Rick Mattingly: It would be ridiculous to refer to a piano as being a collection of eighty-eight instruments, and yet, many people seem to think of a drumset as being a collection of instruments. They talk about the function of the cymbal, and the function of the bass drum, and so on, as though these things were not connected. You seem to play the set as though it is one instrument.
Elvin Jones: It is one instrument, and I would hasten to say that I take that as the basis for my whole approach to the drums. It is a single musical instrument of several components. Naturally, you've got tom-toms scattered around, and the snare drum is in front of you, and the bass drum is down there, and you have cymbals at different levels. But all in all, just as a piano is one instrument, a drumset is one instrument. That is not to say that the cymbal isn't an instrument. But in order for it to be an instrument you have to use it as an instrument. They are individual instruments if you have them set up that way and you have a tom-tom player and a bass drum player and so on. Okay, then they are individual instruments. It just depends on how one chooses to apply it. So I think that's probably where people get confused.
In a dance band (to use that phrase), or a jazz band—small group, big band, combo, or as college kids call them, "stage bands"—then this is a single instrument. You can't isolate the different parts of the set any more than you can isolate your left leg from the rest of your body. Your body is one, even though you have two legs, two arms, ten fingers, and all of that. But still, it's one body. All of those parts add up to one human being. It's the same with the instrument. People are never going to approach the
drumset correctly if they don't start thinking of it as a single musical instrument.
We live in a world where everything is categorized and locked up into little bitty compartments. But I have to insist that the drumset is one. This is the way it should be approached and studied and listened to, and all of the basic philosophies should be from that premise. If you learn it piecemeal, that's the way you're going to play it. You have to learn it in total.