Hello friends!

Happy new school year to all my educators out there!

As some of you know, I am back in school pursuing an advanced degree in Music Education. It is like a masters for someone who already has a masters so you could think as a double masters or no masters at all.

For one of my classes, my lovely professor asked if we would write a wee essay reflecting on an important experience with music education.

My life has been determined by ALL of my awesome music educators. However, this is academia and not the real world so I had to pick one. Here is the story. I hope you enjoy it!

Proverbs in Motian; Thoughts about my time studying under John Vidacovich

Reflecting back to my time studying with New Orleans drumming guru John Vidacovich, AKA Johnny V., I realize that it was through his wisdom, expertise and guided exploration of the self, that I am the percussionist that I am today. A little background on Johnny V: JV is a master drummer who has been at the forefront of New Orleans drumming since the 1970’s. He is a sweetheart and there is virtually no drummer in New Orleans who hasn’t been influenced by his style. Johnny is also a coffee aficionado so most lessons always start (and end) in his kitchen table, trying his new cappuccino machine or the new beans he got from Italy. During lessons Johnny mostly speaks in a proverbs-meet-stream-of-consciousness kind of way. He can light up the path with only a few words and some funky drumming.

It would be impossible for me to reduce his impact on to on just one moment, so in this essay, I will recall three different “moments” that together helped shape my voice as an artist and most importantly, as a human being

Moment number 1: It must have been the Fall of 2003 when I was a student of the jazz department at the University of New Orleans. I walked to Johnny V’s Mid-City home for our first lesson. He greeted me and quickly offered me a cup of coffee. I remember asking Johnny V, “What is something I can do to better my time as a drummer?” I was referring to time as in timing or tempo because I had been struggling with keeping up my strength and stamina while playing fast tempo swing styles. He asked me to play for him. While listening to me play he swung along with my beat and kept his eyes on me, as if he was studying me through a microscope. After a while he asked me to stop. Then, he said: “ Little brother man, you want to have better time while playing them drums? Then you have to have a GOOD time.” He reminded me that I needed to have more fun and to stop worrying so much so I could begin to enjoy the music thus making the music enjoyable. For the following few months, we worked on letting go of doubt and frustration while music making, and like magic my timing got better! While I was taking about time as in tempo, he was talking about time as in life, our life.

Moment number 2: One day I showed up to Johnny V’s ready to learn one of his famous second line drumming beats. Johnny has an ability to watermark every piece of music he plays with this one specific flavor, yet without imposing his aesthetic on the music. I told him that I made a fool of myself the night before by attempting to play that rhythm, and that I messed up so much, I felt that I destroyed the music. Johnny taught and played the rhythm for me as I danced and learned (It is impossible not to dance while he plays a second line beat). Right before I left his home he asked if I would have one final cup of coffee with him. He made a cortado and told me: “You see, music ain’t about you. Music is bigger than that. If you think you have the ability to single handedly destroy music, then you have to keep your ego in check. Some people are ego centric and that is a problem. Other people are ego maniacs and that is even a bigger problem.” Then he stood up and said: “Life is a movie. You want to be the one who presses play on the VCR. You don’t want no VCR pressing play on YOU.”
I left Johnny’s that day without fully understanding what he meant with the whole VCR thing. I just filed it under “Johnny’s wisdom to be dealt with at a later date.” It has been been eleven years since my first lesson with John Vidacovich and I am still unearthing the treasures buried in his words.

Moment number 3: As a student of jazz drums in a city that gave birth to so many great drummers (and if you care about that sort of thing, the place that gave birth to jazz), can be intimidating. Studying the masters, imitating them and paying homage to them with every single note we play can be very a very rewarding but creatively stifling trap. Johnny V. always made sure that his students knew the history and tradition of New Orleans drumming, but he always pushed us to discover and use out own voices for making creative statements that belonged to us. In regards to tone projection he would say: “Hit that cymbal where the blue is and make the sound travel through the purple and all the way to the red! The red is all the way up in the air.” “I want to hear how YOU make that cymbal sound. Hit it, let it ring and wait for it to get quiet on its own. There is a life in that cymbal and you’ve got to let it come out.” In regards to creative soloing he would suggest playing along to Bach’s Branderburg Concerto while singing the melodies. He would say: “I always want to hear the song. The song is what is important” JV and I would trade 4’s soloing over the jazz standard “Bye Bye Blackbird” while we both sang the melody. One of my favorite pieces of advice regarding creativity was something along the lines of: “Magic is not always around. Magic sometimes is hard to come by. What we have to do, is get real good about recognizing when magic IS around. Then we must ride that wave like a magic carpet and let it take us as far as it will. Then we can use the momentum until we can jump on the next magic carpet.”

Until I studied with Johnny Vidacovich, nobody had talked to me like that. No one spoke to me in ways that didn’t make sense at all at the beginning but that made total sense after processing. I think that on a root level, Johnny allowed his students to use their own intellect and experiences to decode the information in a way that would be organically embedded in them. He trusted that they could find the answer within themselves. He almost never just gave “the” answer, because there in no One Answer that fits all.

Check this wee video out!