Jeff "Tain" Watts, Part 1
Traps, Summer 2007
Most of the interviews I’ve done centered on particular themes. Usually it was a new album, or for a new artist it might be an introductory bio, which had to be short enough to keep the reader engaged. The epic days of music journalism waned quickly as electronic media began whittling attention spans down from multiple pages of Rolling Stone to quick tidbits.
I wasn’t happy about this. Nothing appeals to writers more than being granted essentially limitless word counts. Eventually a new kind of satisfaction emerged, which came from finding creative ways of maximum expression in cramped page space. Still, when my brother Andy launched Traps, an ambitious quarterly for drummers, and asked me to write a Tolstoyan profile of Jeff “Tain” Watts, I was ready.
Watts was already a star among drummers, having achieved celebrity through his work with Wynton Marsalis. They were “young lions” then, known for the dignity of their presentation and devotion to the music of their forebears. Time had seasoned us both when we met at Yoshi’s, on Jack London Square in Oakland — but not too much. Within minutes our vibe had relaxed comfortably, so much so that we agreed to continue the conversation the following day.
Some final thoughts: Since Andy wanted a comprehensive account of Watts’s life and work, I went beyond my usual research, digging into as much as I could find about him online and in the San Jose library’s music stacks. Every interviewer knows that satisfaction of being able to drop some minutiae into a question or, better yet, a follow-up to something the subject said. Also, I borrowed a habit I’d developed in my interviews with new artists for their PR bios, by asking at the beginning for a picture of where they grew up; often I’d phrase it, “When you were a kid, what did you see when looking out your bedroom window? Take me there.”
And it helps, too, when you’re talking with someone like Watts, whose sharp wit and intelligence match his musical chops.
****
You were born in Pittsburgh in 1960. What was your neighborhood like?
I’m from this relatively famous neighborhood in Pittsburgh called the Hill District. A lot of musicians, like George Benson and probably Art Blakey, are from there. It’s the equivalent of Sugar Hill in Harlem. If you’re familiar with August Wilson, all of his plays are based in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. Growing up in the sixties, it wasn’t a bad neighborhood. The Hill District had different sections. The section where my family lived is called Sugar Top. It’s less oriented toward housing projects; there are more homes and things like that. It’s kind of lower middle-class, with decent schools and parks. I remember being able to go trick-or-treating safely …
Those were the days.
I’m telling you [laughs]. Everybody knew your family. Everybody else’s parents were responsible. In addition to that, I recall some of the first music I’d go to see. When you were six or seven years old you could go and see the late James Brown. “Tickets four, five, and six dollars!” I remember seeing him and the Jackson 5 when they came out, or Earth, Wind and Fire, Parliament/Funkadelic, and stuff like that, for that price.
What about life outside of music?
Well, I pretty much caught the civil rights struggle. I thought it was something pretty normal. So in addition to the Black Muslims coming to the house to bring fish and bean pies, things like that, they would deliver Muhammad Speaks. People from the Black Panthers would deliver their paper every two weeks. This was all normal. I remember walking to church, maybe it was after Dr. King was assassinated or something else had gone down, but I was walking through the neighborhood with my mother and my brothers and seeing a certain amount of …
Distress?
Rioting, stores bombed out, glass in the streets …
Serious distress.
Yeah. I grew up at a good time because I’m old enough to have been around that but then I was still maybe nineteen years old when hip-hop came around.
What did you see when you walked out your front door?
There were Mom and Pop stores. There was a general store maybe two blocks up the street, run by this lady named Miss Porter. I’d get maybe a quarter and go up there and get Pixie Sticks, chips, and stuff like that. Every Saturday we would go downtown to do some shopping. My father would give everybody a dollar. My brothers would buy candy. I’d buy DC Comics but eventually Marvel Comics. I remember they were a dime, so I’d buy ten comic books [laughs].
Were you aware of Mister Rogers as a kid?
