Stanton Moore speaks like he drums in a confident measured delivery which makes his frequent mention of “reckless abandon” a surprising allusion in both concept and practice. And the latter exercise becomes a dominant theme in his conversation with Doug Collette as he explains his preparation for making his acoustic trio album Conversations far removed from the groove-laden likes of Galactic or his trio projects.
But just as this record is more than just a one-off, so is the New Orleans native’s approach to the art of drumming. And make no mistake, percussion is more than just craft when Moore’s involved. Even when he’s collaborating as a sideman with Will Bernard or Robert Walter, he brings as much enthusiasm as technique to the mix: it’s not uncommon to see him leap to his feat while he plays, but even when seated on his stool, catching him from the right angle, he is dancing behind his drum kit.
And that’s like how Stanton Moore lives. Besides touring and recording, he’s created instructional books and DVDs and is raising a family, while his life containing its share of structure and open-ended spontaneity.
Conversations sounds refreshing to listen to. Did it feel like that to you to play that style?
Oh, absolutely. When I first started playing with these guys, it was off and on over the years, not on a regular basis and never in a national basis, only like in New Orleans, very sporadically over the years in between gigs with Galactic etc. as I was developing and not so much recently.
But it’s something I always wanted to do more of, so when I did, it felt to me like flying really, a lot more freedom in where I can go. All our arrangements are subject to interpretation, so it’s a lot of fun. I make a living hitting back-beats and with this there’s a lot less of that and it is, in a lot of ways, a breath of fresh air for me. Not that I don’t love what I do to make a living, but now to get a chance to do this on a more regular basis is really a lot of fun and enjoyable for me.
The sense of fun and freedom is certainly infectious in listening to the record, seemingly one long moment of inspiration. You guys prepped for a year’s time for this recording: did you plan to play that long before you let yourself record?
Yeah, I knew in the back of my mind I wanted to record this project eventually, but I didn’t want to put any timeline on it, I just wanted to play with the guys and develop organically and naturally. Because sometimes we’d get as many Tuesdays in a row and sometimes months without doing it, it just depended on my tour schedule. I wanted to do it when we were comfortable, so it was about a year and a half, playing as much as we could on a pretty weekly basis, except when I was out with Galactic a lot. But we just got to a point where I started feeling more and more comfortable with it and once I felt the music was developing, I thought, “Well, what do we want the material to be? “
And I didn’t want to do standards that a lot of people had done already and I didn’t want to do things that didn’t have any real connection to me or who I was, so what I started to notice that the material we gravitated to was written by people one or more of us had played extensively with; there’s a lot of James Black tunes in our repertoire, we recorded four or five of them and two made the record. Michael Pellara and Steve Masakowski too, those are all guys David (Torkanowsky, pianist) and Jim (Singleton, bassist) have played with for years and years, those are all guys I watched as I was growing up.
So even though I never got to see Black because he passed before I came on the scene, those guys got to play with him extensively, and though we didn’t record anything by Robert Walter, I did three records of my own with him, and with his groups, and in several other incarnations with Robert, so although we do several tunes by him, we didn’t record any this time.
As the repertoire developed, we recognized we kept bringing in tunes that “Hey I played this with this guy – I think it would work…” sometimes they’d work and sometimes they wouldn’t, but I feel really good about the tunes we’ve assembled to play and the tunes that actually made the record. We probably recorded eighteen or nineteen tunes and twelve of them made the record.
How did you then go about arranging them for the record? Was it any different than the way they evolved when you played them live?
Yeah, live we’d play with a little more reckless abandon. You know we might start one tune, then maybe go into another tune. Or they way we’d end would be another version of the tune; for example, “Magnolia Triangle:” we usually start it with the harmonization James Black did, then we might end it with the way he played it: different accents within the rhythmic structure of the tune, then different harmonizations. And then we’d go into this long, dawn-out middle section, so live we’d do one of the versions then not go into the extended version. We’d try to be more condensed and more direct and to the point.
One of the things that was kind of a rule of thumb, a testing for us, was with me: when I’d hanging out with my wife daughter and friends, we’ll put on records that we’ll let play during dinner and so the records we usually want to listen to are like Louis Armstrong or Ella Fitzgerald, Ahmad Jamal, things that have a very listenable quality to them. And then I love Coltrane, but when I put that on it can be a little bit frantic for my wife in a family setting…
Yeah it can be. I remember trying that a few times and it didn’t quite work!
Exactly, so I wanted this record to be a body of work we could listen to, thinking if we could listen to it, a lot of people could listen to it. I wanted to make a listenable record, not “Listen to how we can improvise!” roaming from this thing to that thing and there’s no continuity. I wanted the record to have a sort of classic air about it, listenable like a lot of classic records I love are listenable and the way a whole group of people hanging out at my house won’t be like “This is irritating!?”
I think you achieved that. I find it listenable in a way that, when I put it on, I really can’t use it as background though: it draws me in, so that I have to sit down and actively listen to it because so much to hear is going on With all due respect, I try often times to block you out and listen to the bass and piano, moving around the group like that. Did you guys have to do a number of takes of these songs or did you nail them quickly?…or was the intention to nail them quickly?
We’d do a couple takes, usually not more than two or three, but on a couple, we had to do more than that, but some of the material is challenging even though it’s listenable. And then there’s some we got in one take you know? “That’s it!”
That’s a great feeling, especially as you were so patient in letting the relationship redevelop within the trio and the repertoire develop by itself, it must’ve been great to nail something like that as a reaffirmation that you’d done the right thing all along. Did you record the album in concentrated sessions of a few days or over a span of time?
