Music Book Review: Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit by Matt Brennan

Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit
by Matt Brennan (Music 786.9 Bre)

While it sometimes seems like the drum kit has been around forever, it’s one of the youngest common musical instruments, having only developed into its modern form around 100 years ago. As instruments go, it has evolved quite quickly, and largely in response to the needs of music in the modern era. In Kick It, Matt Brennan focuses specifically on its development from a few captivating perspectives. Rather than following the usual path of chronological history, each chapter focuses on a unique aspect of the drum kit and drummers from a more sociological perspective, as drummers still sometimes feel like they’re toiling away in the background of musical conversations. The book starts off addressing racist stereotypes of drummers from previous centuries, contrasting them with the clearly forward-thinking percussionists that developed the drum kit out of necessity. The next chapter addresses the loud, noisy, sometimes boisterous aspects of the drum kit, and how its eventual inclusion in most forms of popular music has shifted the conception of “noise.” This is followed by chapters discussing the evolution of performance practice and technique on this new musical instrument, the difficulties of balancing innovation and creativity with providing a steady, familiar beat, the employment prospects of playing the drum kit, and new kinds of technology that have come to co-exist with drums rather than replacing them.

 

It’s a fun book packed with lesser-known parts of recent music history, and I think readers who are drummers or not will find it fascinating. One theme that carries through most chapters is that drummers are often thought of as a kind of musical underdog class, while they quietly (or kind of loudly, to be more accurate!) continue to hone their craft, making the music they play with more varied and interesting along the way. You can’t help but to admire and respect the many drummers and their unique contributions, both technical and musical, documented throughout the book.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer by Bill Bruford, Women Drummers: A History from Rock and Jazz to Blues and Country by Angela Smith or Drumming at the Edge of Magic by Mikey Hart.)

 

( Wikipedia entry for Matt Brennan )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Librarary

 

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New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Drumming With Dead Can Dance and Parallel Adventures by Peter Ulrich

Drumming With Dead Can Dance and Parallel Adventures
by Peter Ulrich (781.66 Ulr)

After forming in Australia in the early 1980s, Dead Can Dance started to garner attention after relocating to London, and ultimately they became one of the most popular bands in the burgeoning “Ethereal Wave” genre. Their style, which included musical elements from all over the globe, helped to bring world music styles to the mainstream, and was a big influence on other bands that went on to combine world music and classical influences with pop, such as Enya and Enigma. The band’s early drummer Peter Ulrich has written a new book called Drumming With Dead Can Dance and Parallel Adventures, and you can now borrow it from the Polley Music Library.

 

I had high hopes for this book, as there hasn’t been much written about Dead Can Dance or the 4AD record label scene, but I started to get a little nervous just inside the front cover, where I had been excited to see “With Foreword by Lisa Gerrard,” displayed even above the book title. That foreword turned out to be a single sentence. As we’ll learn going through the book, though, perhaps that’s just right. Seated at the drum throne from the early days of the band’s cofounders Gerrard and Brendan Perry moving to the UK, Ulrich had a unique vantage point for learning about the unique differences between their working and thinking styles, and it’s their complimentary opposites that ultimately gave the band its artistic range. Interestingly, it’s really just a matter of coincidence that Ulrich ended up working them, too, which he starts to describe at the very beginning of the book: He simply answered a phone call from Perry asking if he’d be interested in auditioning, and the call happened to come on the day he discovered he was losing his job. It turned out that he lived in the same neighborhood as Perry and Gerrard, and though he wasn’t immediately playing fluently in the style they were looking for, the had him continue coming to rehearsals and he found himself “absorbed,” as he puts it, into the band over the coming few weeks.

 

For Chapter Two, Ulrich backtracks into his own musical upbringing. After the usual childhood piano lessons, he eventually found his way to the drum kit and the guitar as a teenager, and was immersed in a pretty wide range of popular music in his youth, including folk, rock, reggae, and punk music. He drummed in bar bands and continued listening to new trends in music, becoming enamored with post-punk and gothic rock bands. This part of his musical interests turned out to be especially useful playing with Dead Can Dance. Quickly returning to the early DCD narrative at roughly the 3-month mark into his working with the band, he was finding Gerrard and Perry to be extraordinary, talented musicians with almost opposite tendencies: Perry was deliberate, detail-oriented and organized, while Gerrard was spontaneous and more of a big-picture thinker. While they were opposites in many ways, both were highly opinionated, and rarely saw middle ground—they either loved what was happening in rehearsals or completely hated it. But songs started to come together, and after circulating a demo tape to record labels that seemed like a good fit, the 4AD label started expressing interest, at first helping the band to get their first opening slots at UK shows, and ultimately agreeing to sign the band.

