DRUMMING: FINALE

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2 and vignettes and Montmartre and Bud and jamboree)

“To play, I need to go to my subconscious level. I don't want to think deliberately about anything, because I can't think and play at the same time.” - Sonny Rollins

It was a Hollywood recording studio, an all-star session for a forgettable folk-rock duo. The guitarist Ry Cooder was on the date, I remember, along with Lowell George, founder and leader of the band Little Feat. I was playing hand drums, tablas. I’d been studying with a North Indian master percussionist and that was the sound they wanted.

After the gig, I drove all my equipment to a drum supply emporium on Santa Monica Boulevard. If Dick Shanahan’s drum shop - where my father had taken me at ten years old for a talent test - still existed, I would have gone there just for the symmetry. But it was long gone, and for all I know so was Dick Shanahan. I unloaded my kit - cymbals, hi-hat, snare, tom toms, the supporting paraphernalia and the boxes containing it all - and hauled it into the drum shop. I took what they offered me for all of it and drove away.

There was no nostalgia, no regret. Only a sense of necessity, of inevitability. Drumming had lifted me up and now it was setting me down. The time had come to shed those skins.

I was 29 years old. The six years since my return from Europe had been as tumultuous and fitful as the decade framing it. The Barcelona fever dream of becoming a Jungian psychiatrist had lasted through some pre-med courses at Berkeley then quickly withered when my father withdrew support. A relationship with a girl I had known in college resulted in a pregnancy, an abortion. There was a job packing books at a warehouse, a brief stint at a university press. There were some psychedelic voyages, some drumming gigs. I married the girl from college, and a newfound interest in Buddhism led to a two-year teaching interlude in Kyoto. I didn’t take my drums to Japan and didn’t miss them. I had explored sound, now I sought silence. I began writing in earnest.

I wanted to describe the world I saw, inside and out, deploying fiction’s forms. I was casting about for some language of the self, a self still obscure to me.

Return to California, and the arrival of a baby daughter. Musically, jazz had moved to the margins, torn between a dissonant avant garde and bebop traditionalists. I could become a studio musician but I didn’t want that. I wanted to write. By the time I sold my drums I had completed a novel and placed it with an agent. I wanted to see my work out in the world.

It would take some more years before I would get there.

Epilogue

Once many years later, at the invitation of a good musician I knew, I agreed to play a restaurant gig for a week with a quartet. I placed myself behind a borrowed drum kit and picked up the sticks. The group was playing mostly standards and it wasn’t that much of a challenge, but I was shocked to encounter a feeble ghost of my former drumming self. I couldn’t fathom how I had ever mastered the four-limbed virtuosity good drumming demands. It was a mystery I wasn’t that interested in solving, but if I had, it would have taken me all the way back to the twenty-six drumming rudiments - the flam, the ruff, the paradiddle, the ratamacue, the rest of the drumming catechism - Dick Shanahan had shown me that first day.

When the gig was over, I put the sticks I had bought for the occasion in a drawer and never touched them again.

Drums had offered me a path out of a fraught childhood: an instrument of desire in every possible sense. It was my portal to sex and romance, art and the creative life, and a rare chance to work with some of jazz’s greatest practitioners during a high water moment in the art form. In writing’s solitude I was sole master of my fate, but I often missed the inspired, telepathic interactions with other musicians. Later I’d become a lyricist, working that juncture where words and music meet, collaborating with the jazz pianist Chick Corea and others.

But it was the drumming that had given me life.