No we did three days of recording and then to mix it, I’d have to do little spurts with my producer/engineer John Porter, where I’d go over to his house for few hours here, a few hours there—no I don’t think we ever did eight hours.
I don’t want to presume too much, but do you have to adjust yourself drastically to play this kind of music, as opposed to Galactic or some of your other projects with Robert Walter etc?
I’ve been getting more and more comfortable in this setting. Playing at a lighter volume and really try to fit into that. At first it felt really uncomfortable—it was a real effort and now I get Vic Firth to make my signature stick (out of hickory) out of maple, which is a lot lighter: it feels the same in my hand, but maple also has a little bit more articulation, especially at a lighter volume, so I get a more articulate sound.
And this stick is a little longer and I choke up a little bit more on it as I hold it. Also I’ve been working with a lot of brushes, working with Jeff Hamilton, going through all these brush workbooks and DVD’s I could find; that’s not really how you learn but to grasp the basic elements. You have to learn by playing, so I’ve been trying to play brushes on the gigs s much as possible, bringing the volume level down on a gig through the course of the night.
And then too I took a couple lessons with Kenny Washington where he asked me what I wanted to learn and I wanted to work on the Charles Wilcox snare drum stuff which is where Philly Joe Jones’ vocabulary was coming from; I’ve been borrowing and stealing stuff from him but adapting it for funk …and Elvin (Jones) and Tony Williams and Max Roach, a lot of other guys I’ll take ideas from and then learn to do it in a funk context.
So I went to Kenny to learn that stuff on a deeper level and he had me do solos super super slow, one measure at a time, then playing the unaccented notes, super…super…quiet like you can’t play them quiet enough, so it was like real Karate Kid stuff (laughs). Because when you’re first doing it, it’s like “What is this?” I didn’t say it was boring, because it was the way Kenny wanted me to practice, so this is the way I practice. And after practicing like that for a few weeks, a couple months ongoing, you start getting on your gigs where I’ve got to play softer and I go “Wait a minute, I feel much more comfortable at that volume level!?” And I started realizing – “Oh!…that’s because I’ve been practicing all those snare drum etudes at a super soft volume level!?”
So I realized Kenny really had a handle on approaching that Wilcox stuff and practicing it his way really works on vocabulary and finesse and accuracy—so many things on so many different levels. So that was really it for me to be able to develop and I do have to adapt to play in this style…I know that’s a long answer to your question, but there’s many things I’ve worked on and changes I’ve made to make that the case.
You anticipated a question as you answered that one in talking about that disciplined approach to studying and letting me know how long that took for you to do that practice and develop those brand-new habits you could call into play. You must regard yourself as a very disciplined musician in that sense because that’s a very scholarly almost academic approach to doing something you’ve done all your life.
A while ago I realized I’ve fallen in love with the learning process, the developing process: I just love getting better and refining what I do. When I was young there was this whole thing about sounding academic and all that kind of stuff and so I was aware of that and afraid to get too far into that side of things. But I’ve spent enough time on the streets, sitting in, going out hearing stuff, looking at it at that level. When I’m at home or sitting here practicing, I don’t think that way at all like when I’ve out playing it or listening or sitting in or living it.
So practice is just that: you have to practice to absorb it, then once you’re playing it on the stage, you just forget about all that and play with reckless abandon, and not be afraid if stuff is sloppy and not be afraid of “Ooh I didn’t make that!?!…” It doesn’t matter, we’re not Evil Knievel here, where if you make a mistake you’re going to the hospital or dying. It’s just music.
I think people study a lot and they’re afraid to take chances: I hope and feel that my actual playing doesn’t sound academic because I try to play with a fearlessness you can only learn by hanging out and doing it. So there’s a whole street approach where you don’t want to learn to play music—you don’t want to learn to read music and you learn on the street, not learning by rote and doing—but for me I’ve taken both avenues: the very studious way of looking at things and a very non-studious way. I think that, for me, I just like to understand things from as many different angles as possible; you can read from a piece of paper, but you can play it by ear as well and that helps you internalize all the ideas and concepts you’re trying to get across. If you know every which way, forwards and backwards, inside and out, you’re going to be able to express it on a much more powerful level and hopefully evoke emotion instead of just putting out there “Here’s this thing I just learned out of a snare drum book”—that’s just a means to an end.
Do you think the two approaches are mutually beneficial to you in whatever realm you’re playing because you never get too ‘school’ and you never get too ‘street’—you’re always straddling the two in such a way the abandon arise naturally…
I think so. The more prepared you feel when you hit the stage, the less inhibitions you’ll have. If you feel totally prepared, I’ve found you’ll feel a lot more at home with the audience. There’s a difference between listening rooms and jazz clubs where everyone’s loud and dancing –you get used to that –but when everybody’s listening, you feel like you’re really under the microscope, like when you’re talking on the microphone, and you’re almost afraid to make jokes with the audience. So I’ve become more and more comfortable in that realm I think and more uninhibited on the microphone to freely and openly express myself as I want to. That just comes with time.
That’s the reckless abandon you’ve mentioned a couple times.
Right! And you can get to that level more openly in a room of friends. Even if the audience is a bunch of strangers, you need to realize they came to see you—they want to be there—and you can embrace them even when it’s a different audience every night.
I suppose we need to remind ourselves, audience and performer alike, that we’re all musiclovers, a bond that should add an element of relaxation to the whole experience. People are going to be elevated and enlightened to great degree before the evening’s over.
I’d hope so.