Yes, Mr. Rogers would come on whenever I’d get home from school. When I was watching it, even though it was on WQED in Pittsburgh, I wasn’t really aware of Mr. Rogers being a local guy. I didn’t find out about that until later, when I went to Duquesne University. A friend of mine, this pianist who’s on Bar Talk – we in the conservatory at Duquesne University together – actually lived in the neighborhood where the real Mr. Rogers lived [laughs]. He said he used to see Mr. Rogers and that he had a socially maladjusted son who was a young drug addict. But I’d definitely come home and watch Mr. Rogers and early Sesame Street and even The Electric Company with Morgan Freeman and all that stuff.
Did you walk to school?
I had to walk maybe more than half a mile to school.
Do you remember your first day there?
I do, kind of. I remember them taking me to kindergarten. I never felt seriously threatened by anything or too crazed. In later years my parents told me I was always really peaceful and I didn’t worry about anything.
You started going to shows when you were as young as eight, so your parents must have been into music and brought you along to shows.
Well, my mother would go with us. I think she liked music. They weren’t really music collectors. I don’t recall a phonograph being in my home until my oldest brother, James, was old enough to collect records. Eventually, having two older brothers, I would simply go with them; they would be semi-responsible for me [laughs].
How big was your family?
I had three brothers.
What was it like to be the youngest of three?
There was a lot of wrestling [laughs], for no reason at all. It was really, really stupid wrestling.
What are they doing these days?
James is a mortician now. He operates the Watts Memorial Chapel in Braddock, Pennsylvania. He puts quite a few people away. I guess Jerome assists adults in health care. At times he’s worked with disturbed adults who need assistance.
He was a social worker or a psychologist?
I don’t know what you’d call it. I’m sure there’s some psychology involved, but mostly he assisted those people with getting from Point A to Point B, like picking people up and taking them to the movies.
Were they musical at all?
I must have been around six years old when one Christmas we all got some very inexpensive instruments from the Sears catalog. James got a guitar. Jerome got some bongos. This was before I even decided to choose drums as an instrument, but for some reason I got this tin drum set, with some shells out of some kind of shiny paper, a little tin cymbal, a snare drum, and a kick drum. So James would play along with the radio a little bit. He never really studied, but he was into it. Sometimes I’d sneak into his bedroom and play his guitar. He’d discovered it was not in the original position and .,.
That’s when the wrestling starts.
Exactly [laughs].
So your parents weren’t musicians.
They were not musicians at all. My father did construction work. Whenever the holidays came along and he needed some extra money, he would drive a jitney in the evenings. My mother worked at an Eatin’ Park [?] restaurant, cooking until the evening.
Did you share bedrooms with your brothers?
When we lived in the Hill District, my brothers and I all had our own rooms. Then maybe around 1970, because my father would do his construction thing and then also spend a certain amount of time driving the jitney, he’d be out in the neighborhood, really checking stuff out as he drove people around. And he became aware of the drug activity, coke and stuff, so he got on this mission to get us out of the city. We moved out of the city when I was ten years old, to an area called North Versailles, Pennsylvania. That was a different cultural thing because prior to that I rarely interacted or saw any white people other than the occasional teacher. I went from that school district to another school district that was maybe fifteen percent black.
Was that a tough transition?
All around, it took me about a year. Part of it was the cultural difference. Part of it was not having as much access to the friends I had in the old neighborhood. The first year my brothers and I all had very large Afros. I was coming from this neighborhood as quasi-militant guys. Little stuff would happen every once in a while. It would be stuff that was that bad, but I’d be on guard for certain things. I remember the first month in this neighborhood. My brothers and I went to go roller-skating. We were waiting on the bus, on our way home, and these guys ride by and throw a soda out of their car at my brother: “You niggers!” I think my brother actually hit the car with a brick. For me, it would be a situation where I would be in school, and a white person would say, “Look at your hair, man! You’ve got a big ‘fro!” Man, they were just touching my hair. The way I was raised, my father would tell me, “No one should touch you. No one should put their hands on you.” So for the first couple of years I was always ready to fight, definitely. I went through the sixth grade without incident. Then, in the seventh grade, I had two fights that caused me to be suspended in about a three-month period. Other than that, I was one of the top students in the whole district, and I got more and more involved with music …
Did you have favorite subjects?
