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Eric Harland
(November 2009 Issue)
Always Ready To Receive The Museby Michael Parillo
In our November feature, Harland enlightens us to all sorts of technical matters, including achieving precise strokes on drums and cymbals, conserving energy, and strengthening the weaker hand and foot. Here’s more of our conversation. We kick off by discussing a spirited New York City performance last spring by the trio behind saxophonist Charles Lloyd’s East-meets-West Sangam album.
Sangam
MD: Let’s talk about the Sangam trio with Charles Lloyd and Zakir Hussain. When I saw you at Carnegie Hall, it was stunning how you started at the drums and Lloyd at the piano but you two switched instruments before you played a note, all while Zakir was singing rather than playing tabla.
Eric: In Sangam, everything is improv. When the group started, Charles just wanted to get me and Zakir on the same stage. We were in soundcheck, and Charles said, “Eric is going to sit at the piano…” I was like, Huh? Basically Charles just wanted this introductory vibe because he’s all into being meditative and bringing this Zen moment in.
It was nice that he was able to pull me out of being ready to just go into drum mode. That’s very significant for the group because knowing that I have to play piano first changes my whole perception when I go play drums. If playing drums was all I was thinking about, it would probably be a completely different show. Even for Zakir–he’s not just coming out and playing tabla; he has to sing. So we’re completely uncomfortable with what we’re about to do. I’m sitting there trying to act like a piano player. Carnegie Hall was really neat because there were so many piano players in the audience that night.
MD: Plus it’s Carnegie Hall.
Eric: Yes. I was thinking, There are unbelievable piano players in New York that haven’t played Carnegie Hall, and here I am about to play. I felt so intimidated. But instead of feeling nervous and fearful, I decided to just try to show what the piano is to me. And Carnegie Hall was one of the first times I was able to do that.
Most of the time I go inside and [play] the strings, but they had the top down, so they just cut off that whole thing. I could only tamper with the strings in the first register. The way a piano is broken down, the best part is deep within. The first register is all tinkly stuff. So I had these Indian bells, and I put them in there [and played the strings] and it was really great. It helped me feel confident, and I was able to keep the rhythm thing going. Because with Zakir, he’ll stay on the groove for a second, but then he’ll throw something at you and you’ll be like, “I don’t play piano, so I might get off–I am not going to lie.”
MD: So that’s a typical way that you start your shows?
Eric: Now that’s the way we start shows all the time. It helps just simmer everything down. It helps the audience–their expectations come down because immediately they think, How is this going to come together?
A lot of great musicians always say the best thing is the beginning and end of a tune. You can take someone doing a great tune, but if they end all messed up, then you’re kind of sitting there, and you don’t know when to clap.
MD: It just peters out.
Eric: Yeah. Zakir always knows how to finish. That kind of drama is great. He knows how to take charge, and that’s what he’s been teaching me, because I just kind of swim in the water. If everybody’s swimming, I’m swimming. The problem with that sometimes is that you can be swimming forever. Sometimes someone has to step up and say, “Okay, that’s enough in the pool–let’s go get on land.” If you’re constructing a concert, that’s what people need. At least that’s what we think people need. It works.
MD: There are some moments on the Sangam album where it feels like you guys hit the end together, but it’s by the seat of your pants. It’s not like, “This is how we’re going to end, fellas.”
Eric: That’s the thing. It feels like I’m on the seat of my pants because I’m definitely on the seat of my pants. But Zakir is just such a master of rhythm, and he has a lot of trust with me somehow. So he’ll have these different kind of tals [rhythmic cycles] that would end on just the most random spot that you could ever think of. Even if you’re playing in four, it might end on the third 16th of the third beat. You’re like, Is he really putting that there? And then you kind of figure it out.
MD: So you hear it and then you know it.
Eric: Yeah. You have to catch on quick. I love being around great musicians that challenge me. Somehow I got this label of being a drummer who can play all different meters and all different kinds of this and that, so I’m always thrown into these kinds of situations. And it’s great. It just makes me better and better because I never want to let anybody down.
 Getting Odd
MD: In what situations have you played lots of different meters?
Eric: With Dave Holland. And Miguel Zenn, he’s such a fantastic writer with the SF Jazz Collective. He’s always bringing super-complex stuff. Then all the stuff I did early on with Greg Osby, Mark Shim, Ravi Coltrane. Growing up, everybody was trying to experiment with different meters and time signatures. I would just try to find the musical center. Now it’s more like everybody’s superimposing this over that.
MD: Will you issue a new recording with the Collective?
Eric: Yes. We recently finished the mixes because they taped some live performances, and we get a chance to pick the best takes of the tunes. We don’t go in the studio and really get a chance to nurture the tunes. It’s always a performance vibe, which is good; it has the most emotion, the best capture. But you might not have gotten the best performance of a piece because sometimes if you’re missing a part you’ve just got to compensate. You go back to the whole philosophical thing about jazz: There’s no mistakes, there’s only opportunity.
