Mike Essoudry: Transcript
Episode Video and Podcast Mike Essoudry:
... I don't wear shoes. And really the only reason, when I started playing drums at 13, 14, and I was obviously, living at home with my parents and stuff, so we never wore shoes in the house. So, I would just go downstairs and play drums without my shoes. I didn't think anything of it. And then I had a gig. It's like, I said, "Oh great. I have a gig, I have a gig, I have a gig." So, we get the drums and you go to play. And I had my shoes on because I needed my shoes to get to the gig. So, I had my shoes on. It's like, "Oh, this doesn't feel right,, I'll just take my shoes off." And that was it. And I never wore my shoes again.
Leah Roseman:
You're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Today's episode features the fantastic drummer Mike Essoudry, who's a busy performer and composer in Ottawa, Canada, playing with many projects in the funk, jazz, and improvised music scene. He's in the funk group, Gephilte, with a previous guest of the series, Josh "Socalled" Dolgan, and in the Together Ensemble with his partner Megan Jerome. Today also marks the release of my bonus catch-up episode of Megan, in which she shares how she and Mike fell in love, as well as her new album and great advice about an important aspect of the music business as an independent artist. Her episodes are linked in the description.
This episode with Mike was unique in that he was sitting at his drum set during the entire episode, and we talked in detail about the history of the drum set and evolution of different styles of drumming. Mike demonstrated lots of intricate grooves and finished the episode with a cool little solo. He also shared stories from his childhood and talked about how in his youth, he built his drums and an intricate tree house in a park.
This series is available as a video, a podcast, and the full transcript to this interview is also linked in the description. Please consider supporting this work and get access to some unique Patreon perks, also linked.
Mike Essoudry:
You're very welcome, thank you. Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks. I'm so delighted to have such an amazing drummer to talk about the drum set. So, I thought before we got into your career and your life, if we could talk about this amazing collection of instruments. If you want to play and talk about different styles. So, a lot of people, well maybe most people, realize that rock drumming came out of jazz and that the jazz kit evolved, I mean drum set kit, evolved out of jazz music and actually swing was the dance form before bebop, which people might associate with jazz now. But the way the main pulse was kept changed over time, right? Through that evolution, in terms of time keeping which instruments were used?
Mike Essoudry:
It's hard to know what some of the older drummers played because there were not great recordings of them. What did the drummers actually do before Kenny Clarke was the main proponent of bringing the ride cymbal beat into the main lexicon of jazz drumming in the, I guess 1930s, somewhere around there. And he was like, "What are you doing?" Everybody was saying, "What are you doing? That's ridiculous. Nobody plays like that." Now everybody plays like that. So it's hard to know what was there before.
However, it's interesting going back further to how the drum set came to be. The very first genesis of that was the bass drum and the snare drum. That was the very beginning of a drum set. And that happened in the late 1800s, before the turn of century. And this still happens in New Orleans today. There were parade, like second line bands, funeral bands and stuff like that. So, there's a snare drummer and there's a bass drummer and they would play together. So, it'd be two people playing the drums and sometimes there'd be lots of other auxiliary percussion as well, like cowbells and things like that. Tambourines, lots of tambourines.
And so, it got to be that that's the way it was at that time. And then when those groups started to play for entertainment in places, two drummers took up a lot of room and it costs, it's two people that you're paying. So, what happened is they came up with the idea, if we can make some kind of pedal to play the bass drum. So, I can show you. So this enabled the snare drummer ... the snare drummer, ended up getting the gig because he had the most chops and skills on the snare. The bass drummer was ... it's not nothing, but it's not as much as the snare drummer.
So, something along these lines was made so that you could play the bass drum with your foot and then play the snare and then that is the beginning of the drum set. Make sense?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, and the research I was doing, it was interesting that the very first bands, they were actually ... one guy was hitting, so he had to play the snare one-handed and then he would reach down to his bass drum before they invented the foot pedal.
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah and I think-
Leah Roseman:
So he's pretty hampered.
Mike Essoudry:
Yes, exactly. I think the first, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the first patent for a base drum pedal was by Ludwig, fully in a full capacity. And then all the other stuff-
Leah Roseman:
And I think the snares?
Mike Essoudry:
... came along later. Cymbals were a later addition, and they were usually, if you ... Early Duke Ellington, or early Count Basie, or Chick Webb, those people, they didn't necessarily didn't have ride cymbals, but they had little Chinese cymbals, as more effects type of thing. So they had done everything on the snare drum and the base drum. Maybe, they had a little thing, it used to be ... it was called a low boy and it was a hi-hat like this that you operated with your foot, but the cymbals were on the floor so you didn't hit it with a stick. And then eventually, it came up like this.
Leah Roseman:
I was just, in terms of the hi-hat, I find it interesting because you were mentioning it, how many different ways it can be played. Maybe you can show some of those.
Mike Essoudry:
I mean, I really like the hi-hat because you can play it this, that's how you end up starting off behind the hi-hat like that. And you can play it like this as well with your foot. With your foot, you can also do these nice splashes. I don't think a lot of people ... jazz people didn't do that. So, when I'm playing that swing rhythm like this, you can hear the two and the four like this.