I was pretty good across the board, but I definitely had an aptitude for math I’ve tried to figure out all these things. I made up equations and problems for myself.
Do you think that connects to drumming and rhythm at all?
There can be. I guess for the types of things I’ve tried to apply to jazz and other stuff, there are things that have helped me. One of the main things is that I’ve tried to take stuff, some of it in jazz but not to a certain extent, that involves what I called pure polyrhythm as opposed to just linear groupings … I was always attracted to systems.
So you excelled at, for instance, trigonometry.
Oh, yeah, of course. I had calculus in high school and stuff like that.
As far as the fighting, though, your family was probably not happy about it.
Yeah, so at that point I became a pacifist. I got suspended twice in a semester, and I’d have to be at home for three days at a time. The school district said, “If you get in one more fight this year, then you’re going to be expelled and you’ll have to go to summer school.” So I adopted the attitude that if someone was not really going to hurt me physically, then I’d turn the other cheek.
That must have felt pretty good, once you made that decision.
It did! It kind of liberated me.
Was this new neighborhood more rural than the one you’d known in town?
It was a lower middle-class suburban neighborhood: homes, no sidewalks, a lot of trees. Some streets had only three or four homes on the whole block. We were maybe fifteen minutes outside of Pittsburgh. This was East Allegheny High School, where John A. Thomson was my band director. Five or six neighborhoods comprised that school district. The neighborhood where I lived was the prime black neighborhood, called Crestas Terrace, in North Versailles Township. That was the black neighborhood in that school district.
James Brown
You were eight when you saw James Brown. Did you take note even then of the drummer in any special way?
You know, I wasn’t truly drawn to the drums. I was kind of interested, but at that time every kid, when they went to see James Brown, wanted to be James Brown. There’s even a friend of my mother who calls me, to this day, James Brown [laughs].
Why is that?
Everybody does this thing: Either you’re on a linoleum floor in your socks, or it’s icy outside, and you try to do this James Brown dance – you slide around, do the Mashed Potato, and all that stuff.
That music made an impression on you.
I dug that stuff, but it was more of a social thing. Even though I had those tin drums for Christmas, I just kind of played them. My cousin would come over and really, really play them, and I was like, “Wow, he’s funky. He sounds good.”
Is he a drummer now?
He probably still works in a band. But even then I hadn’t decided to be a drummer. I can tell you that I must have been in the fifth grade and at first you have your general music class, where you sing various dumb songs – “The Erie Canal” and whatever. Then they decide to designate instruments, to see if anyone has an interest in taking an instrument. They went to everybody, and everybody was picking all these cool things. I asked for a trumpet. To this day I suspect they simply ran out of trumpets and the teacher lied and said my teeth were not correct for playing a trumpet. They didn’t want to hurt my feelings, so they said, “You’re teeth are all wrong. You’re a freak! Play something else!” So for some reason I picked a drum. After that the school started to give me snare drum lessons. They’d loan me a snare drum, and I thought it was the coolest thing to have a snare drum: You could turn this lever here and it sounded like this. That was so cool! I carried it to school and back in a shopping bag.
Lots of drummers talk about bashing on pots and pans in their mothers’ kitchens when they were really little, as if they were destined and driven to play. Your approach seems much more relaxed.
Yeah, I just fell into it. Everybody around me was always beating on something anyway. I did a brief class in [unintelligible]. Everybody in my neighborhood was doing some funky beats on the hoods of cars or on tables. Everybody did it, all the time.
Coping With Perfect Pitch
You were born with perfect pitch. You would think that someone with you gift would have been drawn more toward a melodic instrument.
