on the road solos
From the road.
sitting in mn airport, 11am. Waiting for a 1 pm flight to columbus. gate C13 on friday the 13th, and I'm feeling lucky.
Ordinarily I would be annoyed to have to waste 2.5 hours at the airport, but I'm feeling magnanimous because I'm enjoying just being out here doing what I do. Played with bst last 2 nights at a nice club in mn - maybe 250 seats, good food; very appreciative crowd. Makes a big difference to play for people who have bought tickets to see the band - so many of their gigs are no admission charge, for the gen pop who just happen to wander by.
Fun to play in a smallish club - band setup close together, everybody can hear each other better, the music gets tighter and more interactive, more details speak and they matter more. Tomorrow's my last gig with the band until further notice - I'm a fill in until their new regular drummer starts next week. Seems to be my specialty - the short notice sub for hard music gigs. To be fair, my sub status here probably has something to do with me having told the original singer that he was a fucking psycho - but that was years ago in my angrier days. He is retired now, and for whatever disagreements I or anyone else had with him (which were legendary, and plentiful), I now realize that he added gravitas to the music.
Speaking of the music, upon first returning for this spate of gigs, I had mixed feelings about playing some of it - namely the gymnastic bits. There are quite a lot of up tempo, lot of notes, soloistic moments - most of them not from the original repertoire. Being a lifelong drum solo hater (playing them, listening to them except in special cases), I am pretty uncomfortable playing anything more than 16 bars of groove-solo per set. I haven't hung my hat on the jazz-fusion-soloist rung in a very long time, but I made my peace with it gradually over these last few months of gigs. It took letting go of the stubborn desire to make every aspect of a song performance a beautifully crafted chapter of the larger narrative.
Also necessary is letting go of the poisonous thought that if it's not as good as whomever, it's not any good at all; a courtesy I extend to others by default, but not myself. (is that a morphed form of competitiveness / ego?).
Now I'm getting a shoeshine, from an enthusiastic young man who tells me that his uncle invented the machine he's using - basically a giant dremel tool with a buffing attachment. My tired old clarks are gleaming.
Life is good.
the nature of teaching/learning?
spent the day making the first in a series of videos on drum tuning for the Puremix website. puremix.net is an advanced audio tutorial website. it is interesting having to think and talk about a subject that one knows to others that don't know about it. I think that doing it well is the key to teaching - all teaching. In regards to the teaching he's done all his life, my father always says, "never forget the problems of the beginner".
the difficulty for me occurs when I don't remember them, because the material was learned so long ago.
How much of being a good teacher is throwing the student in the deep end of the pool and letting them sink or swim?
How much of being a good student is being willing to be thrown in the deep end of the pool, almost drown, climb back out and do it again, a little better?
these are the things I think about when teaching, mainly because I can be overly didactic and detailed, but also because a complete science of education is not known (nor is a complete science of anything). I remember growing up - much of the education I had in Chicago area public schools was pretty soft - not because the schools or teachers were universally bad, but because there was a liberal trend in education, or so it seemed.
did I get a better or worse education than I would have in a more heavy-handed system?
dunno.
maybe I would have bucked against stronger academic discipline. maybe I would have risen to the challenge. hard to say - from my current perspective I wish I had a stricter educational experience in primary-high school; but who knows what that would have done - maybe I would be a doctor and not a drummer!