But other things I can do with that is, I'm pretty good with my left foot, doing things with it. So, what I do like the hi-hat sound when it's closed. So I have this other little hi-hat here, and then you sometimes will have a bigger one over here it's just two little closed cymbals. Maybe you can see it on the big screen. But just like this. So, I get more or less that sound of a closed hi-hat, but it also leaves this foot available to do other things.
So, if I'm playing a beat, say, so when I do that, it's not on the ride symbol, which can be a little clangy. If I still want a nice tighter sound, I can use this extra hi-hat that I have and then use my left foot to do these types of things and then have a real conversation with all of those things. That's something that I like to do a lot with the hi-hat, and then-
Leah Roseman:
I was looking up, the Zildjian, yeah-
Mike Essoudry:
Zildjian, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
The Zildjian family, because I knew they made the cymbals and I was curious about it. So, I think it's considered the oldest continuously running company, or one of the oldest in the world.
Mike Essoudry:
It is, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Because as of this recording, it's 399 years old.
Mike Essoudry:
Oh, really?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
I thought it was even older than that. I thought it was over 400. I thought they had actually celebrated their 400th.
Leah Roseman:
1623 is the year I thought but maybe they-
Mike Essoudry:
Oh, is that right? Okay, well, then I'm wrong, then.
Leah Roseman:
They're probably about to celebrate it, we're coming up to 2023. So, it's interesting because-
Mike Essoudry:
That's a long time, privately held, still privately held, family held.
Leah Roseman:
So when they came to the US, they moved the company from Turkey. I understand that they reached out to Gene Krupa to see, "What do you want?" and that he helped develop some of the cymbals. But then I also heard that when Ringo Starr played on the Ed Sullivan show with the Beatles, because people saw that logo, they saw the Zildjian, there was such a rush to order, they had to build another manufacturing plant.
Mike Essoudry:
Right, okay, sure.
Leah Roseman:
Because they couldn't make enough cymbals.
Mike Essoudry:
And it was the same with ... He used Ludwig drums and it was the same thing with Ludwig drums. Everybody wanted to play drums. And it's like, "Okay, well let's get to work on these drums here."
Leah Roseman:
I think Ringo and a lot of rock drummers used two bass drums, is that right?
Mike Essoudry:
Not Ringo. He never did but-
Leah Roseman:
Not Ringo, okay.
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah. Some of the early jazz drummers experimented with that. I don't really know if it's a thing that was used well. It looks pretty great, it's a pretty ... Wow, two bass drums. It looks, it's a pretty nice, incredible looking thing like two bass drums.
Personally, I've never really, for the type of music that I like to play, I've never really understood the need for two bass drums. There's a whole genre of speed metal drummers and thrash drummers, and they use two bass drums and they play them very, very, very fast. Very fast. And that's that music, that's the way that goes. And that's not my music, but that is a total thing and they've spent a lot of time getting that quick. I tried one time, for maybe a few months, a long time ago, to do that. I had an idea for a jazz speed metal idea, but it hinged on me being able to play speed metal and I couldn't do it. I just couldn't get the bass drums that fast as I had in my mind. It's like, "Oh, that'll be really neat." Anyway, didn't happen. Still there in my mind. But anyways, yeah, maybe one day.
Leah Roseman:
The tom-toms, they're tuneable, right?
Mike Essoudry:
Yes, they are. Yep.
Leah Roseman:
So how many tom-toms do you usually use in your kit?
Mike Essoudry:
I use this floor, it's called a rack tom, they call it a rack to, or a tenor tom sometimes they call it. And then on this is a floor tom, but that's two toms. This is of the minimum, second to last minimum. And then from here, I'm sure you've seen pictures, but there are drum kits with bajillions of tom-toms, lots of floor Toms like racks and racks and racks and racks and racks of tom-toms. Very small ones to very large ones, gong drums.
Leah Roseman:
It came from China, right?
Mike Essoudry:
The sonority of a tom-tom came from ... Yes, you're right. There were these little drums. They were looked almost like ... a little like Kodo drums. And there were about this big and they were had this kind of bowed out shell and it ... it might have been a snake skin or something like that on the top. And they were tacked into the side. And again, those were more of a novelty type of thing that was added on to the snare and the bass, like the Chinese cymbals. It's interesting that that's a theme.
And then they evolved from there to the more of how a snare drum worked and how a bass drum worked. With the tuning systems and stuff like that, I don't think that those Chinese or Japanese drums were tuneable. I don't think they were. Whereas these ones, the modern tom-toms are tuneable, going back for quite a ways now, but they've been tuneable.
Leah Roseman:
How often do you adjust the tension on them? Or do you have to?
Mike Essoudry:
I adjust them ... it depends. It depends on the music that I'm playing. For example, when I play with Megan, I'll generally tune them lower. All the drums will be tuned lower, just to get more of a ... because it's not as ... what I play in that isn't as busy or is not necessarily as detailed sometimes as some of the other things that I play. So, the lower tuning helps the sound of the band. It helps support the whole thing. And if I'm playing something that's a bit more detailed where I'm doing more things, I'll have them tuned up a little higher. So, that will come out a little easier.