I think about every now and then, but I just ended up in this thing. I told someone else – and this is also in my early memory – that when my brother started to collect music, before I was ten years old, he got one of those older, battery-operated, reel-to-reel tape players. They’d put in a battery radio and record songs. In retrospect, I was the one who knew when the batteries were low on the reel-to-reel.
Not because the tempo would change but because the pitch would change.
Yeah, and they would have no idea. I’d be like, “No, ‘Cold Sweat’ is right here.” [Tain articulates the horn lick] It’s not here. [He does the same lick, slower and deeper.]” My brothers were like, “No, it’s not! You’re just trying to talk about my tape recorder! You’re putting down my box!”
Does having perfect pitch bother you on gigs where, say, the piano is out of tune?
The only problem I have is that I always end up singing things in the key that they’re in. I have trouble taking it out of that key. This happens to this day with Branford. I’ll be thinking about a tune, and he’ll start to sing the tune, and I’ll instantly go to the key that it’s in. He says, “Oh, Mister Perfect Pitch!” And I’m like, “I can’t help it! I just can’t hear it any other way! That’s how the sound songs to me.” I know about transposing things and all of that, but as far as my subconscious mind and the way I internalize it, that’s just the way it is.
On a gig, though, you can live with it the horn is a little sharp.
I can live with it. As I got into classical stuff, I was around people who had really sensitive perfect pitch. They were a drag for other people because they weren’t really fun. I’m one of the cool perfect-pitch people [laughs].
Was there a time, when you were taking those first drum lessons, when you or your family began to notice that you had something exceptional going on?
I guess the school brought that to their attention. I had maybe a year and a half of lessons when we lived in the city, in the Hill District. When we moved out to the other community, it was like I was instantly this scholar, taking all these upper-level classes. And for my grade they said, “This guy is a really good player. He’s smart. He’s in the band. He’s the main drummer.” That happened all of a sudden. I talked to that other publication recently; they were looking for some kind of epiphany or deep moment …
That would be Psychology Today.
Exactly [laughs], but I ended up saying that music eventually changed me. I kept being around people who said, “Yeah, just do it.” But when I moved to the other school district I still had lessons from the band director, and then maybe in the middle of that first year they told my parents they should get me a private teacher. So I had a private teacher in sixth and seventh grade. It would be great to find this guy. His name is Richard Smith.
This won’t be easy …
[Laughs.] John Thomson [band director at New Trier] probably knows where he is. They were snare drum lessons. He had some discipline: the way your hands looked, when you turned them, the sound you got out of the instrument, and stuff like that. He was a good guy for me to start with. Also, I guess at the time he was in my oldest brother’s grade, so he was in the high school group and whenever they needed somebody to play drum set, he would play. He had good hands. He would be a big hit at the assembly. But he was a really straight guy by today’s standards – easily, kind of a nerd.
Was he a jazz guy or a classical guy?
The music was in the cracks. He definitely had some classical stuff together. He could improvise. He had a jazzy thing together. He had some grooves too.
The idea was to get the rudiments down before expanding into playing a kit.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Everything was based upon playing in school activities. Seventh and eighth grade, the bulk of my playing was in school activities. By this time I had some really rudimentary drum set, also from Sears & Roebuck, but at least it was made out of wood. I would come home at night and play along with the radio. By day I was trying to get this classical thing together; at night, I would jam along with whatever was on R&B or classic rock radio. As far as I was concerned, even when I got out of high school, when I was a sophomore or a junior, and people were starting to tell me I should consider doing this, my career objective was to be a classical guy – a timpanist.
When did you start getting into classical music?
In ninth and ten grades I started to do more stuff with this guy Mike Kumer. We had a pretty good percussion ensemble in high school. He tried to be pretty up to date: He was a member of PAS, he kept up with the new music written for multiple percussion, and things like that. He switched our whole school district over the matched grip, for whatever reason. He was just making us aware of some [unintelligible] stuff. He was pretty fresh in that regard.
Did you like certain composers or pieces?
Yeah, I always got into Beethoven. I got to deal with truly great composers in high school. I got to play some Dvorak, some Rimsky-Korsakov, and some of those other things. I was still learning …
Did your high school have a drum corps?
