dawg said:
and what solos do you find inspiring,then?
Wow, that's a loaded question. Since when was drumming about soloing, and all knowledge of drumming assessed on that basis? I'm actually not a big fan of solos across the board, because since drummers have very little note sustain or tone control after the initial impact most drum solos seem to degenerate into mindless chopping. As an instrument I'd be hard pressed to think of one less suited to expressive solo playing than the drumset.
But that said, if I had to pick soloists I'd be pointing the way of people like Joey Baron or Tony Williams who manage to overcome the technical limitations and actually say something.
for me,the same reason i like weckl's technical superior drumming is the same reason i like colaiuta's. dennis chambers is great in his own funky way,with speed.to me bill stewart and,jack de johnette have different but similar styles in the trad jazz idiom. elvin's mastery of 3/4 and triplets. maybe rock is your thing.
Not really. I just think that soloing is a lousy measure of a drummer, and technique a worse one.
For a better understanding of how technique and art intersect, take a look at the filmmaking world. There the technical side is quite clearly technical - it's all about colour grading, different kinds of stock, camera moves, different approaches to lighting, CG and compositing, etc etc off into eternity. But then you look at the most technically impressive, big-budget movies and compare their content with what's being done on a fraction of the budget by people with good ideas. There's no law that says that working on a huge budget automatically means you have to have no ideas and produce derivative but spectacle-laden junk - there's enough exceptions to show that artistically valid big-budget filmmaking is viable. But on the other hand, the presence of a lot of expensive technique and equipment clearly doesn't render a film any good, either.
Art (=music) and technique (=mechanics to achieve something) have little relationship. The first is notoriously subjective, the latter very objective.
On the latter, objective measure then Weckl is clearly very strong. On the former I absolutely cannot stand a single thing he's done that I've yet encountered. That's clearly down to me, but labling people who don't view Weckl as one of the "best" drummers as ignorant or ill-informed is just silly.
Weckl's instructional videos are very good though, I'll add. I'd include his play-alongs if they weren't so musically apalling, the idea is excellent. But I refuse to give any student the impression that being a good drummer requires you to listen to that kind of stuff...