Leah Roseman:
A lot of people listening are listening to the podcast version and they're not seeing anything and just the sound of ... if you could isolate the sound of those two tom-toms you have and just do a little solo with those, just so we can hear that beautiful sound.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay, well here's the floor tom. Here's the tenor tom.
Leah Roseman:
Cool, thank you. I'm curious about if you refer to your brushes as fly swatters and if you knew the history of that?
Mike Essoudry:
So, these are the brushes here like this and they're retractable stuff like this, so that can ... There's a few reasons for that you can ... Or so that they don't get wrecked, you pull them in like this, so they're a little safer and then you can ... You can have them a little tighter like that, or you can have them a bit looser like that.
So fly swatters, yes, I guess you could say that. People refer to this as, "Okay, just beat the eggs on the snare drum." That kind of thing.
Leah Roseman:
I remember the first time I heard that sound live and it was just so magical. I just loved it. So I might be able to teach you something, Mike. They're called fly swatters because that's what they were originally developed as because it was before plastic and drummers were looking for something quieter because the instruments they were playing with at that time were acoustic.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay, that's right. That's right. Yeah, that makes sense.
Leah Roseman:
They were fly swatters,
Mike Essoudry:
And Bob Moses, he used to play with branches. He used to find branches outside of his gig and just play with branches. I like to use these things, these things actually ... they called them cajon sticks. So, they're a little softer, but they're also a little beefier too. And then, I guess the last thing, the main thing that a lot of drums will use is mallets like this. So, this gives you the ... it's more of a classical type of thing, so you have ... you get that more orchestral type of possibility in play. So, you'll play that in ballads. Ballads I like to do that in. But also some other things too, if you're maybe a groove or something like ...
You get lots of different possibilities that you can ... Drums are very interesting in the sense that ... Somebody asked me once, I have these students, he's a drummer and he was an ensemble coach and I had this drummer. And he keeps saying, "No, I don't have to learn any of that. I don't have to learn any harmony or melody. I don't have to learn any of that stuff. I'm a drummer." And then he says, "What should I say to him because you know all that stuff." So what I said is this is like, "Okay, you owe it to all the people you play with because every instrument, there's three things." So there's rhythm, there's harmony, and there's melody. You play violin. So you have melody for sure, and rhythm, for sure. You know all those things and you know and the harmony. The ones that you play explicitly are melody and rhythm, for sure. Piano, you got it all, you have the rhythm, you have the melody, you have the harmony explicitly happening, same with guitar. So if you're playing clarinet, for certain, it's a melody explicitly, rhythm explicitly.
What about the drums? I only have one. There's only one. So, you're only doing a third of what everybody else is doing. You should know something. You should know a little more. Everybody else knows more than the drummer does in a way. So, it behooves you for sure, to know that stuff. And it definitely helps you play in things. If you understand form and you understand a song length, and you do understand melody and how harmony is working, you'll definitely understand drums better and you'll be able to participate in the music better.
So, if you listen to anything with drums in it, the drums could be just playing anything, regardless of the music. If it's just you're playing in four four, but the drums should reflect what's happening, or certainly not get in the way. And the drums are supposed to support and help the music along. And you can't know that, or you can, but it's certainly helpful if you know the song and you know the harmony and how it all works and the form of the tune, to do that if you know that.
Leah Roseman:
Jesse Stewart was a guest of the series earlier, last season, and he started as a jazz drummer, but now does different things. But I asked him if jazz drummers need to know all the chord changes. And he said, "Well, you can get away with it, but you really want to." That's basically the same answer.
Mike Essoudry:
And you can tell, I can tell, I could tell when the drummer ... Yeah, no, you don't know that tune.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering, Mike, when you've been teaching, do you find sometimes students they get lost to the count, if they're doing a 36 bar, they don't know which bar they're on? And do you have tips for that?
Mike Essoudry:
Know the melody of the tune? Know the melody of the tune. You can count. You can count. And I'll be the first to admit I'm a terrible counter. I'm a terrible counter. I should have done this probably more is when I was coming up, is just to do more counting. But I don't know, I just doing my own thing. Experimenting and improvising and all that kind of stuff. So counting, yeah, I kind of know, I kind of know. And it's like, "Oh." But it would be ... You don't have to, you don't have to but you should ... I'm a better counter now. But if you know the melody, that takes care of it for you. In a jazz perspective, it's like, okay, well, if you have a 32, 36 bar tune, say All The Things You Are is a 36 bar tune, and there are three, four melodies that happen in it.
So there's an eight bar section, an eight bar section, another eight bar section, and then a 12 bar section, which is the first section. So, if I know that melody, I'm not going to get lost in that tune. Even if I'm playing, I can actually start to go quite out on that playing because I know the melody.
There's another one called Alone Together and that's a tune, it's AABA, or AABC, where the As are 14 bars. And then the B section is eight and then the C section is eight. So, 14 is an odd number in terms of feeling things. But if you know the melody, no problem.
