Drum Masters 2

Young pianist Emmet Cohen has a reverence for the history of jazz and a deep abiding yearning to preserve the music of the masters and to this end, Cohen developed the concept of a Masters Legacy Series intended to be a collection of recordings and interviews with various living jazz icons who began their careers fifty or sixty-years-ago. Volume one celebrates and documents the music of Jimmy Cobb, arguably one of the finest drum masters of our time, and is the center piece in the inaugural installment of the project.

Duke Ellington's fanciful tale of Carribee Joe and his drum, which evolved into a woman known as Madam Zajj (and a very abstract telling of the evolution of jazz) became a television special in the late '50s but does not translate all that well to record.

Jonathan Dee Lemon is an English-born American cartoonist and former musician. He is best known for drawing the Alley Oop comic strip. Lemon was born in Watford, Hertfordshire, England in 1965, and earned an art degree at the University of Brighton.

Longstanding friends worldbeat artist James Asher and drumcircle facilitation trainer and percussionist Arthur Hull meet again to co-create, and produce some of their most persuasive imaginative material within their recorded audio adventures, ranging from energising and percussive to cinematic, chilled and atmospheric.

For Planet Drum, Hart convened some of the world's finest drum talents for a momentous collaboration that won the very first Grammy for World Music. He brought together Nigerian drum legend Babatunde Olatunji, Indian tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, Nigerian talking drum ace Sikiru Adepoju, and Puerto Rico's master conguero Giovanni Hidalgo, among others. The cornerstone 1991 album spent an unprecedented 26 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard world music chart and continues to sell as a perennial favorite to this very day.

Some time in July 2012 we played a show in Castlemaine with Brod Smith. He's a crazy-genius-western-nut-ex-rocker and is also Ambrose's father. This was not long after we had collaborated with him on the recording of Sam Cherry's Last Shot so we performed an off the cuff version of that song to half-a-dozen confused locals. That got me thinking about trying a multi-song, read-along, narrative based, western musical record. Brod seemed keen to compose a story and provide narration so Cavs, Lucas and I raced to my parents garage and recorded Fort Whipple and The Killing Ground. You can hear my parents dogs barking in the background and my dad banging on some old rusted saw blade. I didn't really have much of an idea about recording back then (still don't really). I think I had 2 microphones and I was recording onto this hunk-of-shit-but-kinda-awesome digital 8 track machine. We had no mic stands so one mic was taped onto a shoebox in front of a guitar amp and one was hanging over the drum kit boxing ring style from the roof truss. I sent these recordings to Brod and he wrote the first chapter of Eyes Like the Sky that night and send me a recording of him reading it into his computer mic. It sounded kind of fucked up so played it though a guitar amp, recorded it, and synched it to the next recording we made which ended up being the title track. Brod and I went back and forward from there, sometimes the music inspiring the words or the words inspiring the music. It all came together pretty fast. So as you may be able to tell, it is flattering and bemusing to me that people would want to listen to this fried, weird, lo-fi record of ours. So thank you very much! Enjoy, Love Stu

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (OST) from the film At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal (2019). The music by Drum & Lace and Ian Hultquist (The Gospel According to Andre, The First Monday in May, Love & Bananas: an Elephant Story). At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal is a 2019 HBO documentary film directed by Erin Lee Carr.

In his new Saxophone Concerto, Gabriel Prokofiev explores a side of classical music usually seen as forbidden by modern contemporary composers: melody. This aspect was incorporated at the request of the soloist, Branford Marsalis, allowing Prokofiev to revisit characteristics of the classical tradition not usually heard in contemporary music, giving the saxophone an open canvas.

Billy Cobham has once again given us the great honor of producing and writing his new Drum N Voice. This is Vol. 5 of the prestigious series.