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Jim Chapin
(August 2005 Issue)
Still Rolling It's a steamy
tropical night in South Florida.
I'm sitting out on Jim Chapin's lanai,
watching the eighty-one-year-old drummer rip off amazing licks on
his
ever-present practice pad while the tree frogs and locusts in the
backyard provide a symphonic backdrop. "This is not a
drumstick,"
Chapin says. "It's a beautiful golden stallion. When I put my hand on
it, I'm a jockey. If I ride him like
this [he demonstrates a
stiff-armed stroke], I've slowed him down to my tempo, my speed. I
might as well get off the
horse and run along beside him. But a good
jockey gets up in the stirrups and gets his weight off the horse. The
bell rings,
you hit him in the rump one time, and off you go. He's
carrying you."
Chapin then proceeds to play a set of RLL
triplets, executed
so rapidly that they almost sound like a press roll. "See, this way,
I'm riding the stick; it's
carrying me." What Chapin is demonstrating
is the Moeller technique. Percussionist/educator Sanford Moeller, when
in this
twenties, observed veteran Civil War snare drummers gathering
together to play and was impressed with the way they used the
physics
of the sticks - a swinging-and-bouncing technique far removed from the
stiff precision of many classically trained
players. "The way I play
has nothing to do with me," says Chapin. "I am one generation removed
from the greatest bunch of
bashers that ever played'the little kids in
the Civil War. They had to get a bounce. Those old drums had terrible
heads,
and if the weather was slightly damp, it was all over."
Chapin has more of a reputation as an educator than as a
drumset
player, and he knows it. Although he played drums in both the swing and
bebop eras and worked with many famous
musicians, his legacy will
forever be linked to his books and his teaching. One of his longest
steady gigs was with what he
calls a "peanut" band in Las Vegas. "I
wish I had pursued more of a career playing with great musicians. But I
was having so
much fun, I didn't care."
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