You know what's interesting, because you're talking about counting and everything? One thing difference about the drums, so for example, and lots of other instruments, is that we're playing all the time. Is there ever a 32 bar rest what I'm doing? Or a 33 and a half bar rest? No, if I'm playing, I'm playing. You would come by that many times, like seven bars ...
Mike Essoudry:
You would come by that many times, like seven bars, rest here. You play for three bars, and then there's 17 bars of rest or something like that. It's like, yeah, you got to count all that. But if it was me, I'm playing through all of that stuff. Well, there's the violins. Okay, so they're there. It's a different thing, playing the drums, in that regard. I just did a session this weekend for an album, and I'm playing all the time.
The horn players will play the head. Somebody will do a solo, and then they'll stop for a few minutes, until they come back in again. But I'm playing all the time. So it's like, yeah. I don't have to count because yeah, I'm playing all the time. The notes are going by. So, it's a little different that way for drums.
Leah Roseman:
Could we talk about Latin grooves?
Mike Essoudry:
What do you want to know about Latin grooves? I don't know. I would say I'm okay at Latin grooves. There's a few common ones, like bossa novas are... a basic bossa nova is this.
That's a very basic one. Then there are variations of that. If I'm playing a fast bossa nova, there's a lot of bass drum that happens in there. So, I like to take some of those out. And this. Do this at 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.
Or the other way around. One. So it's interesting there too. One of the other things, that's a more Brazilian type of groove. But there is a few different claves, and they're usually described as three, two claves, or two, three claves. So say a three, two son clave would be this. 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.
And the three and the two come from, there's three notes in the first bar and two notes in the second bar. So it's like 1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, sorry. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2. And there is a two, three song clave, which is just the opposite. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4. And then there is a rumba clave, which is, there's a two, three rumba clave and a three two rumba clave. So they're very similar, it's just the third note of the three is pushed again to the end of four. So it is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4 and 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. And then the other 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4, and 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, and 3, 4 and one, like that.
A lot of times, there's going to be a percussionist as well, there'll be drums and a percussionist. Now admittedly, I don't play a lot of Latin music, a lot of straight ahead Latin music, but I'd like to play some of those grooves though sometimes. So what I end up doing, and I actually do find this quite helpful in playing those grooves, is I play the clave with my left foot. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. So what I'll do is, I'll play a groove with that clave going, and I'll try and make it so that you can hear that maybe a little bit better as I go.
So the one, where's one? One. All right. That's the clave there, and then you can improvise around that clave. So I've been finding it easier to improvise around that clave by learning to play that clave there and play around with it.
Leah Roseman:
There's so much amazing independence happening, its so inspiring. I'm curious, I've often heard really great jazz drum solos because you guys are keeping this groove and I feel like it's almost to help all the other musicians keep track of where they are. But then often in the solo, I sometimes lose the one because it gets displaced. You know what I mean?
Mike Essoudry:
Yes. But you can lose yourself too. It's easy to lose yourself sometimes. And so you can start a cycle of things and think, "Oh, I lost the one here somewhere." Sometimes that happens to me. And sometimes you have to be careful because, particularly, if you're playing with a band and the band has stopped playing and you're soloing, and then you want to do your stuff, but you have to make sure that everybody else knows where you are. If you're the saxophone player, you're trying to count through this drum solo that's happening and you just doing all kinds of stuff. Drummers can get really out there and there's a lot that's available and there's a lot that you can get lost on for sure. If you start mixing meters, if you're playing swing, say you're playing in a triplet type of thing, you can start off playing some triplets or some swing eight notes and stuff.
But then, you might switch into some 16th notes, straight 16th notes into that pulse, and then mix them around. Mix around the triplets and the 16th notes and then it can get really swim-y as to where the time is. The drummer might know exactly where it is, but if it starts to get weird with everybody else, it's like, okay. If you start playing poly-rhythmically, orchestrating poly-rhythmically across certain things that imply a different pulse, if you get sidetracked by that pulse, then you're toast, then you won't know where the one is, particularly if you're trying to follow along. So I prefer this. I generally prefer this, is when somebody plays over my solo. So if I'm taking a drum solo, I prefer it if somebody is playing.
Because this is, and I thought about, just the other day, why I like this. Because if you're a horn player and you're taking a solo, you get a chance to stop. You can stop, just take a bar. It's like, okay. And then come back in. Collect yourself and stuff. If you're playing a drum solo by yourself in the middle of a song, you stop for a bar, what happened? The song, is it over? Is the song done? You just can't. So if somebody's playing, just the bass player is playing a groove with me, I'll ask him, please keep playing. So it affords me that possibility that I can stop as well. Plus, I get to play on the tune. I get to play on the song rather than just play drums. Do you know what I mean? Everybody else is playing, gets the luxury of playing. Oh, I get to play with everybody and then I get to play with nobody. That's not fair. I want to play with somebody.
Leah Roseman:
That's super interesting. Yeah. You mentioned poly-rhythms. So I imagine you play two against three a lot and probably three against four. Are there other cross rhythms that...
Mike Essoudry:
I use a lot.
Leah Roseman:
Habitually?
