Earl Palmer

(BMG Records) By Scott Gudell Spectacular to hear and stunning to view.  This box set of a dozen seven inch singles/45s is billed as a celebration of the fifty year anniversary of Emerson / Lake / Palmer (ELP) and focuses on material from the decade they dominated, the 1970s, as …

Sole surviving member Carl Palmer, in association with the Estates of his bandmates Keith Emerson & Greg Lake, has announced the much anticipated  WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS- THE RETURN OF EMERSON LAKE &  PALMER Tour.  Launching on Friday November 18th., 2022 at the 2300 ARENA in Philadelphia, PA, the tour will actually reunite …

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in art, music, and technology are here to stay.  Owner/CEO of Modern Drummer Magazine David Frangioni finds himself uniquely positioned. Frangioni is a self-made success in the music technology industry, a drummer, a producer/engineer, a publisher, a consultant, and a sophisticated collector. He and his team have spent a …

Hello! Roger Earl here, writing from Long Island, New York, my adopted home. I grew up in SW London during the ’50s and ’60s, listening to American music like Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry.

Hello Modern Drummer, I’m Michael Blicher. I play the saxophone but drums are what I should really be playing—I love them!

The June issue of Modern Drummer magazine features an interview with three-time Grammy Award–winning producer Russ Titelman who in his long career has worked with musical giants including Little Feat, Randy Newman, James Taylor, Brian Wilson, Cyndi Lauper, Graham Central Station, Rickie Lee Jones, George Harrison, Chaka Khan, the Bee …

Longtime New York City drummer Tony Leone is currently on the road with the Chris Robinson Brotherhood.

Hi, MD readers! My name is Joe Fitzgerald and I’ve been drumming with the Irish pop band Pugwash since 2010.

Hello Modern Drummer readers, fellow drummers, and music lovers! David Frangioni here again and I’m pleased to share with you that the Carl Palmer concert was a resounding success. Carl and his band (along with special guests Steve Hackett, Mark Stein, and Liza Quin) killed it!

Carl Palmer, among the most renowned drummers in rock history and a founding member of both ELP and Asia, is returning to the United States for the final leg of the Rhythm of Light Tour. The tour features his popular ELP Legacy band and will also highlight his collection of …

The term effects, or FX, is applied to a wide array of cymbals, from tiny splashes to giant, oddly shaped sheets of metal to cymbals with tambourine jingles riveted to them. The key to helping customers find that unique voice they’ve been missing in their setup is to know what’s …

What is the rhythmic essence of progressive music? What makes prog so different from other genres? Does it require a specific skill set on the drumkit, or does the nature of the music make it open to interpretation? MD posed these and other questions to the drummers in Spock’s Beard, …

Though Adam Wade cut his teeth with seminal ’90s noise rockers Jawbox, he didn’t truly come into his own until joining fellow Beltway-based post-hardcore pioneers Shudder to Think. Manning the drumkit on the latter’s prog-pop masterpiece Pony Express Record—an under-sung treasure of the alt-rock epoch—Wade weathered Shudder’s stylistic schizophrenia and …

Hey, all, Russell Simins from the one and only Blues Explosion here. I play drums and write music with bandmates Jon Spencer and Judah Bauer, two of the greatest guitarists I know, and I know a lot of them.

Odd times, intergalactic themes, and more tom-toms. Rock drumming gets interesting….

Hello, Jeremy Taggart from Our Lady Peace here. We’re releasing album number 8, Curve, in the U.S. on April 17. It’s been a great experience, and I can’t wait to play the songs on this year’s touring cycle. I couldn’t be more amped about it…

First of its Kind Online Course from Berklee Launches April 2nd, 2012 from Renowned Author and Journalist Steve Morse.

The Monkees’ Micky Dolenz on longevity, the Wrecking Crew, and that wacky setup of his.

Drumming news for the month of November complied in one place.

MD Pro Panelist Daniel Glass on the magic of Deep Purple’s Ian Paice.

Welcome once again to the MD Readers Poll, where the greatest drummers on the planet are honored by the most educated drum fans around. Let’s get right to it: the envelope, please….