I ended up in this corps. The year before I became involved with them, they came in ninth place or something like that at DCI. At the time, they were the [sounds like: Fenderville] Royal Crusaders; they later became the Pittsburgh Royal Crusaders. I dealt with them for about eighth months. I’d play quad drums and xylophone. But I never toured with them. I never did those crazy, all-summer tours, with twenty people sleeping in a room. I didn’t do that. But our high school drum line started moving in a corps-like direction, so I was pretty aware of that stuff.
That was helpful to you, in terms of chops and discipline.
Definitely.
Gigs
When did you start doing gigs?
That was when I got to Duquesne University. I wasn’t really playing out before then. I was a basement guy, playing with records. I just never got around to it. It was just so foreign to me, the concept of taking my drums out of the house and doing a gig. I didn’t have a driver’s license. Also, my oldest brother crashed my father’s car. And my middle brother was kind of wild, so he’d borrow the car and disappear for long periods of time. By the time it got down to me, it was like, “He’s not going to drive it [laughs].”
That’s another disadvantage of being the youngest kid.
That’s the way it was! The thing that gives some kind of direction to this mess we have today is that when I was fourteen or fifteen, my oldest brother James started to work in a reasonably hip record store on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. He just started bringing all these records home. He started to gravitate toward classic fusion. There was a period where, for my birthday or for Christmas, he would give me a bad-ass record – like, for Christmas, Birds of Fire. I’m like, what?! Here’s Herbie Hancock’s Thrust or Where Have I Known You Before from Return to Forever. I started to get into that stuff. That was a very comfortable bridge, because obviously these guys were very together technically. I didn’t really detect whatever was jazzy within that music.
You took a different route to get into that.
Yeah, so I could hear a very through-composed kind of vibe that I could tie into my classical experience. That music got me into the drum set.
You were playing drum set by then?
I’d been playing it along with the radio, not trying to improvise. I was running beats, though; that’s something.
You could relate to those fusion drummers because they had a rock/R&B feel and a lot of power, but it was also more interactive and improvisational, in real time. As good as James Brown and the Jackson 5 were, they played charts most of the time.
That had a real appeal, coming from a certain amount of drum corps and being exposed to someone like Billy Cobham, who was implementing [sounds like: musically you music witness].
Did you see some of these guys play live?
I’d see everyone. They seemed almost unreachable. The power and precision, the complexity of some of the music, was something to strive for.
“Lenny White just amazed me. … It was the greatest stuff in the world.”
Was there one gig in particular that had a lasting impact?
There was a series of shows. I saw the classic RTF, right before Romantic Warrior came out. Lenny White just amazed me. I was maybe four rows from the front, checking him out. It was the greatest stuff in the world. I saw Mahavishnu with Billy Cobham; later I saw them with Narada Michael Walden, playing stuff from Apocalypse, with the strings and everything. That was really cool. I saw Larry Coryell’s Eleventh House. Around this time I was beginning to go to college, so I was getting some other influences from being in the dormitory. A friend of mine turned me onto Frank Zappa. I’m like seventeen or eighteen years old, and I’m going to see Zappa with Terry Bozzio right after Zoot Allures came out [1976]. Then there was the transition to Vinnie Colaiuta and I’m checking that stuff out. All this stuff somehow got me into jazz.
How do you feel about fusion now, in retrospect?
What can you say about it? I don’t find very much negative about it. It didn’t distort anybody’s vision or take them away from anything. It doesn’t sound like Herbie got damaged by it, that’s for sure. Where musicians have arrived now, even with people trying to play different styles, it used to be like, “You’ve got to play this. If you play R&B, you shouldn’t play jazz, because it takes away …”
[Break in Tape]
Enough people are trying to address enough different kinds of music these days, where one thing doesn’t take away from another thing. If you want to do something with music, you just have to pay respect to it and do it. It’s not like one kind of music makes the other music worse. You spend time with this music, you spend time with that music, and be honest with yourself, and hopefully you can enjoy all this music. I do revisit some records that sound a little corny for my taste now, but I still respect what they meant to me at that stage of my development.