Mike Essoudry:
Well, I would not straight up in... I will use groupings, for example. I'll use sort of a five note grouping in 16th those, or in triplets. So meaning that if my favorite one is to do... So there's five notes, and there's two of them, so that's five. So that's right, left, right, right, base. And then I would do the other way, so starting with the left. So there's two, five, no patterns.
Right? So then if I think about that, it says four, four, and as 16th notes. So it's a poly-rhythm, but it's a grouping poly-rhythm. So that's in 16th notes, but I could do the triplets. So you can get nice different things. And those are the types of things that I end up doing a lot. And there's a seven one that there's like... So that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
So it's sort of poly-rhythmic, but it's not quite a straight up poly-rhythm. So that would've been a seven against four type of idea. And the other one was five and three or five and four type of polys, but three and two all the time. All the time. All the time. All the time. And definitely different groupings and phrases. Groups of... Say if you have a four bar phrase, so you have 16, assuming four, four, so you have 16 beats, there's a number of ways that you can subdivide those beats. So you have quite a long poly-rhythm, so your or grouping. So I would, 3, 3, 3, 3 and two and two at the end to make the thing. So its sort of poly-rhythmic, it's a long poly-rhythm in a way, because over the three bars of four, you'd have four bars of three or four groups of three in that longer phrase. A classic example of this would be sort of like a second line beat. And this would be more like a 16th note groupings in one bar, be something like this. Put the eight knots there, or make the quarter notes.
Make sense? Da, da, da, da.
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Mike Essoudry:
Da, da, da. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, drop. Make sense?
Anyways, so playing in four, but playing those groups of three in those fours. So that's how I do poly-rhythms. And there are people who do a lot of this, and there's somebody I knew who has a book, his name is Peter Maguedini, and he has a well regarded book on poly-rhythms. I don't know the book.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I’m an independant podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce this series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter starting at 3 dollars Canadian (which is close to 2 dollars US or 2 Euros) and getting access to unique perks! The link is in the description. Now back to the episode!
You wrote a book, you wrote a drum manual, like a pedagogy book?
Mike Essoudry:
Well, it's a book of beats, basically. There's lots of beats in there, and there are some other things in there and some ideas about how you can make your own beats, and different counters and stuff that you can play your own beats. I think it's good for getting some tools together to play anything that you want to play, and it builds your tools for improvisation in that context, I think. That's what think it's good for.
Leah Roseman:
What motivated you to write it? It must have taken a long time.
Mike Essoudry:
Particularly for beginning drum students, I'd be writing out basic drum beats. I'd be writing them many times. I said, "Okay, well maybe it'd be good if I had them in a way that I can, okay, I've got a bunch of them so I can just give the student..." I'm not thinking about, oh, well then all these beats, all these beats. And then there's this idea and then there's this idea. So it just sort of went in like that. So there isn't a lot of descriptions or anything, it's just lots of beats and different things that you can do with those beats. It can be for anyone. It can be for anyone. But one thing I do... I am definitely starting to realize now is, the importance of... And as a classical violinist, what you've learned is repertoire.
Right? Now, for drums, it's a funny thing because what's the drum repertoire? What is that? What's the drum set repertoire? How many songs could I... Probably zero, that I could just, okay, I know the drums for that song. That would be probably zero, that I would know. I could play many, many, many, many tunes, but do I know any of them off by heart to play on the drums? The answer would be probably no. There's good sections that I know like maybe Tom Sawyer by Rush, or what are some other ones that I might know? But not all of them, parts of them, not all of them. And that could be just me. The way that I've approached the drums in my life. I like to improvise and I like to do those types of things. I can hear them, I can transcribe all those things too. But do I know them off by heart? I would have to say no, almost none. I know bits of stuff. If I was to ask you how many tunes would you know off the top of, that you memorized?
Leah Roseman:
Not a lot.
Mike Essoudry:
Not a lot? Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.
Leah Roseman:
Because I'm not a soloist, right?
Mike Essoudry:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
So for soloists, that's their priority.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay. And so you're probably a phenomenal reader. You're probably a fantastic reader.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Mike Essoudry:
I'm a terrible reader. I get so into my own things and it's like, oh no, what was that thing that I just did? I want to do that again. I was like, "Oh no. Oh, that's bad." So yeah, it's not that I can't read, it's not my strong point for sure.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking about that because, when you're doing all your demos, my default is to try to picture it. Right?
Mike Essoudry:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm trying to write out in my head, which is hard to do, but that's just the way my brain operates, which is very restrictive. Another aspect of drum playing which I find interesting is the history of drummers being Foley artists. And for radio, for silent movies, apparently when the talkies were developed, thousands and thousands of drummers were put out work because it was a big part of what they did was do all these sound effects. And you'd mentioned the Lugwig company earlier. And one thing I ran into with my research is they had all these different noise makers for this purpose. And one of them was the nose blowing sound, like when someone has to blow their nose.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay. All right. I don't know that one, but.
Leah Roseman:
Certainly an orchestra.
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
My percussion colleagues often have to make sounds, sound effects. But have you run into that in your career? In the studio?