More with the phenomenal drummer/educator, who was featured in the January 2011 issue of MD. His is one of the most closely observed careers in R&B, fusion, gospel, and pop drumming, with acts like Israel Houghton & New Breed, Chaka Khan, Christina Aguilera, Babyface, Patti LaBelle, Randy Brecker, and New …

Spencer Dryden was the drummer of San Francisco psychedelic rock icons Jefferson Airplane. After graduating from the Army & Navy Academy in Carlsbad, California, in 1955, Dryden played in some early rock ’n’ roll bands, but showed a preference for jazz. He was drumming at Hollywood’s Pink Pussycat strip club …

Richie Hayward, the drummer in the band Little Feat since their inception in 1969, was born in Clear Lake, Iowa, and was influenced by rock ’n’ roll pioneer Earl Palmer and big-band jazz drummer Sonny Payne. In 1966 he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Fraternity Of Man, whose …

If you ask Steve Jordan who his favorite drummer is, be prepared to get hit with a never-ending list of influences, ranging from the obvious—like jazz greats Kenny Clarke and Philly Joe Jones and funk innovators David Garibaldi and Stephen Ferrone—to the more obscure, like Motown/disco session drummer Andrew Smith, …

If you said that Earl Palmer is famous for being the most recorded drummer in history, you wouldn’t get too many arguments. But you’d also only be telling half the story….

Carl Palmer started out as a jazz drummer in his early youth, gravitated to rock in his teens, and burst onto the international scene in the late ’60s as a member of English proto-progressive rock bands Atomic Rooster and the Crazy World Of Arthur Brown…

Blaine came to define the drum beat of Top-40 radio…

Hello to all MD readers and drum friends. It’s been a while since I’ve posted to this blog–not for lack of desire–but because I’ve been running all over the globe attempting to make a living by hitting things and writing about them….

My own little record store, containing only albums I still like after twenty-five years–that’s suddenly what all my records look like splayed out across my room.

Mitch Mitchell was not alone in blending jazz and rock drumming styles, but he may have pushed the combo further than anyone who came before him. Here a number of noted drummers provide further insight into Mitch’s influence….

In drumming, the terms legendary and innovator are thrown around far too often. Yet Earl Palmer deserves both of these titles.

The March issue of MD (out now) features Billy Ward’s fascinating conversation with Simon Phillips, Doane Perry, Marco Minnemann, Thomas Lang, and Jerry Marotta about the grooves that inspired them to play drums early on, and that continue to today. It seemed to make perfect sense for MD’s editors to …

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to throw my hat into this incredible blog, and to share a bit about what’s been going on in my world for the last several years…

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to throw my hat into this incredible blog, and to share a bit about what’s been going on in my world for the last several years…

My name is Oli Hecks, from England, currently living in Los Angeles…

My name is Oli Hecks, from England, currently living in Los Angeles…

After spending almost three years straight on the road touring with country acts.

After spending almost three years straight on the road touring with country acts.

As if channeling the cosmic power encompassed in the prophetic “Alpha and Omega??? from the book of Revelation, tuneful progressive rockers Asia envisioned themselves as near deities when their albums topped the charts and sold millions in the 1980s.

Playing For The Song–And More! Steve Jordan Interviews the Great Levon Helm….

As with most people around my age, my heroes were Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa (who both seemed to turn up regularly on variety television shows), Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, Mitch Mitchell…

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and Nate “Danja??? Hills signed on to co-produce Duran Duran’s latest CD, Red Carpet Massacre. After all, the band—keyboardist Nick Rhodes, singer Simon Le Bon, bassist John Taylor, and drummer Roger Taylor (guitarist Andy Taylor decided to bow out …

Progressive rock’s evolution from its nascent days in London’s university halls and local clubs to stadium-filling global phenomenon has its roots in the tumultuous melting pot of 1960s rock and psychedelia.

New York City drummer Rich Pagano is way more than just a member of the hippest Beatle cover band you’ll ever hear. He’s also an accomplished singer and producer. As we journey through Rich’s MD Online interview, we’ll learn that not only does he do a stellar job of providing …

Paving the way for some of the great studio musicians of our time, like Jim Gordon, Jim Keltner, Jeff Porcaro, and John JR Robinson, were Earl Palmer and Hal Blaine. MD recently sat down with the jovial drummer to walk a bit down memory lane.

Over the years many have claimed the title “The Fifth Beatle.” When you think about it, original Beatle drummer Pete Best deserves the tag as much as anyone. The Beatles: The True Beginnings (St. Martins Press), Pete’s new book written with his brothers Roag and Rory, makes the case as …

One of the marks of greatness in a musician is that you can recognize him after the first couple of notes.

When we caught up with Darrin Pfeiffer to talk about Goldfinger’s new record, Stomping Ground, he was on tour in Barcelona, Spain with the band. “The fun thing about making this record was that we got to work with producer Tim Palmer,” Pfeiffer says.

Like all the masters of psychedelic pop, The Flaming Lips blow your mind with the most ordinary of devices. These seem-to-be eccentrics, who’ve recently won a Grammy for the instrumental “Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia),” are really just a bunch of hard-working regular guys, using modest tools: a …