MD: Did you play odd-time stuff as a kid?
Eric: I was always into math, but I didn’t start getting into odd-time stuff until I started working with Osby and working in New York. I really didn’t have a good grasp of it then, but I was always into Jeff “Tain” Watts, so I was into timing information. I was trying to do this three-against-four thing, and that was my thing, playing the triplet against the quarter note.
Fusion guys, especially Dennis Chambers, had chops, and I was always very attracted to that. I wanted to be able to get around the kit like that. And Elvin, just his style of the delayed time feel. But these things are kind of normal for me because I’ve been checking it out for so long.
I can’t say I’m a big Dave Weckl fan, but I admire how musical he is. He’s such a musical drummer that you really can’t deny it. Drummers, we’re really hard on each other. We want all drummers to do singles, and we want the patterns to be unique and very precise, and Dave Weckl is very precise, but he also uses a lot of doubles, so cats will say, “Dave was cheating because he was using doubles.” But the thing is, it’s all about the execution. And something that people leave out, I think, about Dave is he’s a fantastic reader. You put him in a studio session, he’ll play the shit out of some music, like, “Bam!” He makes it feel good. It sounds good. Everybody has their own version of what’s unique and what’s hard and what’s complex.
MD: And even if you usually want to be precise, sometimes you might not want that. You might want it to be blurry and messy.
Eric: Exactly. And I think the blessing and the curse to it was Tony. Tony was the one cat who could do it all, and that messed everything up, because all of a sudden Tony was like the John Coltrane of drums. Where everything had a genre–that’s the jazz cats, or that’s the rock cats, or that’s the fusion cats–all of a sudden now it’s just one guy that could do everything.
And then that became a natural expectation. He could play as loud as a rock drummer, and he could play double bass. He had chops galore, but then he had taste. He could swing like crazy, he could play clave…there was nothing he couldn’t do. Now every drummer feels like they have to be as versatile as Tony Williams–so versatile that no matter what’s being presented in front of you, you’ve got to be able to deal with it. And that’s some hard shit. But it has caused the drum chair to rise so much. You can’t just be a rock drummer. You can from a certain standpoint, but in the drum circle people are really critiquing you.
Doing The Work
MD: Is there anything technical that you’re working on now?
Eric: Oh, man. I’m always working on independence. It’s just making sure that you have each limb in complete unison and also that you can have each limb doing something that’s completely foreign from the others.
I got into the whole clave thing for a while because I like that. And I work on how to keep odd time signatures, in different ways.
MD: You read, right?
Eric: Yeah. I love reading, and I encourage every drummer, even if you’re not the greatest reader, to read. If you know the value of everything, then if someone throws a triplet in front of you, you’re not sitting there like, What is that? Or a 16th or a 32nd note. You never know what you’re going to get called for.
And just knowing the different rhythmic values, because horn players and everything, they’re writing the music, but they’re more focused on the harmony aspect, so sometimes they depend on the drummer to correct the rhythmic value. You’ve got to be like, “Dude, this doesn’t really work out.” It takes four 16th notes to equal one quarter note. The simple stuff can get overlooked, but they’ll be sitting there trying to play it, like, “Damn, something is messed up.” You explain it, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, my bad.”
MD: You’re like the copy editor.
Eric: Exactly. And that’s a good job. But most drummers, they’ll be sitting there too, like, “Oh, damn…I knew something was weird–I just couldn’t figure it out.” This is what you do–you are the rhythmic player. You don’t have to read harmony, you don’t have to go from C7 to B flat 7, you don’t have to do any of that. The least you can do is just be like, “Okay, this should be two 16ths and an 8th,” or whatever.
The Value Of Technique
Eric: You cannot beat good technique. Everybody that’s really great had great technique. Tony had awesome technique. That’s why he was sitting there like it was nothing. And you look at his posture, the way he sat. No matter where everything was, he didn’t have dead space.
The cat I like is Mike Mangini. He’s one bad dude. Technical? Whoo. That kid has some awesome technique. I’m still trying to figure out some of the stuff he’s doing. He’s able to get super-fast single-stroke rolls with one hand. Effortless.
MD: He did that at an MD Festival, and the room exploded.
Eric: There’s a natural twitch in the arm. It’s a relaxed thing. You’re not supposed to strain to do it, so it’s a matter of finding it. Sometimes you can find it in the bass drum where you kind of let your feet bounce and you use the bounce from the pedal. The more you work it, the more you’re able to control it, which is the weird thing because at first it just feels like nerves, like you’re just twitching a muscle. But then after a while you learn how to control it. But he’s able to do that with his arms somehow. I haven’t seen him live to kind of figure it out, and I’m curious to see what he’s doing because he has to have some kind of technique, either with his wrist or some kind of bent motion where he’s finding a way to really get it and allowing himself to be relaxed without straining that muscle. Whatever it is, I know it takes time.
Photos by Paul La Raia
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