Mike Essoudry:
No, not really. Not me. Not me. It's a thing, for sure. And you're right, percussionists do that a lot. Because I think percussionist generally are dealing with really intangible types of sound. Do you know what I mean?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
I don't know. A chord on a piano sounds great, a beautiful note on the violin sounds great. I'm just hitting a piece of metal with a piece of wood. Really? How does that sound great? But when they do sound good, it sounds really nice. I don't know why. Drums, is this an empirically nice sound? I don't know. It's a very intangible thing, what the appeal of drums is. And you certainly know that they're not there, but when they're wrong, boy oh boy, do you ever know as well?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
But back to the Foley, you're hitting a cymbal and you're trying to find all the different sounds that you can make from a cymbal. Or with a bow or something like that, there's different cymbal sounds that you can make. And out of Toms and stuff... This is a good one.
Oh, it sounds like whale music or something. So that's the type of Foley sound. So drummers are good at finding these sounds to hit anything in this. Oh, that's a good sound. I could use that for something.
Leah Roseman:
Have you done the hand... Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
Hand percussion? Not so much. Not so much. That's a whole thing. It's a whole other... You start to, the more you get into those things and say, "Oh, do this, do this, do this. But when you dig into it more, it's like, oh, there's a real thing to this. People ask me, "Can you play tambourine on this track? Just put some tambourine on the..." I don't know. I mean, people who play tambourine well, it sounds great, and I'm not one of those people. You try and, it's hard. It's hard. And you think it's going to be really easy, but it isn't. It isn't to make it sound really good. And I like to stay away from that because it's like, ah, I feel like I'm sort of disrespecting that tradition by doing that. Does that make sense?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And the listeners might be interested to know, I'm going to be having a couple of different hand percussionist soon on the series, different styles.
Mike Essoudry:
Great, great.
Leah Roseman:
Now I noticed when you play, you don't wear shoes.
Mike Essoudry:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
For the pedals. You like the feeling?
Mike Essoudry:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Is that common? Is that just one of your things?
Mike Essoudry:
I don't think it's... Yeah, I think a lot of people wear shoes. I don't wear shoes. And really, the only reason, when I started playing drums at 13 and 14, and was obviously living at home with my parents and stuff, so we never wore shoes in the house. So I would just go downstairs and play drums without my shoes. I didn't think anything of it. And then I had a gig. I said "Oh, great, I have a gig, I have a gig, I have a gig." So we'd get the drums and you go to play. And I had my shoes on because I needed my shoes to get to the gig. So I had my shoes on. It's like, oh, this doesn't feel right. Take my shoes off, and that was it. I never wore my shoes again for a gig.
Leah Roseman:
Were your parents support...
Mike Essoudry:
Were my parents supportive? Yes. Yes. Really, if you have a kid who's playing drums in your house all the time, that's supportive enough. That's fantastic, because that's a major thing. Drums are loud all the time, repetitive. The only time, my mom said to me, I was practicing a lot, Elvin Jones does this thing like this.
So I was doing that a lot. A lot, a lot, a lot. And my mom said, "Just the one time..." And this is the only time she was, "Do you think you could do just something else? Just for a little bit?" It's like, "Okay, fair enough." But that was it. Otherwise, the fact that they would let me play when I wanted to play drums in the house, that's amazing.
Mike Essoudry:
... drums in the house. That's amazing. That's a lot of support, because some parents would just... It's out of the question for you to play drums, like, "No, we don't want that kind of volume in the house." And additionally, there's lots of situations where it just can't happen, like in row houses and things like that, and I've been lucky enough and still lucky enough to have a single house. Having earth between you and the other houses is a big deal. It really cuts down the sound a lot, so I'm lucky.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering if you started with rock drumming as a kid.
Mike Essoudry:
Yep, yep, for sure, AC/DC, yep. All the stuff would've been in the mid-late '80s, but I was really into '60s music, even when I started playing drums, so into Jimi Hendrix. I was into Pink Floyd and I liked Rush and Led Zeppelin and those big bands. Yes, I liked as well. I liked a lot of those bands, for sure, and I listened to them all the time. The first gigs I played were blues gigs, actually, shuffles and stuff like... I play a lot of shuffles. Stuff like that.
And that was fun. And those, actually, were really helpful in a jazz sense because I am actually playing that triplet type of field and I'm also getting really used to hearing form as well. At that time, I wasn't studying piano or any of that stuff, but I was playing a lot of blues music, so it had a certain form to it, a certain pattern, four bars, four bars, four bars. Certain breaks would happen at certain times. I was like, "Okay," and I started to really get that into my ears.
So all of that was really helpful in knowing where you are in a tune, and particularly in a blues thing at the time, and then later on, in jazz, to hear progressions, 2-5-1s, cycle progressions, and hear those things as you're... Understand, okay, here's one. That's the sound of the one chord. All right, here we are again, here we are again, and it's the last two bars of this section, and we'll go back to the top. So those were all really, really helpful things in feeling comfortable hearing chords, hearing harmony that way, knowing where the tonic chord is, the one and the five, particularly those types of things, early on.