Lots of great musicians were trying new things. It’s almost beside the point whether they succeeded or not. We didn’t mention, by the way, Weather Report.
They were revolutionary. But before I heard Coltrane, there were maybe two things that gave me this attitude to be remembered. You have fire, this “eye of the tiger,” and that energy that I would later associate with the John Coltrane Quartet. I got it in a transitive fashion from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jimi Hendrix, and things like that.
By your senior year in high school you’d decided that you wanted to be a musician.
Yeah, everybody was saying I should do it. At the same time I had this math thing going on. There was a period of time where I looked into doing a double major. For some reason I was trying to do computer science and music. This was in the late seventies, and there was a big push for minorities to go into any kind of engineering. I graduated from high school when I was seventeen, so I said I’d try this music thing. I’d go to college for music, and if it didn’t work out I’d be twenty-one and I’d try something else. The whole thing was to try this music thing until it runs out. And it’s just never run out.
“The concept of someone feeding himself as a musician was like, ‘You might as well be a spaceship operator.’”
Music is a risky business, where a computer job might be seen as more secure.
That factored into it. Coming from the family, the concept of someone feeding himself as a musician was like, “You might as well be a spaceship operator [laughs].” The only musicians my family knew personally were, like, Old Joe who played at the bar on Saturday, and he’s also a gardener or something like that. They’re like, “Do you really want to do this?” It was like that for quite some time.
Why did you decide to go to Duquesne?
I applied to some other places, but the drum teacher, Mike Kumer, influenced me to go there because he ended up being the associate percussion head, or something like that, there. He recruited me there. And it was close to home.
Did you live at home as a student?
The first year, I lived in a dorm. The second year, I stayed at home. I was a performance major.
Why did you move into the dorm? You just wanted a change of scene?
Yeah, it was purely that. This was in downtown Pittsburgh, as opposed to where my family was living.
How long were you there?
I went to Duquesne for two years. I went one year as a full-time student. The next year, I knew I was going to transfer out of Duquesne, so I basically pre-registered for classes and never went to final registration. I just monitored classes and played with every ensemble. I didn’t get credit for it, I never paid for it, and I went to Berklee.
Why did you transfer?
Maybe I would feel differently now, but even in the classical percussion repertoire I was more interested in stuff that was a little more contemporary inside of that world. My main teacher, not Mr. Kumer, had me doing a lot of roots stuff – violin transcriptions from Bach and things like that. I was really interested in the timpani, but he had me in the real old-school timpani bag. The thing that made me end up in Boston was that I really wanted to study with Vic Firth. He was the head of the section with the BSO when he was maybe twenty-five, and he was a timpanist, so I said, “Yeah, I want to study with this guy.” So when I was thinking about leaving Duquesne, I applied to Eastman, I applied to Oberlin, I applied to the Cleveland Institute and the Cincinnati Conservatory, and definitely New England. I went down to West Virginia University to audition. But I wanted to go New England, so I sent my list of pieces to audition, and they let me know that they did not want to give me a personal audition and I should send a tape. So Mr. Kumer advised me that if they were doing this, they probably had their two percussion students for the next semester, from private students that the faculty may have. If they didn’t want you to do a personal audition, they probably already had their people.
But they would still listen to a tape, so there was still a possibility.
I guess so. But in the interim, a friend who went to Berklee and lived in the neighborhood, this guitarist Stacy Gray, came home for Christmas and started telling me about the school and all these people he saw playing. I guess around this time Kevin Eubanks was there, and Tommy Campbell, Cindy Blackmon, and people like that.
Drumming at Duquesne
During your first year at Duquesne you took general academic and music courses. Was this when you started playing in bands?
Yeah. I used to play at a lot of parties.
Did you have a car by then, so you could drive your drums to gigs?
