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Michael Travis
Spreading The Jam
This article is an
excerpt from the 11/2005 issue of Modern Drummer Magazine.
Check your
newsstands today to read the full article.
by Robin Tolleson
When string cheese hits you, you hardly feel a thing. That's part of
its charm. Not so with the drummer of
String Cheese Incident, Michael
Travis, who has shaped the hearty grooves of this hugely popular jam
band for nearly ten
years.
Travis first joined the Colorado-based "hippie
bluegrass band" as a hand percussionist,
but he's gained the respect of
the drumset community by combining his percussion with drumkit, playing
congas,
bongos, and timbales while keeping rhythms going on kick,
snare, hi-hat, and cymbals. Newly added String Cheese
percussionist
Jason Hann says, "Travis worked out this whole repertoire with the band
on his own, so when they go into
certain styles - a Latin style, an
African style - he's able to play parts of the kit with one hand while
playing congas or
other things with the other. If you listen to those
recordings, it sounds remarkably full."
Indeed.
Some of Travis's best work can be traced to
the band's live recording, Carnival
'99. Listen to his grasp of 6/8 on
"Mouna Bowa," as he solos, moving from congas to kit. There are big
nods to
The Meters ('Missin' Me" and a hot cover of 'Hey Pocky Way'),
and fresh takes on a couple of jazz
standards. Travis plays Dave
Brubeck's "Take Five" all the way through on bongos, and it works just
like drumkit on the
newgrass "Shenandoah Breakdown." Travis impresses
with a perfectly controlled triplet fill near the end of the
funkified
"Footprints." His drum and percussion solo, 'drum Jam,' features
surprisingly crisp, well-placed chops,
especially from someone who'd
only been playing drums six years at that time. 2001's Outside Inside
kicks off with a strong drum fill, and Travis shows good hands on
hip-hop ('Joyful
Sound'), Jerry-jam ('Close Your Eyes'), and
reggae-Latin funk ('search').
The new String Cheese album, One Step Closer, also
has some very strong
drumming. The first track, 'Give Me The Love,'
sports a big, but not busy, drum sound. 'When The Music's
Over'
features a dirty, swampy funk beat, while 'The 45th Of November' stands
out because of its rhythmically
tuneful 6/8 versus 4/4 feel.
String Cheese Incident, like the Grateful Dead
before them, has full
business control of their music (SCI Fidelity
label), as well as merchandising and touring. The band performed tracks
from
One Step Closer and other favorites recently on a package tour
with Spearhead,
Umphrey's McGee, Keller Williams, and Yonder Mountain
String Band. But this is a band that tours constantly and has
built up
a legion of fans - especially fans of deeply felt rhythm.
MD: You
were born and raised in Los Angeles and attended UC Santa Cruz, correct?
Michael: I learned to play hand
drums in Santa Cruz from Arthur Hull, doing the Hull village drum
circle thing.
After learning hand drums from him, I moved to Colorado
and was drumming around. These guys formed String Cheese, and I
started
with them, just playing hand drums. Six months later I realized that it
would be cool to have a kit in the band, and I
started learning how to
play it for this project.
In 1994 I worked in a drum shop in Boulder. I
got
the job because I could string djembe heads - and the guys that worked
there would teach me drumset. They'd say,
"Oh, no, you want to open the
hi-hat on the '&' of 4." And I'd come back the next day and have
another
lesson. The guys working there could play.
MD: What attracted you to hand
drumming?
Michael: I had this friend who
was very big in my life and showed
me a lot of great things, and said,
"Hey, this is cool." Village drumming on the hill sounded like a great
thing to do. The
tonalities and the rhythms were very appealing, but
I'm not sure I would have gotten into it without my friend telling
me
to.
MD: There weren't a lot of examples of percussionists in bluegrass
bands to learn from.
Michael: It was sort of new.
Leftover Salmon was our
biggest influence starting out. They didn't
have a percussionist per se, but they would jump from bluegrass to
calypso to
Cajun-flavored themes. I was friends with the bandmembers,
and their mandolin player couldn't make their first gig. I had
just
gotten back into town, and they all knew me, so they said, "Hey, you
should play the gig." So it was a merger, but it
wasn't like a shocking
thing or anything weird, like, 'Whoa, bongos on bluegrass' No way,
dude." It was hippie
mountain bluegrass. If we were down in the South
it might have raised a few eyebrows. It just seemed like the thing
to
do.
MD: When you play your
percussion stuff, you're also playing
your feet on the hi-hat and kick.
Did that present a different problem than just playing drumkit?
Michael: Yeah, it did. But I
was a percussionist first, and then said, "I want to play drumkit and
add it onto all
of this." So from the first moment, I started putting
congas next to me and trying to work up that dual thing. At first it
was just
'boom chick boom chick," with the hands doing whatever they
could. I still do that a lot. [laughs] Eventually I developed
cowbell
patterns with the other hand, or trying to emulate some of the more
classic styles with more involved foot patterns.
Getting a clean
cha-cha going with different cowbell patterns was a challenge.
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