Sunday, May 01, 2005

JUNE 2006/INTERVIEW/STEVE REID/PART I


This month Black Athena are proud to present an exclusive interview with legendary jazz drummer Steve Reid. Black Athena were fortunate to meet Steve Reid during his visit to Athens last month and chatted to him about Sun Ra, Africa, Spirituality and the universal pulse that has been guiding his drumming for the past 50 years. Essential!


As legend has it you started your career off drumming for Motown with Martha Reeves

Yep, that’s true. She was a great singer and now coincidently she is an elected politician - she is a councilwoman in the city of Detroit. It‘s like a fantasy story! I learned a lot about the business from her.


So after the first meeting they asked you to go to Detroit for the recording sessions? How was that?

They were basically one take sessions - the regular Motown formula - turn down the drums, turn down the tambourine - every body was playing acoustically as this was before amplifiers and stuff like that, so the sound was much more acoustic based, Gospel based or Church based as that came about right there at Berry Gordy’s house which was where we recorded. Back in those days it was like an exciting movement, because that was the first actual black record company that had National and International exposure. We had many black record companies before but they never got out of their area like Chess Records, Stax records and things like that but Motown was really able to make that leap, everybody was buying it.


From many accounts it sounds like Motown was run quite strictly in a business sense – did you find that when you were there?

No, not at all, everybody was into the music primarily because unlike most other performers, black performers are not motivated by necessarily making records and therefore record sales, the money comes from jobs, that was the main thing then although now it’s completely different. Guys are making records and you never see them! So it was always the performance first, it was really like that. It was a business thing of course because it was about making money and they didn’t have the budget that the larger white companies had, for promotion and all that kind of thing, so it was mainly about touring the guys as much as possible and that was the main promotion. When the Motown shows came in it would be like, The Supremes and Marvin and all those different names together and that’s how they really got it out there, because as I said they didn’t have the money to do advertising and radio promotions and all that.
Live performances were about having it down - going down to the radio station to get people hearing it then if they like it doing it for a sold out crowd - that’s what really pushes things, sell out crowds. It’s good for the people and it’s also good for the business because business doesn’t really care too much about quality in music they just want to know that it sells and makes money. And if you go just by quality you can have a record company with great quality and you wouldn’t have any money!


It’s obviously best to combine both if it’s possible.

That happens too, you just have to keep playing your thing and you get to a point where money will be in it and then you might get to a point where money leaves it again depending on which way you choose to go.


Did you get to do any session work with any other Motown artists?

Not really, not recording wise. We had interchangeable bands, which would play for everybody. It must be interesting to know that Marvin Gaye was Motown’s first drummer and the second drummer Motown had was a guy by the name of Al Melvin, who used to sing too on Teddy Pendergrass’ stuff. Then they had Hamilton Bohannon and it always used to be a good scene for drummers. Marvin Gaye was a pretty good drummer that’s why all the rhythms were so hip in his music - he had that hi hat flow.


Let’s speak about John Coltrane – you were friends with him right?

There were Gods then but there weren’t gods then! People romanticise the fact that we formed these little musician-run independent record companies because we were going against the system but that’s not really the case. We formed them because the system wouldn’t give us anything so we had to make our own little system. It was the same thing with me and Trane -when I first met Trane he was with his first wife Naima and his daughter Saita at 1660 Mexico Street in Queens. I used to go there every morning skipping school, every weekend we were hanging out - there were always drummers over there.


Did you play with him? How much of an influence was he?

In the house yeah, we played. There was an influence obviously but you have to remember that we saw the transition and like all transitions it’s never permanent. He was coming back to where he started at that time. In his case he went into the money and then went out of the money whereas Miles went out of the money then into the money although he was playing fantastic trumpet when he wasn’t making any money at all. All those great records, it’s a kind of paradoxical situation. My view is that the most important thing is the music and if you give 200% every night then some good thing are going to happen for you.

You get what you get and you’ve got to treat people really cool and be humble to the music and then I believe the creator protects you. That’s why it’s unfortunate that the system will bend you to do anything. That’s why we don’t have any Jazz vocalists right now, because any anybody that tries to do that ends up doing pop. I’m a little pessimistic of the future of what was known as Jazz. It’s been reborn but a certain aspect of it is not going to be taken up by the younger guys. It’s just not happening because of the money situation, guys want to play and want to make money right away which is good, if it can happen that way but man the music has to be number one.
… Music is like life in this world and then there’s another type of life, the spiritual life and it’s like two different systems and one system can work the other but it’s still difficult. That’s why Thelonius Monk retired. Columbia records called and wanted him to record his version of some Beatles song. So Monk called his lawyer and said “Yo, they want me recording Beatles tunes - I want you to go get me a doctors letter and tell ‘em I’m retiring for medical reasons’! His contract was void after that and that’s why Thelonius Monk never made another record. Some people would have done it though and maybe it’s just that Monk didn’t want to do it, this is the problem people change but there are some things that don’t change so you have to incorporate both.


