Jim White and Emotional Drumming

hearing the voice of God in a well-tuned snare

Some music gives everything away the first time you hear it. You’re hit with the totality of the sound—a huge riff, an unforgettable chorus—and you immediately understand how it works and why it exists. Instantly appealing music represents a small yet significant slice of the music I care about. More often, something draws me in from the first listen, but it’s hard to name. I have to ask myself: What is this doing? What quality inside the music is creating this effect?, and it can take a while to figure out.

One strategy for working through this puzzle it is to “enter” the sound while listening, fixating on a single aspect of the piece to hear how it contributes to the whole, and what measure of the music’s total force this element carries. What’s that piano doing? Is the reverb on the vocal reminding me of something? Is there a feeling of surprise when the horn comes in? And so on.

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Sometimes a line or two from something I read will lodge in my memory and shift how I hear music from that point forward. And then, after many years, I might forget where I read something, and question if I actually read it. One example came to mind after Lee “Scratch” Perry died. It was from an interview where, going from memory here, he said: 

“I don’t make reggae. I made eggae. Because without the egg there is no chicken, and without the chicken there is no Scratch.” 

I read it once, could have been 20 or 30 years ago, and it carved a space into my brain because it crystalized his trickster humor and the way he could scramble inputs and have something surprising come out. It was like one of those perspective drawings where an exterior surface of one shape is also an interior surface of another, and you blink and shift between possibilities.

Another quote that changed things came (I think) from an interview with Frank Black. He was talking about his favorite records, and he mentioned Bob Dylan’s “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.” The reason he loved it so much, he said, is because of Kenny Buttrey’s drumming, which he described as “emotional drumming.” I took that to mean that the drumming carries a significant portion of the song’s emotional content. That sounded exactly right: listen. Buttrey’s hesitations, his rolls, his galloping backbeat. It doesn’t just echo what Dylan is singing—it comments on it, tells its own story within the story.

Buttrey did that a lot when he played, but I would say “emotional drumming,” in the way I’m thinking of it, is somewhat rare in rock music. A great rock drummer drives a song, pushes it forward, adds a spine and a bit of texture, and ultimately, most of the time, offers support above all else (an important job, to be sure). Emotional drumming is more common in jazz, especially starting in the 1960s, when a drummer didn’t necessarily have to keep time. Elvin Jones is a master of his approach (see “India”), and so is Sunny Murray (see “Vibrations”), though they play very differently. Then there’s Aphex Twin’s “Flim.” The delicate piano part gets all the press while the programmed drums speak the drama, the way they tumble and then stand up, suggesting awkwardness, shyness, melancholy, inner strength, all with perfect control. Rhythm always conveys feeling, of course—we’re talking about a foundational aspect of music that goes back a few hundred thousand years—but I’m thinking about when percussion becomes a character in the story told by the music.

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Drummer Jim White is 33.33% of Australia’s the Dirty Three. I reviewed their excellent new record recently. In addition to his main band, he’s played on many records in an array of contexts. No matter who he is playing with, his drumming is doing everything drums should do, and they’re doing a great deal more. He’s always in conversation with the song—scraping the snare, pausing in unexpected moments, increasing the volume to show you one thing and playing so quietly you can barely hear him to show you something else. He does this in a subtle way that’s always present if you “enter” the sound, get close to his percussion, listen closely, and let its meaning come to you.

White released his first solo album this year, All Hits: Memories, and it’s excellent. It’s a collection of short pieces—a series of moods or “feels”—that allows him to explore in detail the expressive possibilities of percussion. It’s an uncanny record, both intriguing from the first note and also perfect for exploring piece by piece, taking in each fragment and figuring out how it all fits together.

My favorite Jim White performance is also one of his simplest. He has recorded as Tren Brothers with Mick Turner, the guitarist in Dirty Three, and in 1998 they released a 7-inch on Secretly Canadian with “Gone Away” on the A-side and a track called “Kit’s Choice” on the flip. “Kit’s Choice” is one of those tracks that means the world to me while I wonder if anyone else knows it exists. It’s possible that I love it more because I’ve never really been able to share it with anyone. There’s music as a social practice, which is deeply embedded into the entire structure of the art form, and then there’s music as an object for solitary contemplation, which is where I’m living a lot of the time. 

For years “Kit’s Choice” wasn’t available digitally, until it found its way to the Mick Turner comp Blue Trees on Drag City, which I imagine sold a few hundred copies. And for years after that, it wasn’t available on YouTube or streaming, so I’d have to email someone an mp3 in order to discuss it with them, which I did a few times. Now you can hear it any time you like.

I thought to listen “Kit’s Choice” shortly after Steve Albini died, because I remembered how well he recorded drums, and that the single had been tracked at Electrical Audio. After I dug out my 7-inch, I discovered that while it had indeed been recorded at the studio, Greg Norman served as engineer. (Let’s assume from its sound, bold and clear with nothing extraneous, that he and Albini had discussed how to mic a trap kit at some point.)

On “Kit’s Choice,” Turner plays two chords, double tracking melodica and guitar. If you’ve read my writing, you might know where I’m going with this because I’ve written many times about the majesty of the two-chord vamp, how it traps past and future and mashes together hope and regret. It’s a structure I never tire of. I can close my eyes now and play back White’s entire drum part in my mind, the way he lurches forward and hints at accents you don’t expect while leaving out the ones you do expect, how his rimshots sound like the crack of a rifle. As it builds, everything sounds terribly alive and beautifully imperfect—sometimes it’s almost too much—as is rolls and snare hits grow louder and then, finally, fall into something like a predictable cadence. The track’s title suggests a crossroads; by the time the closing march begins, perhaps, a decision has been made, the story has taken a turn, and we follow alongside, desperate to know how it ends.