And people say I bring too many drums to gigs.

This past Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending a clinic with world-renowned percussionist, Terry Bozzio. The clinic was held at Ladue High School in suburban St. Louis, and it was standing room only. The clinic was the latest sponsored by Drum Headquarters, our local Five-Star drum shop. As always, Jim Uding and the rest of the Drum HQ crew did a great job.

Terry came out after a short performance by a student group, Ladue Percussion, and played four pieces over the course of next fifty minutes. If you've never seen Terry play live, it's really awe inspiring. It's not just the sheer size of Terry's kit, but the fact that he has a huge array of toms on his left that are tuned chromatically and an additional set of toms to his right tuned to an ionic scale and in a lower octave. This, in addition to his eight tuned kick drums and a massive array cymbals, chimes and bells, gives him a tremendous range of sound and allows him to play incredibly complex melodic sequences on the drum kit.

Also utterly jaw-dropping is Terry's independence. All the pieces he playing Wednesday night involved laying down a base ostinato on the kick drums and a varied set of hi-hat-like apparatus, and then implementing melodic lines over top of it. As Terry pointed out during the Q&A section of the clinic, he generally tries to come up with two or three melody lines per piece, and then, of course, solos in the center. And some of Terry's solos were amazing. His ability to lay down incredibly complex polyrhythmic patterns over a consistent, 4/4-feel ostinato is mind boggling. He really is a one-man percussion ensemble.

Terry's Q&A session was a lot of fun as well. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

"This instrument is uniquely American, the drum kit, and often doesn't get the credit and respect it deserves. It seems, more often than not, to get lumped in with the tambourine and the harmonica."

"Music is part of the human condition, like light. If you take the frequency of a note in an octave and increase it into the millions of cycles, it becomes a color, so it's and integral part of our lives and the universe."

"His question was, 'How much did your kit cost?' Honestly, I don't know how many pieces are there and I don't think I want to know how much it costs. I just know it was free for me." [fist pump]

Also, even though I'm sure that Terry is tired of telling it, I particularly enjoyed his telling of how he got the gig with Frank Zappa back in the early '70s. I won't recount it all here as I probably would get large portions of it wrong, but it's definitely worth hearing sometime in Terry's own words.

After the Q&A, Terry played one more piece and then did a terrific finale with three high school students on marimbas and a vibraphone. It was an amazing piece and I really have to hand it to the students who pulled off an exceptionally complicated piece. I can't imagine having played marimba like that as such an early age with Terry Bozzio pounding away right behind me. They showed tremendous poise and professionalism.

Overall, it was a great evening. I would have enjoyed some of the staple clinic kinds of activities, specifically more instruction and tips-and-tricks, as well as the meet and great afterward (Terry had been traveling all day and needed to leave immediately after the clinic), but having the opportunity to see one of the greats perform in such a small venue was terrific. Again, many thanks to Jim Uding and the folks at Drum Headquarters for continuing to bring big-name performers and clinicians to St. Louis.

Here are a few more pictures from the clinic: