This page covers the double-disc set I spent two years making, what you’ll find on it, and how to get a copy.
Two years in the making
Most instructional videos answer a single question. How do I play this? The Nature of Drumming sets out after a different one. Why do we play at all?
The project took two years from first idea to finished disc. Cameras followed me to remote country far from any city, into the recording studio, and onto the concert stage. The result is the best work I’ve put my name to, and the one closest to what I actually believe about music.
I had carried the idea for years before a camera ever rolled. A drummer spends his early life proving he can play fast and clean. Somewhere past the halfway mark, the questions change. You start to wonder what the playing is for. The Nature of Drumming is my answer, set down while I still had the energy to chase it properly. Start with the sound, then the reason behind it. Technique can wait its turn.
What you’ll find on the discs
The set holds a DVD and a CD, and the music crosses several traditions I’ve lived inside over the years.
Some pieces are chants, drawn from Cuban, Brazilian, and Native American practice, where the drum carried prayer rather than entertainment. The jazz pieces come from a quieter place, written around love and the plain beauty of a melody. One piece, “79 Seagulls,” I built entirely around the act of paying attention. The title is plain enough. The piece grew out of a habit I keep, of staying with something ordinary long enough to actually see it.
The chant material asks the most of a listener. These rhythms were never written to fill a hall or sell a ticket. A village used them to mark a birth, a harvest, a death. I recorded them with that weight intact, slower and plainer than a concert version, because the speed was never the point.
A heartbeat runs underneath much of the record. I put that sound there on purpose. Every person listening has carried that rhythm since before they were born, and a record about why we play should begin where rhythm itself begins.
Half the program was recorded behind a full kit. The rest belongs to the hand drums, the congas and frame drums and gourds that have carried me across forty-five years and a good many borders.
The places it was filmed
A room with four walls can capture a sound, but it can’t always show where that sound was born. So the cameras went outside.
You’ll see open land, water, and quiet country with no audience for miles. You’ll also see the studio at work and a lit stage with a crowd in front of it. The visual side carries its own argument. Rhythm belongs outdoors and indoors equally, in solitude and in front of a room full of strangers, and a player should feel at home in all of it.
Weather shows up in the footage, and I left it there. Wind moved the instruments between takes. Light shifted while the cameras rolled. None of that needed fixing. A drum lives in the physical world, and the film should admit as much.
What the reviewers said
The notices were generous. Modern Drummer described the music as colorful and evocative, warmer than the magazine expected from a percussion record. Audio/Video Interiors kept it short and called the whole thing classy and good fun. One critic at a regional paper singled out the way a lone performer moved between a snare, a hi-hat, a cajón, and a stack of small instruments without the music ever thinning out.
I’ll take the warmth over the technical praise any day. Warmth was the goal from the start.
How to get a copy
The Nature of Drumming ships as a double-disc set, the DVD and the CD together in one package.
You’ll find it in the store on this site, alongside my other records. If you’d rather order it directly, or you teach and want to ask about copies for a class, write to me and I’ll see it sorted.
Spend an evening with it. Then go put your hands on a drum. The video will have earned its place if you play one note differently afterward.