At the drum set, a practitioner sits on a stool (sometimes called a “throne”) and operates a constellation of drums and cymbals with two hands and two feet. Both drums and cymbals have a long pedigree, going back to Africa, Europe, China, India, and everywhere else on the globe, but the drum set evolved into its most familiar configuration in America, with a recognizable standardized form found everywhere by the late 1940s. While jazz and rock would be unthinkable without a drum set, there’s hardly a form of vernacular music worldwide that didn’t incorporate a drum set into the mix after 1950 or so.
In a traditional marching band, bass drummers had a huge drum strapped to their chest. Originally this was simply the pulse, the basic motivating beat. At the drum set, the right foot operates the bass drum. (A few left-handed drummers reverse the roles of the limbs, but for this article I will refer to a traditional right-handed setup.) The beater for the bass drum is hard felt—sometimes wood or plastic covered by felt—and activated by a pedal. In general, acoustic jazz drummers use an eighteen-inch drum, while rock drummers use bigger sizes, up to twenty-six inches in diameter. A skilled traditional jazz drummer might play very soft consistent beats with the bass drum, a specialized technique known as “feathering”—a heartbeat that is felt more than heard. In funk music, the bass drum part might be very syncopated; in bebop, surprising bass drum offbeats were called “bombs.”
Cymbals go back even further than marching bands. They have always been a ceremonial statement for spectacular function, and today many of the best drummers maintain a link to the rituals of antiquity by using cymbals made by Zildjian, a company that was apparently established in 1623 in what was then Constantinople. There are three basic kinds of cymbals in a drum set, all played with matched wooden sticks: ride, crash, and hi-hat. The steady sustained “ping” of a ride cymbal relates to the bass drum in terms of providing a basic beat, while smaller and higher-pitched crash cymbals are for declarative punctuation. Both the ride and crash cymbals are mostly played with the right hand, while a pair of hi-hat cymbals can also be operated by the left foot. The metal mechanism of the hi-hat, which opens and closes on command, is the most unprecedented aspect of the traditional drum kit and is a good example of early-twentieth-century technological innovation. In jazz the hi-hat “snicks” on beats two and four via the left foot, although jazz drummers also play the hi-hat open and closed with the right hand. Steady fast pulses on the closed hi-hat, a clear and dry sound, is featured in many forms of rock and pop.
The left hand sits with stick at the ready on top of the snare drum. The “snare” itself is a sheaf of wire placed along a bottom head of the drum to create a characteristic “rattle.” Tradi-tional virtuosic patterns for snare are called “rudiments” and are played by both hands: rolls, flams, paradiddles, ratamacues, and the rest. Any professional of the drum set has a certain amount of rudimentary control, and those with exceptional speed and evenness are said to have “good hands.” If the drummer uses “traditional grip,” with the left hand curling the fingers around the drumstick, it is a direct nod to the military marching tradition, and the drum will be a bit tilted in emulation of a snare drum strapped to the chest. If the drummer uses “matched grip,” both hands take the sticks dead on, and the snare will be even with the floor. In rock and pop, the snare is often played on two and four, the famous “backbeat.” Jazz drummers leave that backbeat to the hi-hat and offer discreet commentary on the snare: Tootie Heath calls it “coughing,” little hiccups in the timing that add to the swing.
Tom-toms can be mounted on the bass drum or stand alone to the side. (The snare drum with the snare turned off is also a tom.) Three toms are commonplace, although many jazz drummers pride themselves on getting away with two, and showy rock drummers might have five or six. (The complete kit of someone like Neal Peart, the late and much-lamented drummer of Rush, included an additional half-dozen small roto-toms, a second bass drum, and many more cymbals.) Toms are connected to the European tympani and the ceremonial music of China and the First Americans; they are also the closest the drum set comes to the classical music of Africa, where a choir of hand drums works in sophisticated patterns. Those African patterns traveled to South America and became the timbales of mambo and other dances that were very successful in the United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. To tell the truth, one can play jazz and rock successfully without any toms at all—but the minute a drummer is required to appropriate salsa, bossa, Afro-Cuban, or a dozen other dance languages, it is good to have some toms at the ready.
Magic happens at the drum kit when the four limbs are slightly desynchronized. Any truly swinging or funky drummer does not always place the articulations of the two hands and two feet at exactly the same time (even though it may look simultaneous to a lay person). These complex techniques are not covered by the European tradition of music notation; the groovy result is often simply called “feel.” The tradition of “feel” is at its most exalted in various hand-drumming languages of Mother Africa, the continent where most of the rhythmic motifs in American music come from. A drummer with “good hands” may not have exceptional “feel.” Naturally, the very greatest drummers have both.
Ethan Iverson is a pianist, composer, and writer living in Brooklyn.