 

These early chapters give a fantastic inside look at the early days of Dead Can Dance, going through the same kinds of trials and tribulations so many young bands experience. Early shows are plagued with sound issues, their first record has to be done on a very small budget and short schedule, early mixes sound awful and need to be re-done, and band members quitting just as the band started to gain momentum. But they persisted, and quickly started to gain critical and popular notice. Ulrich has an additional unique perspective besides being their drummer in these formative years, too—because he had worked in offices and had some administrative experience, he became their early tour manager. This probably helped to cement additional memories of early tours in his mind that are the kind of thing that drives managers crazy, like vehicle breakdowns that result in breach of contract fines for missing shows, or venues that didn’t seem to be located where they should be on maps. There is a particularly wild story about an early gig in Paris that went terribly awry, leaving the band to defend themselves against the audience and then the bouncers for the club!

 

To roughly its halfway point, the book primarily follows the career of Dead Can Dance, with some side tracks into Ulrich’s work with another 4AD band, This Mortal Coil. Then the 90s proved to be less kind to the whole scene: Dead Can Dance broke up, many other 4AD bands were breaking up or near the end of their careers, and even their couple who ran the label broke up. Then we enter the “parallel adventures” referenced in the book’s title. Ultimately, Dead Can Dance has reunited several times in the ensuing decades, sometimes for tours and sometimes to produce new records. Members have also embarked on solo careers and collaborated with other groups over time. And the influence of Dead Can Dance continued to grow, even during times where the band was dormant. During these more recent iterations of Dead Can Dance, Ulrich has continued to follow the band, but it no longer participating directly. That said, he has remained in touch with his former bandmates, and reports both their careers and his own in recent years.

 

One thing I was hoping this book would discuss in more depth was simply how the wide-ranging influences behind Dead Can Dance all came together in the music. Ultimately there isn’t a breakdown of this—perhaps that would have to come from a book written by Lisa Gerrard or Brendan Perry. From the early days recounted in the book, it seems like the process was a gradual one that simply involved listening to lots of records and having an open mind to learn more about music. While the band is largely self-taught, they absorbed influences from musical traditions around the world, as well as folk music and earlier eras of European classical music, and made a new kind of music out of these influences that seems to speak from every place and era all at once. Although we don’t won’t find a particular method here behind this, there is an excellent appendix in which Ulrich presents what he calls “An introductory guide to world music.” He provides a list of recommended recordings here that’s divided into two rough groups: music captured as field recordings, generally reflecting what world music traditions most likely have sounded like historically, and music produced by groups all around the world that has taken on some cross-cultural influences of its own. In their own way, Dead Can Dance arguably fall into the latter category, and there are some additional fantastic recordings referenced here.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Silenced by Sound by Ian Brennan or England’s Hidden Reverse by David Keenan.)

 

( publisher’s official Peter Ulrich page )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Renegade Snares: The Resistance and Resilience of Drum and Bass by Ben Murphy and Carl Loben

Renegade Snares: The Resistance and Resilience of Drum and Bass

by Ben Murphy and Carl Loben (Music 781.648 Mur)

 

Drum & bass music was a tremendous influence on lots of electronic music styles from the 1990s to the present, and the music continues to be made as well. As one of the larger subgenres within electronic dance music (EDM), the story of drum & bass is fascinating, but not so well-known, especially in the United States. But we have a recent book that traces the history of the music through to the present day. It’s called Renegade Snares: The Resistance and Resilience of Drum and Bass by Ben Murphy & Carl Loben, and you can borrow it from Polley.

