Blog 6: What Drumming Taught Me About Listening

Years ago in college, my roommate played drums in a lounge band and couldn't make a gig. He asked me to cover it, and there was no time to rehearse with the other two guys in the trio, so I showed up the night of and played. I knew some of the songs, since they were lounge and jazz and light rock standards. There were plenty I didn't know at all, and for those I had to listen carefully to the bass player and the guitarist for tempo, style, and dynamics.

There's always some amount of that at any gig. But that night I went in completely cold.

Here's how it actually works. When a song comes up that I don't know, I ask whoever does know it, usually the singer or the bandleader, to count it off or just start playing. That lets me come in at bar four or bar eight, once I've heard enough to know what I'm dealing with. Some of it is already settled by context, since a lounge act means the whole night is going to sit in a particular range. While I'm playing I watch the other musicians, their hands and feet and the way somebody moves right before a change. I listen to their dynamics. And I use what I know about how songs are put together, listening for the verse and the chorus and the bridge, for tempo changes, for whether the intensity is building or backing off.

We got through the set.

I studied with a few different drum teachers over the years, but I don't think that's where I learned to listen. I learned it in a snare line. In marching band and drum corps you're never the only one playing your part. There are people right beside you playing the same thing, and what you do has to match what they do exactly. Listening isn't optional there. It's the whole basis of the thing, and nobody presents it as a lesson about anything larger. You're a teenager and you just learn that your hands are accountable to the people standing next to you.

As a drum set player, I know I'm there to keep time. That's the baseline. But I'm also there to contribute something musical, because if I weren't, there'd be no reason to have a drummer at all. Everybody in a group brings a voice and an interpretation and a style.

The difference is that a drummer often has more influence than anyone else on the stage. What I play determines the tempo. It determines the volume and the intensity and a good deal of the feel. That means I'm responsible to the other musicians and to the song itself, and I have to keep asking whether what I'm doing is adding to it or taking something away from it.

A few weeks ago I got that wrong.

I was playing five songs at an event with a group I'd rehearsed with several times. I felt good about all of them. There was one I especially loved and had been looking forward to. Then we started it and something sounded off. I couldn't nail down the feel. It almost seemed like the guitarist had counted it off in a different time signature than the one we'd practiced.

I wasn't aware of any of this until the moment I came in. My hands felt weird. I couldn't tell whether I was supposed to be playing quarter notes or eighths or swinging it, and the muscle memory I'd built over all those rehearsals was completely gone. The only thing I could do was play as simply as possible and listen to everyone else until I got through it.

The strange part is that nobody noticed. After the gig I asked about the time signature, mostly because I was curious, and it turned out several other people had struggled with that same song. Maybe I threw them off. Maybe they threw me off. Everyone had been more worried about their own playing than about anyone else's, and so all four of us came off that stage each thinking the problem was our own.

Those two gigs sit oddly next to each other. The night I was completely unprepared, I was fine. The night I'd rehearsed a song I loved, I fell apart. What got me through both was the same thing, which was playing less and paying more attention to what everyone else was doing.

There was a long stretch where I didn't have any of this in my life.

In the sixteen years we lived in North Carolina I played weekly in the worship band at my church. Most people there knew me as the drummer and not as a faculty member, and later not as an administrator. I could be myself in that room without translating anything. That's been true of music generally for me. My coworkers and students knew the educator. Audiences and bandmates knew the drummer. Family and close friends knew both.

Then we spent seven years in apartments while we chased positions at different universities. There was no room for a kit, and less and less time to practice or to play with anyone. Work took it. It wasn't a decision I made, it just happened over several years.

I got it back after the Camino and after we moved to Lewisburg. My first week here I met a few guys and found out they were musicians. It took about six months for anything to come of it, but I'm playing in a group with them now. There's a kit at their rehearsal space and one set up at my house, and I practice every day. I still feel rusty, though I can tell I'm recovering.

I hadn't connected any of this to how I lead until I read Frank Barrett's Yes to the Mess, which looks at leadership through jazz. What struck me was that the thing I'd been doing since I was a kid in a snare line was the same thing I'd been trying to do in every room I ever ran, and it had never occurred to me that they were related.

I coach the way I play. I take a Socratic approach and I keep the questions short. No long ones, nothing with three parts. I'll ask someone to tell me more. I'll ask why they believe a particular thing, or what another way of thinking about it might be, or what evidence there is for the claim they just made. Those questions keep things grounded and focused, and they leave room, which is what a simple beat does. When I'm uncertain, the temptation is to fill that room with more of my own material. That's the wrong instinct behind a kit and it's the wrong instinct in a coaching conversation.

Sometimes what's useful isn't a question at all. It's being the one willing to say that the song felt strange, so nobody else has to go on believing they were the only one struggling.

I've been talking about listening to other people, which is the obvious half of it. The other half is listening to yourself.

For seven years I didn't hear what I was losing. Nothing announced itself. The work expanded until it filled the space the drumming used to occupy, and I let it, because that's what the work asked for and because the version of me that showed up at the office was the version almost everyone knew. It took walking across two countries and moving to a small town before I noticed that a real part of who I am had been in storage the whole time.

You don't have to be a musician for that to apply. You just need something that's actually yours, and a job big enough to crowd it out while you're not paying attention.

If any of that is familiar, the sense that your work has quietly taken up more room than you meant to give it, that's a good deal of what I do now. You can find me at www.walkwithultreia.com.