The Beat of the Bullet, The Rhythm of the Book

The Associated Press recently reported a story that’s positively biblical, with a good beat, and that you can dance to:

Oct 16th, 2009 | SAN ANTONIO — San Antonio police are investigating the wounding of a man after his elderly father allegedly opened fire when the victim refused to stop drumming. Police said the son, in his 50s, suffered a non-life threatening head wound early Friday while at the home the men share. Police said his 83-year-old father was detained on an aggravated assault charge.

They’ll wind up throwing the book at this latter-day Isaac who, like the lady next store when I was a kid who suggested with highly ambiguous sarcasm that an untimely end for me and my set of drums would suit her just fine, was likely driven to near insanity by paradiddles, flams, ratamacues, and every other drum rudiment at full volume.

But what book should they throw at him? As a drummer, let me suggest the following volumes to inflict maximum punishment on the perp and maximum pleasure for drumming fans.

This is one of the great pieces about any musician, written by Whitney Balliett, the long time jazz critic for The New Yorker. What Buddy Rich did was indescribable. Until Balliett described it.

For BR, stormy relationships were the norm but singer-drummer Mel Torme endured and enjoyed his lifetime friendship with Buddy, and this book provides the most intimate portrait of the artist and person we’ll ever read.

There’s a reason why Buddy Rich was a living legend and why he’s remained a legendary drummer after his death: no one else then, (or now, and likely well into the future) possessed his flawless technique, speed, agility, taste, and musicality. Whatever natural talent he was gifted with (small-stature men tend to be faster and have quicker reflexes than larger men), the fact that he began playing drums professionally at age eighteen months as part of his parents’ vaudeville act meant that his brain and entire nervous and muscular systems were developing around rhythm and the motor skills associated with stick control and four-way independent coordination of the hands and feet. Drum technique was hard-wired into his brain at the earliest possible time in a child’s development; only an in utero drum set during gestation might have given him a better opportunity.

That Buddy Rich never had any formal training and could not read a note of music made no difference in his playing career. It certainly made no difference in his writing career:

Buddy Rich’s Modern Interpretation of Snare Drum Rudiments (Later edition. First edition: Peter Maurice, 1942)

Drummer and famed NYC drum shop proprietor Henry Adler actually wrote it. And when I studied with Roy Burns in the early-mid 1960s, in one of the upstairs studios in Adler’s shop on 46th street in NYC, BR would often stop by.

In his then standard uniform of Italian-cut black shirt and slacks, black shoes with “Cuban heels” (to provide an extra inch of height), and sharply snazzy black hat, you always knew when BR showed up:

“Hiya, Fats!” he’d trumpet, all-smiles, to Henry Adler, who treated Buddy like an errant son and overgrown brat. Which Buddy Rich was.

Gene Krupa, though technically overshadowed by the phenomenon of Buddy Rich, was the first drummer to take center stage and solo. Though he did take drum lessons, he, too, could not read a note of music. Here, Rollo Laylan lays out the rhythms and exercises in formal music notation. Krupa was the most popularly known drummer of his time, the subject of a sensational marijuana bust in 1943, and the only drummer to be the object of a movie biopic, a dubious distinction given the stink this film emits. You simply must see Sal Mineo-Gene in a marijuana-crazed mania hammer out the savage tempo of the jazz era.

Header image of my dream drum set courtesy of Drum Workshop.
Image of Super-Drummer courtesy of Between the Covers.