Americans spend much time, money, and effort every year producing excellence in the old European manner: violinists who can play in symphonies, pianists who know all of Beethoven and Brahms, singers for opera, and assorted conductors and composers, all intertwined with the ecosystem of august names such as Houston Grand Opera, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Symphony.
In the current culture wars, some academics and politicians are pushing back against this pattern, wondering if all this is colonialist and an expression of white supremacy.
I have the solution! Everyone involved should learn some basic jazz drums.
To state the obvious, jazz is incredibly sophisticated music, just as rich as European classical music. Indeed, there’s an argument that we should call jazz “America’s Classical Music,” for jazz is a New World blend of European classical music (harmony and song form) and African classical music (rhythm, phrasing, sonority, improvisation).
But jazz is also simple, just as European classical music is simple. There are some basics everyone should know. Nearly everyone involved in classical music at a professional level can do basic keyboard mechanics, meaning sight-read Bach chorales at piano and accompany singers from that old Schirmer edition of Italian Art Songs and Arias. It’s not rocket science.
Likewise, almost all professional jazz musicians can play a basic mid-tempo swing beat on a drum set. The right hand plays “Spang, spang-a lang, spang-a lang” on the ride cymbal. The right foot plays four soft beats on the bass drum. The left foot snaps the high-hat on beats two and four. The left hand plays simple fragments of classic clave patterns.
Great drummers take all those elements and make it high art, but the basics are there for anybody. This essential beat powers all the famous jazz records from the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties, and it is also heard in countless movie scores, TV commercials, and much other flotsam and jetsam from American culture.
It is impossible to know which is harder objectively: to play a Bach chorale at the piano or play a chorus of Count Basie blues at the drums. There is absolutely no reason American musicians shouldn’t be able to do both.
For the violinists and the conductors, swinging at the drums will help them play Mozart and Mahler. Guaranteed. Indeed, new horizons of expression will be right there for the taking. For there can be a kind of stiffness in classical musicians, a way the beat can be uptight. Jazz drums teaches the triplet, the luminous three within the two that is such a marvelous feature of the formal music descended from Mother Africa. And this might quell some of the lingering racism in elite musical institutions, where some of the practitioners still think jazz and other black music is “easy.” If it’s easy, let’s hear the first violinist and the conductor play basic swing drums with a decent jazz pianist and bassist.
Knowing basic jazz drums is a simple fix for a variety of issues. But apart from renovating the room, knowing basic jazz drums also unlocks new forms of creativity. What fresh combinations of sounds might appear from American composers if our elite ensembles understood rhythm as well as they understood notation?
Ethan Iverson is a jazz pianist and composer. His new album, Every Note Is True, is just out from Blue Note.
