Over the last few years, I haven’t been doing so much recording, because I’ve gotten so much busier with the clinics. My time is sort of in three areas now, just due to there being no more hours in the day. My television job with the Doc Severinsen band on the Johnny Carson Show is five nights a week, when I’m available in town which is a good deal of the time. And on most weekends I’m out clinicking; sometimes, of course, I take a week or two off to do a clinic tour of the States. A lot of my time is put into my own big band not just in the working end, but in new music, rehearsals and things like that. To be quite honest, I’m really not interested in doing commercial recordings very much any more; I’m lucky enough now that I have other work that I like to do so I don’t have to do it for bread and butter. Which I did in my younger years.

The merging of rock styles into drumming has enhanced it to a degree, but on the negative side we have a lot of drummers who feel that if they have just some basic rock techniques and no other skills that this is going to be enough to last them. I think they’re in for a very rude surprise. I would say that, except at the very highest level of rock drumming, jazz drumming is generally a bit more difficult and a bit more sophisticated. I’m not trying to be critical; I speak from experience now as a teacher, and I’ve had a lot of very good rock drummers come to me, who are trying now to learn some other techniques, because they find they’re at a very dead end. They want to do other work, with other music; among it will be a lot of jazz playing, and they have to get some new tools.

It’s the same with a jazz drummer today it would be silly just to close your eyes and not know how to play rock acceptably well, I would say. I don’t mean you have to, but you’d be a better musician if you could and play Latin equally well. I suppose I look for the all-round picture, because that’s kind of what I’ve always done in my life; but I still think it’s good for a guy to be able to play all of those three basic styles well. Then you bring a little more musicality to whatever music you’re in the context of.

One of the younger drummers I admire a great deal is Steve Gadd, out of New York City, because I think Steve shows his adaptability in being able to handle jazz playing equally as well as rock playing. If we had more young drummers coming up with the kind of musical flexibility that Steve has, it would be very good. He’s an excellent rock drummer, but can sit down and play good mainstream or progressive jazz also. I have not come across too many younger drummers who can do all of that, the way Steve can, that well I have to say that.

Another thing is that there are a lot of rock drummers who are playing very much into the drums. I have some of them sit in on my drums sometimes, and they can actually kill the entire snare-head in one or two tunes because of the incorrect way that they play. This is a big problem to people like me not as a drummer, as I’ve got a few extra drum-heads, but they’re doing it very wrong, and the drum looks like a hammer has been taken and the hell beaten out of the head. I don’t mean to say that it’s only rock drummers that do it, but primarily it seems they’re playing that way. I just don’t think anyone has yet shown them that to get the biggest, strongest and best sound out of the drum you must play off the head not into it.

Since I am a clinician and sort of a part-time teacher, I spend a lot of time with some of those guys trying to teach them to play off the head. And a lot of them are not happy playing that way; they realise when they’re killing a couple of drumheads a week that something isn’t right. I mean, a guy like Buddy Rich or myself, who are playing equally loud, will have a shiny spot in the centre of the snare drum and no great big dig marks. We’re playing very loud and very hard, and we change the head because that shiny spot tells you that the head is thinning out but there’s not a big bunch of huge dents and clunky marks into the head. So it’s how you do it.

Some of the guys play well as far as their overall playing goes, but they’re approaching striking the drum really bad. A lot of them pay the piper, because they get tired easily; they tell me: “Gee, I get so tired” I say: “That’s because you’re playing with so much more energy than you need to.” See, you need to save your energy for the times you really need it to the maximum. It’s just like in good athletics: you see some guy go over the high bar at a seven foot height, and sometimes he just looks like he’s flying well, he’s learned how to do it gracefully, and, in a way, that’s why’s he going over so high. Naturally, there’s good and bad to all sides of all styles.

Amplified drums? It’s funny for me to talk about that, because I’ve experimented with some electronic amplification just trying for new sounds and things like that. I don’t use it all the time; maybe I do one or two tunes with my band on it, but it’s strictly for a different tonal quality it’s not to make the drums louder. I use a couple of effects with the pitch pedal, and it’s kind of interesting; I play it with the hands, not the sticks. So it’s not the kind of electronic sound that hits you between the eyes; it’s kind of a mellow sound like you’re maybe playing on string drums, if there’s such a thing! I think sounds like that, if they’re used in a good musical context, are worthwhile. But so far I haven’t heard too many attempts at really amplifying the drums electronically that I thought were very musical. It’s like anything else if it doesn’t create a musical effect that’s pleasing or interesting, then it doesn’t have any validity whatsoever. Sometimes over-amplification will make a drummer not shade as much—you almost start to relate too much more to the electronic sound than you relate to the acoustic sound. With some players, this can cause their control of dynamics to suffer. Same thing if you kill the sound of the drums by putting a sofa and five armchairs in it, or something like that. Some drummers are ending up playing with their foot four times as harder than they have to, and there’s no sound coming out of the bass drum and they wonder why their legs get tired. Buddy and I have talked about that many times it’s not letting the instrument do any of the work for you. So these are all things, of course, that people have to learn as they go along.

Although drumming has changed a great deal in a way, the basic requisites are always the same: trying to get a good quality sound. A maximum sound with a minimum of effort, really that’s what we all work for. Very often it’s much more difficult to play effectively softly than it is to play effectively loudly; it calls for a lot of touch, a lot of skill. That’s the type of thing Jo Jones showed everybody many years ago absolute control of the instrument itself.

Both Jo Jones and Sidney Catlett were masters of this; they could show you how you can get an exciting pulsation and not be playing the drums loud. It was a certain intensity, and a certain “real high-class touch,” as I used to call it they’d be swinging like hell, without bombarding you with the drum set at that time.

In some ways, true dynamics of that kind is a lost art. You can’t find too many younger drummers who can play with brushes today, for instance they’re really at quite a loss. Yet, as they go along, a lot of times they find out they’d like to learn eventually. That’s why some of them come to coaches or teachers like myself. They say: “Hey, you know all that banging I’ve been doing—there’s more to it than that.”