Leah Roseman:
Nowadays, they have these electronic drum pads that people might get for their kids so that they don't really make any noise. What do you think about people starting on that sort of kit?
Mike Essoudry:
I always think that they're a substitute. I always think that it's a substitute for drums, really, in the end. If I happen to, I hope it never happens, but a situation where I can't play drums in the house and I need something to practice and play, yes, I could deal with it, but at the same time, I do know what this feels like, an actual acoustic drum set, how it feels, how infinite it is, and how dynamic it is. I can fill in the blanks, as it were, with an electronic kit, if I'm playing it.
There's always a delay. There's a slight, slight, slight delay, but when you hit the pad and when the electric sound comes back to you, always, even the best ones, there's a delay. That's the danger, because it's like if you're playing a violin and it sounds a half a second later than you actually play it. How do you negotiate that? You might be able to do it now, but you certainly can't learn the violin that way. Do you know what I'm saying? So it's-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
Starting on them is difficult, I'd say, just having an acoustic drum set, because the other thing is that they're infinitely sensitive. I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this on electronic drums. It can't be done.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You had talked about second line, and I know from my conversation with Megan that you guys have visited New Orleans a lot, and I know you've played a lot of that music. So that tradition of marching bands, also in different contexts in American culture, we don't have that in Canada.
Mike Essoudry:
No.
Leah Roseman:
No, because there aren't school marching bands, really, so I think a lot of kids might lose out on the chance to try drums because of that.
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah, yeah. It's in New Orleans, definitely, for sure. But even when you go to any of those major, major universities in the US, there's a huge marching band. There is some kind of cheerleading band. You can get a scholarship to play snare drum in one of those bands. Seems unheard of, but yeah, you can. But New Orleans, it's a fantastic tradition. Have you ever been to New Orleans?
Leah Roseman:
I have not.
Mike Essoudry:
It's, wow, something else. It's something else. It's not like any city I've ever been to. There's just music all over the place. It's just so rich. It's so rich in music and heritage and food and it's wild. It's great. I totally recommend it. If you only go to see one thing in New Orleans, go to a second line on Sunday from about... It's from about noon to 4:00. Go to that. It's fantastic. It's like, wow. You've never seen anything like that in North America, for sure.
I mean, I had run a marching band for a while, and it was called the Mash Potato Mashers, and this was back in 2010 till 2012 or so, and it was inspired by that music, by that, and other... And when I started just investigating this marching music and stuff, I was like, "Oh, there's traditions of this all over the world." In Eastern Europe, there's a really big Serbian brass bands, and there's a whole festival called the Guča Festival, and it's brass bands, and they play a certain style of brass band. It's incredible, it's amazing, so I took some of that. I took some klezmer type of music that I really enjoyed, the sound of that music, and also, there's a bit of mobility in that as well, some New Orleans stuff, where's there's lots of mobility, and just a bunch of other things.
And that was really fun. That was a really, really fun thing to do, and just finding out all kinds of... In India, there's a big tradition of it as well, and you start to find there's all kinds of traditions of that. There's one in Mexico, it's Banda music, and this was so interesting to... And there was tubas in this music. I said, "Well, where did this come from? Where did tubas in Mexico come from?" "In the 1850s." "Really? Okay, all right." So apparently, there was a German migration in the mid-1800s from Germany to Mexico, some large group.
But they brought instruments, and then, you know how that works, so people come to different countries and they start exchanging their heritage and their cultures and stuff, so Germans would have a polka type of thing and Mexico would have their own thing, and then they all come together, and then you've got this thing that happened, so there's tubas and brass bands in Mexico with their own thing entirely. It's like, oh, wow. That's incredible, how that happens. So yes, I love that music, and it always has a special place for me. I love every time I hear that type of marching music or Balkan music or klezmer music. I'm a closet clarinet player. I love to play the clarinet, not that I'm very good at it. And those are the sounds that I really gravitate to, like klezmer types of clarinet, those types of Eastern European sounds, odd times, things like that, in the way that they would play odd time music.
To me, those are the odd times that are the most resonant, because they're real in the sense that they're based on dances. It's not an academic type of thing, so when they were playing in seven or they're playing in 11, it's real. There's a dance, there's a whole thing around it, it's got a name, and the song has a title, and it's about something that happened a thousand years ago, and there's a very specific dance that happens to it, and it's in 11. That's just the way it is. Somebody I knew, or know, who was from that region of the world, came to Canada and she had a hard time, apparently, playing in 4/4, because that's not the music that she knew. She knew odd time things. It's like, oh, no, it doesn't feel right, it's too even.
Leah Roseman:
I was just curious. Your parents were immigrants to this country and I was curious if either of their musical traditions was stuff you were aware of or heard growing up?
Mike Essoudry:
My dad played classical guitar, and that's Spanish guitar, I think. He liked Segovia and John Williams and those people, Segovia, in particular. And he would play, and he was pretty good, but there's a tonality of that type of music that is very Spanish influenced as well, particularly the stuff that he liked to play. And my dad was from Morocco, French and Jewish. It's a big story.