 

Murphy and Loben are the perfect authors to take on this project, as both were fans of the music during its development in the early to mid-1990s, and both have been editors of DJ Magazine, a British monthly magazine covering electronic music trends since 1991. They’ve known the scene since it started, and written about it for decades. And I think books like this are especially important today because many people don’t know much about the origins of a lot of EDM styles. So much of EDM, from techno to jungle to drum & bass to dubstep, reminds folks of dance clubs and raves, largely full of affluent white kids spending their nights dancing and trying the latest in laboratory-synthesized recreational chemicals, and these stereotypes have somewhat overshadowed the real history of this music. Take techno music, for example: did you know that it’s generally considered to be a product of black musicians in Detroit, starting with producers Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, who combined DJ techniques with synthesizers? Or that the relatively recent EDM subgenre of footwork was an innovation of black producers in Chicago, and later some Japanese producers were inspired by their work and developed a parallel Japanese footwork scene? Or that dubstep in the early oughts in the UK was massively influenced by 1980s Jamaican sound system DJ collectives? So too, we will find, that drum & bass music started in working-class black neighborhoods around London.

 

One of the most important elements of drum & bass music is the “breakbeat,” which is using sampled drums from instrumental passages on records. This kind of work had long been a staple of hip-hop production, and in fact one of the most commonly used breakbeats in hip-hop, the “amen break” from the 1969 tune “Amen, Brother” by the Winstons, became a foundational sample for drum & bass music, too. Chapter 2 of “Renegade Snares” digs deep into the history of the amen break carrying over from hip-hop into EDM styles, where the focus on percussion was even bigger. Where hip-hop producers often slowed down the amen break in their tracks, drum & bass producers sped up the sample, and sometimes add a little distortion to it, making it a hyper, assertive call to the dance floor, or an almost overwhelming rhythmic statement that could elicit a similar kind of hyper energy as the drums in thrash metal music of the same era. In Chapter 3, we learn about breakbeat hardcore, the early 90s antecedent to jungle and drum & bass styles. At the time, these were DIY extensions of EDM music, and early artists were mostly self-releasing their music.

 

As an aside, while this music was an underground phenomenon, a relatively popular style was also developing using some of the same concepts: big beat. Bands like the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, and the Crystal Method were all drawing from breakbeat hardcore music, and arguably some of their early 90s records contain moments similar to drum & bass, though usually with somewhat slower tempos than “legit” drum & bass music.

 

The next few chapters of Renegade Snares cover the development of jungle music, the transitional style between breakbeat and drum & bass. All of these styles are closely related, and the main difference that a lay listener is likely to pick up between breakbeat hardcore and jungle is more emphasis on deep bass parts. Jungle slowly made its way into dance clubs further than breakbeat had gone, likely because of the bass. Small record labels were also important to the distribution of jungle tracks, which carried through to drum & bass artists as well.

 

It’s interesting reading about some of the ways this music made its way around the UK that differ from the way things have worked in the US. As mentioned in Chapter 6, pirate radio stations were an essential part of sharing these new musical forms—airplay on pirate radio could drum up interest for music before it could be found in record stores or dance clubs. Indeed, pirate radio could create demand for records and being featured in clubs! In the UK, these stations formed a whole network of information and art-sharing that could happen without the financial backing needed for most mainstream music. Perhaps the closest thing we had to this in the United States was tape trading in the 80s, but I can only imagine the extra immediacy and sense of community these radio stations nurtured in the 90s.

 

In the US, the terms “Jungle” and “drum & bass” are used pretty much interchangeably, too, so it’s nice to get a sense of the differences between them through this book. As the book progresses, specific artists who became known for drum & bass music, such as Goldie and Roni Size are highlighted, as are transitional artists like the Omni Trio, whose “Renegade Snares” tune is the inspiration for the title of this book. They are similar styles, and the sense I get from the book is that “drum & bass” can be considered a kind of refinement or evolution of jungle approaches that introduces strategic jazz and ambient sounds, and keeps pushing the tempos faster and faster (although there is “ambient jungle” and jazz-infused jungle, too).

 

Later sections of the book highlight the spread of this music around the rest of the world, and new genres that are inspired by drum & bass approaches, such as footwork and dubstep. The high-speed breakbeats and deep bass this music unlocked in the 90s has enjoyed several resurgences in popularity filtered through these newer styles. And it’s fun to read about how all kinds of styles within EDM, classic and new, from all over the world, continue to cross over into one another in fresh new ways right up to the present day. A great book for finding your way into this rewarding underground genre.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music by Matt Anniss, or DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music by Bernardo Attias.)

 

( publisher’s official Renegade Snares web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!