Beat Life: Portrait of a Young Man As a Drummer in New York

When I first moved to Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, in 1996, I was kind of a drummer. I was in that liminal state between my small-town-college cloister and the insanity of New York City. If I was one of the strongest drummers in college – I was in the game, at least – I might have been among the worst in NYC right off the bat.

People talk about the energy of New York, arriving in the city and feeling more alive, expressed shorthand as a hard-bop soundtrack to footage of a car-clogged city avenue. The music is fast; it traffics in metaphorical chaos. It can feel like the fractured amphetamine energy of the city is amplified, epitomized wholesale by the drumming. There are melodic elements in jazz, but drumming is at its core.

To walk down a city street, or hustle to the subway, is to join the headless river. I suppose that’s what makes NYC so energized – we’re all on the way to somewhere else. There are so many long and straight lines in the city – New York may contain infinite worlds but it can feel oddly comprehensible. Just follow the straight lines. You can arrive in the city and within a few months be a pretty confident navigator. But the New York music scene is vast and impossible to quantify.

I quickly decided that my life in music would reside on the sidelines – instead of pursuing my own drumming career, I’d work to support the people who had actual training and talent. I ended up getting a job at the Knitting Factory, when it was on Leonard Street in Tribeca and still focused on jazz and experimental music. I had the good fortune to arrive there around the same time as another drummer my age, Phil Ballman (who ended up playing in Antibalas after he left the Knit, so he was no slouch) – Phil was very knowledgeable about improvising drummers, and he acted as my gateway into the scene. In my years at the club I saw so many incredible drummers. There was Jim Black playing with Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, a revelation. He looked like a teenager, but his sound palette was extremely personal: he had an incredibly trashy sounding kit, broken and/or dry cymbals, pingy and high-pitched toms, all played with unmitigated aggression and spirit. I saw Bloodcount so many times during that era, unaware I was witnessing something unique and life changing. Bloodcount influenced me in ways I’m still processing.

Noel Grey, a Knit employee, had studied with the legendary Milford Graves at Bennington College in Vermont. I was assured that seeing Graves was essential – he rarely performed and had very few available recordings. Graves was still teaching up at Bennington – his research on heartbeats and rhythm and music’s relation to holistic health was very advanced. I went to see him play at a small venue on First Avenue called Context Studios, and my mind was blown. He seemed like a spry old man (he wasn’t old – it was almost 20 years ago, and I have a different perspective on age now) and was absolutely one with the drums. He had technique and spirit to spare. If you go to see him now, it’s still all there – probably even more so. It’s incredible.

I met Rashied Ali, who pioneered the saxophone/drum duo with John Coltrane’s incredible later groups. I met Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, William Hooker, Max Roach, Susie Ibarra, Joey Baron – it’s awe-inspiring now just listing them. How did I end up in the presence of all these giants? I wish I could walk among them as casually again.

But I also witnessed a weariness of spirit among some players. It was a façade I didn’t understand back then, how every single day musicians have to assemble and reassemble their intimacy with creativity, in the midst of forces dead set against it. These experienced musicians had no remaining vestige of innocence or naiveté – that scared me and scarred me. Yet the high-wire act they were pulling off was nothing if not childlike. To believe so purely that merit and hard work could garner some kind of reward – an abstract, elusive reward at that – is actually quite lucid.

I didn’t have the good sense to seek out drummers to study with at the time. All those musicians seemed to be on another plane, though they probably would have been willing to show me a few things if I’d asked. I didn’t consider myself a “drummer” – I played the drums in another realm. I played in squats and rehearsal spaces. I imagined that I was separate from the world of making music. But that was just in my mind.

I would arrive a few hours early to the Knitting Factory, open the doors, turn off the alarm, make a cup of coffee and then play on the house drum set for a couple of hours before the work day began. Then I would field calls from the real musicians. The great pianist Borah Bergman discovered that I played the drums, and asked me to come to his apartment to jam with him. I did not feel worthy of playing with any of the musicians who performed at the Knit – I wasn’t versed enough in the vernacular of jazz or improvised music to really hang. But I also saw Bergman’s invitation as an amazing opportunity.

Bergman was notorious among the Knit staff as a musician who had a limited understanding of the esoteric rules and assumptions behind the business side of music. Bergman was prickly – he could be self-pitying and coveted the success of other musicians, but he also spent countless hours developing his technique, and his left hand could improvise separate and unique melodic lines along with his right. He called this ambi-ideation. He was an embodiment of the misunderstood artist: he lived on the fringes of acceptance and renown, with prodigious talent and challenging social skills.

Because I had some success with booking tours for Knit artists and had migrated to booking the club, Bergman saw me as a person who could help his career. I did pretty good work on the business side – I made people a little money, met deadlines, and was easy to reach. But I was also deeply insecure, so I wasn’t able to see the invitation as purely musical. It was more of a trade with an unspoken subtext: I play some drums with Borah Bergman, and he asks me about getting more gigs. I entered into a tacit bargain with myself – despite my deep misgivings about my playing and my ambivalence about whether this meeting was earned on a musical level – that I would play as well as I possibly could and not hold back.

Here was a pianist whose catalog included sessions with Hamid Drake and Andrew Cyrille, and there I was, doing something on the drums. I would say it was a bit of punk improv. We played for about an hour or so. I tried to get inside what he was doing, and respond quickly to his runs. If he referenced swing I struggled. I had to keep it abstract. Some musicians create material so quickly and fluently you’re overwhelmed and you just have to stop your mind and push forward. It’s exhilarating when this happens, and when it does you know you’re in the presence of greatness. Listen to the title track from “The Human Factor,” his duo record with Cyrille, and then imagine interacting with Bergman’s maelstrom – it’s beautiful, melancholic, complex, breakneck, searching. Astounding stuff.

Despite the immensity of what I could have learned from Bergman, that afternoon ended up as a final step on a particular path. I’d already decided to leave the Knitting Factory – I had lived an entire lifetime there and I was exhausted. The negative experiences were tainting my love of improvisation. It was time to leave that rarefied and immersive world for an entirely different set of naive dreams: songwriting and being in a rock band, the band that became Oneida.

I spent years working day jobs and refused to call myself a musician. It felt too novel, unattainable, insincere. And this was while I spent every minute outside of work playing, recording, and touring in a band. When I hit the age of 40 it felt like it was now or never. If I wanted to go full time, I just had to make that leap. I had to call myself a drummer and work backwards from there.

That step was essential and energizing, and it helped me navigate the mental transition: “I am a drummer and a composer and I live in New York City.”

But that identification as a drummer – feel free to substitute your own creative endeavor – is not the entire answer, as pragmatic as it sounds. It could be considered the beginners’ first step; you can’t replace insecurity and lack of fluency with a title. And in a way, the title is not yours to take or to give. It represents a kind of assertion, one that has no validity in the theater of actual music. When you enter into an intimate improvisation with another musician it becomes about the moment, a realm beyond time when you must surge ahead of your conscious thought and willfully leave consideration behind.

With Bergman it was all I could do to just play. I could not stop until the cataract ended. I was inside the storm. That was the first time I’d experienced the unknown territory beyond consciousness. Bergman gave me this casually and without awareness.

An untrained stranger can sit at your drums and play in ways you could never imagine or hope to attain. On the other hand, the great masters have redirected thousands of hours of practice into preternatural virtuosity.

New York is impermanence – it is the impossible cascade.

Kid Millions will be performing his composition 100 Disciplines alongside a troupe of percussionists on May 3rd at Brooklyn Museum as part of Red Bull Music Academy Festival New York 2015. To find out more, check out the event page on nyc.redbullmusicacademy.com.