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The State Of The Beat | |
Michael ShrieveArticle from Music Technology, September 1988 |
From providing the backbone of Santana's Latin beat, Michael Shrieve has moved into electronic percussion and out again. John Diliberto listens to the drummer's tale.
It would take a unique talent to play with musicians as diverse as Klaus Schulze, Stomu Yamashta, Carlos Santana, The Rolling Stones, Steve Winwood, and Steve Roach. Michael Shrieve has a unique talent.
"When we did the film we were able to do seven minutes of music that didn't fit into any category. It's probably one of the most expressive things I've done."
Shrieve's own Transfer Station Blue, has become one of the most popular new age albums in the US. The music was derived from sessions he'd recorded with Schulze. Shrieve had taken the 16-track tapes, remixed them and in the case of the title track, interpolated R&B rhythm breaks that were as misplaced as stick figure drawings on a Rothko canvas.
The record made an unusual crossover from new age to funk audiences, with DJs using it as a rap background. It also found an audience with film directors. "Every film I've ever gotten has been because of Transfer Station Blue", he says.
WHEN HE DRIFTED away from Schulze, Shrieve moved to New York and began experimenting with electronic percussion and doing session work - including a stint with The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger. It proved to be a psychological epiphany for Shrieve. "I went to Nassau for ten days with Mick and Jeff Beck", he recalls. "We were staying at Chris Blackwell's house, and Mick was playing me songs on the acoustic guitar and they didn't sound that great. But I realised that they were going to end up sounding great. It hit me that I should start believing in myself, and not have doubts about what I don't know."
Shrieve began working again with electronic percussion. With digital samplers and Simmons drums, he now had the melodic capability he once envied in Santana. "Now it's gotten to the point where we can actually play melodies with the drums", he says with relief.
Shrieve embraced drum machines and, in 1984, recorded an album called In Suspect Terrain, an all-percussion solo record centred around the Linn drum machine with other acoustic and electronic percussion added in. "There's an art to programming drum machines", he explains. "You can make them sound like a human. On In Suspect Terrain I tried to do that. The problem was that it came out four years later in America. By that time there were new chips for the Linn, so it sounded, perhaps, old. But I still feel there was some very hip programming. It was an exercise that I wanted to put on record."
But it sounded like an exercise - brilliant rhythm tracks in search of a context. The melodies came as he began scoring films. In 1986, he and synthesist Patrick Gleeson scored Dino De Laurentis' movie, The Bedroom Window. For the sessions, Shrieve brought in a young drummer named David Beal. "Just before leaving New York for California to do the film, I did a session with David Beal, kind of a new guy on the scene", says Shrieve admiringly. "He came to the session with all these samples - he was one of the first guys in New York to have it so together with that scene. So I hired him to work with me on the percussion for this soundtrack. We had such a good time doing it, I said, 'Let's create a situation where we can do something percussion-wise'. It felt time for me to get back into something that was percussion music. I've always wanted to do something that was percussion music besides songs or play on a piece of percussion music."
"When we use tablets or African drum samples, we try not to pretend that were Indian drummers; we play as we always play. And that has got to have its own uniqueness."
"On most of the record we sequenced a foundation and we went back and replaced it track by track", says Beal. "You can spend hours and hours programming a sequencer to play like a human, but we're players - so why bother? The sequencer was mainly an arrangement writing tool. That makes the record sound more exciting to me. In the pop world they like everything sequenced, but this is the one world where you can get away with a good sloppy fun groove. So why not do it?"
Despite all the computer and electronic technology, the album has a primal, organic feel, as if it just danced out of an African jungle. "One thing sampling has done is turned us on to world acoustic instruments", says Shrieve. "When we use tablas or African drum samples, we try not to pretend we're Indian drummers; we play as we always play. And that has got to have its own uniqueness."
