Each month here we visit with a member of the community to find out what music they’ve been digging.
Since I’m often pretty busy working with different artists on recording sessions and live gigs, the majority of my music-listening time is actually in preparation for upcoming gigs or things that I’m absorbing for my own daily practice habits. That being said, I’m constantly getting excited and inspired by different music and DO just listen for fun, especially on drives. It’s always changing, day to day. One of my biggest joys is diving deep into different producers and session musicians that were behind the scenes to bring records to life. Since I’m a drummer first, lately I’ve been going especially deep into an era of late ’70s R&B and pop session drummers like Steve Ferrone, Jeff Porcaro, James Gadson, Larrie Londin, and Ricky Lawson. Example song: Chaka Kahn’s Whatcha Gonna Do for Me. I just hung out and jammed with a personal hero, engineer and dub legend Scientist, so I’ve been reinspired and revisiting so much of his singular style and creative catalog, like Scientific Dub.
I sometimes do some projects composing and scoring for film, so I sometimes go into periods of listening to film/TV scores. Lately some favorite composers I’ve been listening to are Jerry Goldsmith (his score for 1968’s Planet of the Apes), Hildur Guonadottir, Johnny Greenwood, Terence Blanchard, Jon Brion, Elisabeth Lutyens, Vangelis, and Bernard Herrmann. In the fall I end up listening to a bit more acoustic music, country, and Americana. New music from Denitia (Highways), Anna St. Louis, and classics from Lucinda Williams have been on heavy rotation. For years I spent a lot of time working with extended techniques, electro-acoustic improvisation, and musique concrete-style composition, recording sounds and using tape machines as an instrument and the medium. I’ve slowed down from that music the past couple of years, but I’m starting to get the desire to start again, and these are two brand-new tape-centric albums I enjoy: Graham Lambkin’s Aphorisms and Refract by BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, and Marcus Gilmore.
This article appears in November 2023.