You spent a few years in Africa, what took you there, was spirituality the reason that you made the journey?

Yeah, spirituality was part of it but also at that time I was heavily into the civil rights movement and Black Nationalism, all of the black artistic renaissance in fact. I definitely wanted to go since I had heard so many stories. Blakey had told me about when he went over there and Randy had told me some stories and I heard some stories from some other guys, so I said ‘man, I got to go there - that’s the drum, that’s the place you want to learn everything about the drum’, and so I went over there and ended up staying for about three years just playing with different High Life Bands, not just from Nigeria but from Togo and so on.. It was really like dance music, like the Reggae of African Music .

Right now Jazz is re-inventing itself as usual, I just hate to see a certain historical point lost amongst the younger guys who think drumming started with Tony Williams or Billy Cobham and they don’t know anything back further than that and this is what’s being lost - the history of this shit cos it’s just like in tradition, I play with somebody and than they play with somebody and I play with somebody it’s like a thread that continues. It’s like a big house. If you’re fortunate and able to play your own stuff you can make another window in the house. So people are looking in the music and they can see another way that it can be done. There is no one best way! So music is like your fingerprints, it’s like writing, like art it’s creative it isn’t just supposed to be taken and duplicated or replicated like on Star Trek you know!


You’ve talked about drummers being able to play melodies on drums rather than just keeping time, how do you feel that is achieved?

I never really thought playing drums was just about time keeping, that’s a preconception put out there by the establishment, especially the teaching establishment so they can get reigning and force a style that they can demand.
The way I view drumming is that you keep time with the rhythms so the rhythms are first and then they make the time, that’s the way I approach it I know it’s kind of backward but I like to do it that way because it comes right from the bottom that way. It’s like walking almost… I like melodic drummers. I grew up in an era of great power drummers you can go out one night in New York and you could hear Art Blackey, Phillip Joe Jones and then Max Roach and Buddy Miles and then you can go and hear somebody you’ve never heard and they will knock you on your head, so it was like a different period.


After drumming for all these years how do you view the concept of rhythm, do you believe it to be a way of taming chaos?

I believe that there’s one big rhythm - it’s on a pulse and I play off that pulse. So everything can change but the pulse will be the same, the time can change and the actual inside rhythms can change but the feeling could remain the same and vice versa. I’ m in the process of writing a drum book, finishing it up now in fact, and I base on that that the rhythm is first so it’s like a new system (that’s why I called that record Rhythmatism) but all drummers like Chick Webb, Bobby Darnes man they were doing ridiculously fantastic stuff and that’s when people were dancing to the music before it moved kind of away from that and the music changed styles and you couldn’t dance to be-bop. It was brought into the modal fusion thing and then to avant-garde. Things got really kind of splintered and then you had the Jazz that was represented largely by Wynton Marsalis for a while and a lot of people lost interest. Now it’s almost disappeared cause there are no groups anymore, there are no real bands in Jazz now.


You mention the ‘pulse’, do you believe rhythm exists within the universe?

Oh Man the rhythm is the heartbeat of the universe, physically, mentally and spiritually.


In the Sun Ra documentary 'A Joyful Noise' there’s a description of a drum being made from the trunk of a tree that had been hit by lightning – is this the kind of symbiotic relationship you perceive between nature and rhythm?

There’s definitely rhythm in nature – just look at the seasons, you have the winter, the summer, the fall. It’s like one big rhythm and it happens over and over again. Then there are the little things running through it as well so really once you don’t have the rhythm you don’t have life.

Sometimes rhythm is like a big wave and the thing is that the higher you go then the lower it can go! That creates extremes so you have one end of the music with Avant Garde or free improvisation and then you have the other end of the music with blues maybe, or Dixieland, or anything that’s really locked in, so there’s a lot of room to manoeuvre. That’s how I approach it, that way I don’t label myself. People call me a free jazz drummer, I don’t know why, but I don’t label myself I just call myself a drummer.

Originally drummers were priests, in Africa the priests were the drummers. And then as things got turned from spirituality to religion then that was displaced until the drummer was finally outlawed so like in the US slaves could not have drums and for a long time there were certain rules and to have drums in a club you had to have a certain kind of licence. And these were called the cabaret laws. So it was hard to keep the drummer, but now it’s coming upfront and the drum sound is improving, drums are beginning to be recorded like they really sound without being taped up or muffled or equalised or cd-ed, or dvd-ed.


Do you believe drums are coming into the fore ground in music now?

Oh yeah! Definitely man. This is a rhythmic age, there’s not gonna be no more Stevie Ray Vaughns or Jimmy Hendrix or Wes Mongomerys. No more Coltranes or Albert Aylers now it’s about all of that being mixed in with rhythms. Not just a beat in the background but the total immersion of both into each other. And that’s what I’ve been working on the last few years.

To be continued...