A Tale of Two Drum Solos

I am not a drummer nor am I even a musician, so take this commentary with a grain of salt if you know more than I do about drums. But I tend to think that Neil Peart is one of the most overrated drummers ever. I mean, if all you listen to is classic rock and prog rock, then he is definitely a standout. But the minute you turn to jazz, he just seems way overproduced and laughably predictable.

Let's grab two videos from you tube and put them side by side.

Neil Peart has a gigillion piece drum set that completely surrounds him, a spectacular light show and a gigantic stadium screen behind him showing the audience his every move. Yet everything he does on this gigantic drum set falls squarely and predictably within a 4/4 time signature. Everything about this seems slick, clean and tame.
UPDATE: Case in point, the video was taken down from you tube for a copyright violation. It seems that Rush and Atlantic Records' astronomical profit margin from the DVD sales just isn't wide enough, so they've decided you can't even see a low quality version of it. Well, here is a website that still has it until the Atlantic copyright sharks take that one down as well.


Jim Black is a jazz drummer who has a simple trap set and is playing to a small crowd in a nightclub. There is no light show and the camera angle doesn't show much. I have no idea if the guy is sticking to one time signature because I can't count it out in the first place. It is chaotic, unpredictable and dirty, yet he stops and starts on a dime with millisecond timing. Chaos becomes silence and then chaos again within one single second. I love it at the end where he tosses all of the drumsticks onto the kit and the sound of them hitting everything becomes part of the piece. At that point, the audience can't even tell when the piece ends (in a John Cage, "sound is music" sort of way).

Richard Dawkins: If Science Worked Like Religion

Flocking Behavior in Schools of Fish

A big influence on my artwork is a group behavior among social animals called flocking. Whether it is schools of fish, flocks of birds or swarms of ants; there really is a group intelligence at play that is reminiscent of both neurons in the brain as well as traffic patterns in cities... Although I do think that the fish have cars beat hands down as far as elegantly working together as a group.

The Real News: The Age Of Science And Discovery

Another great TED talk. This one is very short, but really good.

Choose Privacy: video from the American Library Assoc

Choose Privacy Week Video from 20K Films on Vimeo.

How to Build a TED Talk

If you're not familiar with TED talks, then you should certainly look into it because you're in for a world of enlightening and entertaining lectures by some of the worlds brightest thinkers.

This particular TED talk, however, is a very funny tongue-in-cheek lecture about how to give a successful TED talk according to the statistics of the user ratings of previous TED talks. I do love infinite feedback loops.

Albert Ayler

Albert Ayler has always been one of my heroes in the jazz world... His sax playing is somewhere between spirituals, folk songs and complete outright chaos on the tenor saxophone...
New Grass is my favorite album cover of his, but the list of his great albums is too long to mention.

This is a really good NPR story on him...
http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=90627436&m=91279984

And here is a recording of him doing the classic song, Summertime...  This may very well be the most toned-down you will ever hear Albert Ayler.