"That was the most exciting thing about electronics", agrees Beal enthusiastically. "As a percussionist you're only as good as your collection of percussion, so a guy from rock 'n' roll who could express himself in ethnic music could never cross over because he couldn't play instruments like talking drums and bata drums. They take years to learn how to play. But once you get into sampling, you can take that bata or talking drum, sample it and put it on your Octapads. All the different ethnic communities of drummers have now crossed over.
"In The Bedroom Window", he continues, "we had African tribes, with 20 or 30 African drums that were all sampled and we could just play track by track and create things that drummers like Michael and I could never express on our own."
It also changed the way they approached the drums, taking into consideration properties of sound with which drummers aren't usually concerned, like sustain and pitch-bend.
"With the authentic percussion there are so many subtleties on the drums, and subtleties in the way people play with sticks", explains Beal. "The sound you're playing, like a talking drum, may have a pitch sweep to it, so when you're playing those rhythms you're taking that pitch sweep into consideration. You want to leave space for it. Before, the rhythm you might play on a cymbal bell could never be played on an orchestral bass drum, because of the physical aspects. Now, that cymbal bell can be an orchestral bass drum so you're getting a whole different rhythm sense."
ONE OF THE most interesting figures in Shrieve's career is Steve Roach, one of the few American synthesists to create his own sound out of the German school of electronics. They initially played together at The First Annual Palo Alto Space Music Festival in May 1987, and immediately found an affinity for each other's music. Later that year. Roach flew Shrieve in from New York to lay tracks on his Dreamtime Return album. Those tracks were never used, but Shrieve stayed for six weeks, not only recording for Dreamtime Return, but laying down the basis of an album of Shrieve-Roach duets called The Leaving Time. They wrote most of the music in that six-week period, jamming on sequencers.
"We'd be programming at the same time on the drum machine and the sequencer and just building and changing and shaping in an intuitive way", says Roach. "Michael was also using the Ensoniq sequencer (with the ESQ1) so we had that common language between us. And the drum machine programming, of course."
But both decided it needed something more, so they enlisted guitarist David Torn.
"It felt like it needed more than just the synths", says Shrieve. "I had done that with Klaus and I was beginning to feel like we had to open it up."
Roach felt the same way, and Torn's distended guitar appears on every track, adding harmonies well outside the run of new age music. "His knowledge of harmonising melodies and chords took the album to another level of harmonic sophistication", says Roach. "It was amazing hearing these chords and melody lines. At times it took my ears a while to adjust to this new sound."
The Leaving Time resonates with synthesiser textures, ambiences and the sequencer patterns of Roach, pushed by the rhythmic drive of Shrieve, and shaped by Torn's liquid guitar.
But after all this electronic innovation, Shrieve is looking again at his acoustic drums. Even on The Big Picture, he and Beal, after laying the electronic tracks, went back in with double acoustic drum kits.
Now he's working on a solo project that he terms "a jazz record", using a traditional jazz drum kit and covering tunes by Gil Evans and others.
"It's not going to be like one of those new age records. I want it to be new music but I want to play drums and I want to play freely as well. I want it to be improvisational drum-wise, and not sequenced or programmed. I feel like I've come full circle. There was a period in New York where drums weren't enough. Maybe I was hanging around with the wrong people, but I was really bored with the drums, and now I'm really back into them. The direction I'm going in is more of a jazz direction, because it has more to do with the art of drumming than anything else."
Since Shrieve has been known to shift gears at a moment's notice, it remains to be seen how the project will turn out. And an unpredictable factor could be the Santana 20-year reunion. The only certain thing is that Shrieve will follow his own instincts and that it will, somehow, be related to everything else he's done.
"I learned from Stomu that if you do interesting things, interesting people find it", he comments. "You don't have to worry about doing something that everybody might like. Do what you feel and the people who like that will come towards it and they will be interesting people."
The Struggle For Freedom (David Torn) |
The Sound Art Of Programming (Steve Roach) |
In Praise Of Music (David Torn) |
Interview by John Diliberto
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