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    Friday Night Jam: Sax, Hand Drums, Rock n Roll
    Friday Night Jam: Sax, Hand Drums, Rock n Roll
    Friday Night Jam: Sax, Hand Drums, Rock n Roll
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Friday Night Jam: Sax, Hand Drums, Rock n Roll

    By Nowick Gray

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    About this ebook

    A how-to memoir tracing the learning curves of group music improvisation, the peaks and pitfalls of African hand drumming with electric instruments.

    African drumming was booming in popularity in the 1990s but not well integrated into conventional Western music mixes. This chronicle conveys the challenge of merging diverse musical instruments, genres and personalities; of attempting to produce quality music in a venue that welcomes relative beginners, lifelong amateurs, and random drop-ins for the night.

    The book offers experiential advice to beginning drummers, or to longtime musicians who have not yet had the opportunity or courage to attempt improvisational collaboration with others.

    At the core of the journey is the learning of the limited individual ego, with its unique talents and limitations, to negotiate the free and structured spaces with others, to merge in the greater group striving for excellence and beyond, ecstatic union.

    Nowick offers an overview of the confluence and conflict of different musical styles and expectations: acoustic/electric, world beat/rock, drummers/guitarists, perfectionists/amateurs, safe/risk, stoned/straight, standards/improvisation, men/women, fifties/sixties, tight/free. In rendering this spirit and process, the words too speak for themselves, players in the mix, jamming on the universal pulse.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNowick Gray
    Release dateMar 14, 2020
    ISBN9780981143125
    Friday Night Jam: Sax, Hand Drums, Rock n Roll

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      Book preview

      Friday Night Jam - Nowick Gray

      Roots Jam drum rhythm and lesson books...

      Download the first book free!

      Roots Jam: Collected Rhythms

      for Hand Drum & Percussion

      Now get the first book in the Roots Jam series free! Access hundreds of rhythms from the African, Latin and rock traditions. Easy notation for all levels, from beginner to performer. Includes lesson guide, arrangements, popular styles, and practice exercises.

      Send me my free ebook!

      Friday Night Jam

      Introduction (1996)

      During the last six years a number of the local neophyte drummers have attempted to breathe life into and out of that longer-lived institution, the Friday Night Jam. Haven of Elvis aficionados and Credence Clearwater hacks, Willie Nelson impersonators and would-be-Deadheads, the Friday Night Jam has lived by one rule: anything goes. Unfortunately for my taste, the any part of it sometimes gets lost in the Standards shuffle. Which is to say, group improvisation is hard to do well. When it works, however, it’s dynamite, true inspiration, golden. It can even redeem the most tired of oldies, given an injection of altered lyrics, rhythms, and original solos.

      The chronic problem at the Friday Night Jam has been to amalgamate the Afro-Latin drums and percussion with the western guitars, accordion, piano, harmonica, and their associated forms: primarily in the straight-ahead four-four mold. The drummers generally want to lean the beat over to the offbeat, the syncopated, the reggae. Reggae has been a convenient meeting ground because the compromise is simply found in the regular upbeat. But more than that is the issue of a controlled, recognizable song versus an extended, authentic and moveable jam.

      Group drum jam energy works best in waves, without restrictions of straightjacket lyrics, measures, predetermined chord changes. You can put it all together in a great package, if you’re Santana or Olatunji. For us amateurs, that challenge takes work and practice as a group, and these are not appropriate to the looser anarchy of the jam. Even the oft-attempted Let’s take turns and go around the circle for starting something is hard to maintain consistently in that venue. So success is left to chance, to who shows up and the mood they’re in, to the phase of the moon or the health of the crop or the status of one’s lovelife, to how many drums can support each other for the occasional detour down Africa lane. It’s all about listening, and sharing leadership, and these are qualities that don’t come to us easily or automatically.

      The biggest obstacle in this culture comes from the worship of the guitar god. The lead guitar calls the shots: sets the melody and mood, determines the volume (easily overpowering drums with a twist of the amp button, or requiring them to tone down, if there’s no amp, until the natural projective life goes out of them). It’s true that rhythm is fundamental and so a single percussionist can take any song and shift its character, ruin it or drive it to new life. But in terms of group dynamics, the guitarist is generally preeminent, by default. Everyone looks to them for the next song, waits for them to retune, and depends on the structures that they have memorized and are offering as a well-furnished boat for everyone to ride in. What the drummer offers is support: this is what is expected. For a drummer to share or take the lead is not expected or easily allowed. Conversely, it’s hard for other musicians used to taking lead melodic parts to learn to settle for supportive, truly rhythmic roles.

      So lately the jam is in decline. Lately there haven’t been many drummers showing up, because when we do, we’re held back by the inertia of low energy, low volume, and low creativity. We, like the other musicians, are aging, or have a lot of distractions on our minds, or are afraid to boldly take the loose reins, or have simply given up trying—for now. But as always, it’s different every week. Who knows what stranger or visitor will show up this time, or what random collection of hideaways will decide to come out and celebrate this full moon? When it fails it’s deadly dull, and a Friday night wasted. But when it clicks, and moves into magic, there’s nothing like it in the world.

      1991

      September 23, 1991

      Day after Fall Faire and I’m sitting here dull and reeling after a weekend full of the social whirl, performance Saturday afternoon, again at night by campfire, drums drums drums, the lesson being, this time, again, to listen, to tone down enough perhaps if that’s what it takes to listen, to converse. This lesson arose in the jam on the first good song after the long instrumental, and Walkin came in with the lyric again, and I interrupted in the next half line with an inane idea for a title. Peter had to say, Too late, Nowick and that killed the song. All right, it’s not a conversation, it’s a ceremony.

      Music, like life, is a learning in social relations, interactions. Sometimes it’s complicated, or I care too much, or try too hard, or find it a difficult sport. I do better at the individual sports, I always found; does that imply playing as a drum soloist? No, the best is when the teamwork, the laughter, the ceremony clicks.

      1992

      January 4, 1992

      The drums played beyond performance anxiety on New Year’s Eve because the appreciative dancers were eating it up, and the band was grooving, and I was feeling good. To find again, get in touch with the inner voice, the voice

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