I didn’t have a car. I had friends who had cars. When I was at Duquesne, I had my drum set tucked away. Sometimes it would be in the dormitory. Sometimes it would be in the school. Then I’d pick a time and go into the big room, where the orchestra would rehearse, and practice the drum set. Sometimes the conductor of the orchestra would come in and shoo me away. He was a really nice guy, Bernard Goldberg, and I played for him in the orchestra. He was the assistant conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony. One day I was playing in there, and one of the vocal students came in and said, “I want you to be in this band.” So I ended up being in this R&B band called Flavor. We ended up doing gigs and recording. I still have the single at home. There was one single that was on the radio in Pittsburgh, called “The Gift of Love.”
Did you have a horn section?
We had two horns, keys, guitar, and stuff like that. We’d play at parties. I guess the other performance thing was this guy David Budway, the pianist: He’s the guy that got me into jazz specifically. He let me hear what Charlie Parker and Bud Powell sounded like – and Coltrane’s music.
Had you literally never heard that music up to this point?
I hadn’t really heard it. Maybe I didn’t know what radio station to find in Pittsburgh. Even when I was in the high school jazz band, we played these big-band things arranged by guys I’ll never hear of again. A lot of people who say they don’t like jazz, they just haven’t truly heard jazz. They’ll hear one little pocket of jazz and decide they don’t like it. That’s where I was at, because I didn’t really get it. But David let me hear McCoy Tyner’s Trident with Elvin Jones, or some Jazz Messengers, or Max Roach taking a drum solo. It wasn’t just [articulates fast, show-off figure]; something linear and internal was going on. That was really cool. Throughout my post-high school educational process, my career goals changed from wanting to be a classical musician to wanting to be a studio musician who played drum set but could also double on percussion.
Live shows didn’t appeal to you as much as studio work?
I would do gigs, but I saw myself doing soundtracks and film scores. I was getting hip to all these fusion records, but then there was a wave of records after the hard fusion by these guys who were studio players, like Harvey Mason, David Spinoza and whatever. So I started to become aware of guys like Harvey, Steve Gadd and Steve Jordan. I read up on Harvey Mason and found that he was a percussionist and he had studied at the New England Conservatory, so I was like, “Maybe I can do this. I’ll still get to play my orchestral stuff but then I could play drum set too.” So I wanted to know something about jazz not to be a jazz musician but so that if someone called me to play something jazzy, I wouldn’t suck [laughs]. That’s the whole thing. Even when I was at Berklee, I was trying to prepare myself to play in different styles. And Wynton was the person who called me to do a gig.
What was the key to going from classical percussion and music that was heavy on the backbeat to developing a feel for freedom and complexity in jazz?
It’s by listening. Definitely, your frame of reference for timekeeping and all of that is more air than physically down in the drums. Years later, after playing a lot, I just try to see in some way that things are all the same, even though they’re not. There’s no clear explanation. No matter what kind of music I’m trying to address or check out, I’ve never been the type of person to transcribe all this stuff. I just look for how drums affect the music – what they’re doing non-specifically but just vibe-wise to give the music a certain feel.
You apply to that to straight-ahead backbeats and more abstract stuff. You begin with finding the feel.
Yeah. What is the sound I’m going for? Is it heavy? Is it light? Is it really consonant or modal and dark? Is there tension in it or is it a friendly vibe? What is the particular dance that’s involved? And what’s the arrangement, so that we’re all together?
There’s always a dance element in the music.
Yeah, whether it’s an African dance, a funky dance, a swinging dance, or you’re playing some free music and it’s an interpretive dance or whatever.
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In the second part of my transcript, Jeff reflects on his experiences at the Berklee Conservatory, his introductions to the Marsalis brothers, the drummer’s role within an improvisational ensemble, his meetings with Elvin Jones, Buddy Rich and other giants, working with McCoy Tyner, Betty Carter and the Tonight Show band … and why he was saddled with that “Tain” nickname.
I think the caption is wrong in the second pic…