But yes, I would hear him play guitar, and I would see him play guitar as well, which I do also think is really important, for kids to see people playing music. You can listen to all kinds of music on a stereo and stuff like that, but it is people playing it some. That's a really important thing, is to... up close, to see people playing music, oh, this is the drums, the guitar, and stuff like that, and singing as well, guitar and singing, oh, this is it, this is where it actually comes from. And then, they would have to figure out, "Well, how does it get from there to the thing that I listened to in the box? How does that happen?"
So my dad wasn't necessarily involved in any of the music stuff that I was doing. I would just hear him. I don't think he really liked me playing the drums, but anyway, I played the drums. And he didn't really play a lot of this type of music in the house either, any kind of Jewish music or any kind of North African music at all, but that's the music that I'm... or Jewish music, for that matter. But I'm always gravitated to that music. Those are his roots. I never heard him play those things, but somehow, that's the music I'm really gravitated towards. I don't know how that works, but it just... I've never been there, but somehow, that is the music that I'm gravitated the most towards, so I don't know how that works.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious, yeah, when I asked about hand percussion, because of that music is a lot of hand percussion, if you'd experimented with any of those.
Mike Essoudry:
No, no, not so much. I hear them, and then I try to adapt things to the drum set from those things. A lot of times, and particularly the more traditional musics or music of those regions, there isn't a drum set. There's a lot of hand percussion, so if I'm trying to make something with those types of things, I'll say, "Ah, there's a sound, there's a vibe, but there's something in here that I could add in here as a sound."
Leah Roseman:
Could you show a little bit of that, how you did that?
Mike Essoudry:
Some people who (music). There's all kinds of things that you can do with this. There's this sort of tabla sound. (music) You can try some stuff. There's lots that you can do, that you can translate onto the drums. There has this pesky metal rim, so you whack your fingers quite a bit, and I'm getting a little older now, so that kind of... oh, I can't really do this anymore. Anyway, but yes, there's a wealth-
Leah Roseman:
But you are using your hands.
Mike Essoudry:
Yes, for this demonstration only.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah, there's tons that you can do, and then you're going to have to feed in. So it sounds a bit like frame drums, you can get that sound, or sometimes you can get a bit of a darbuka-y sound, but definitely frame drums. There's a lot of that, that happens. There's a big tradition of that in North African music as well, frame drums. And now, you've got me interested in that. I got to work on this a bit more so I come up with some ideas for some of the groups I'm working in, so it's cool.
Leah Roseman:
I noticed on your YouTube channel, you had a playlist of North African music that you liked.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay, yes. There's particular instruments that I really, really enjoy. Ngoni is one. I love that instrument. It's almost like a kora, but it's a little different. It's a little warmer than a kora. And neys, as well.
And then, in Morocco or Algeria, there are these large groups of people that have these big castanets, and they're like... But there's this rhythm that they play, and I still don't actually know what that rhythm is. It's sort of at an overall four pulse, but the subdivision of inside, I can't tell what it is. Is it fives, or is it quintuplets, or is it some kind of rhythm and septuplet, or a sextuplet inside? But it's just like (sound effects).
And then, there's the singing overtop, and then a ney, and this is really intoxicating, kind of what is that, what is that? It's so amazing. I mean, there's a whole continent of music there that is unknown in so many ways, and it's rich and deep and it's really worth exploring, for sure, for sure. I always find something amazing anytime I listen to that music, for sure.
Leah Roseman:
I was curious, Mike, if you were willing to consider sharing your father's immigrant story, because it's pretty interesting?
Mike Essoudry:
Sure. My dad was born in Morocco and he was Jewish, born in Morocco in, I guess it'd be 1937, Jewish, born in Morocco. He spoke Spanish as his mother tongue in the house, and Hebrew as their religion. And it was a French colony, so he would've gone to school in French, so he knew three languages early on. He was definitely exposed to those languages early on. And World War II, I mean, Morocco was almost bombed, I think, or probably bombed a little bit by Germany in World War II, and he remembers that. He remembered that, for sure.
And then, his dad died fairly young, and he had eight other brothers and sisters, and the mom, so they decided, "Okay, well, it's kind of too hard here, so let's go to France, we can move to France," and lived there, so they moved there, and he was about 16 at the time, and that was fine and he was going to school then. Algeria was a French... I guess, I don't know what you'd call them at the time, protected or a colony or something. I guess it was still a French colony, and so, there was an uprising in Algeria to be independent, and France was trying to quash that uprising, and so, they were sending people to fight, and my dad was eligible to go and do that. But he said, "I don't want to do that. Let them have our country." He didn't want to go and fight for that, but he would've been conscripted.
So he found a way to not go. I think he was able to not have to go because he was in school. And then, I think after that, he decided that, "Okay, well I'm going to go to Israel. That's my history, that's my religion, so I'm going to go there," so he was there for quite a while. And I think that's probably where he learned English. He learned English in Israel. That was the last language that he learned. And that's where he met my mom, in a kibbutz, in Israel, I guess in the, what would it have been, mid '60s. That was a thing to do, I guess. It was a thing to do, to go to a kibbutz. And so, there's many, many traditions in my dad, for sure. My mom is Danish, from Denmark.
My dad, he delved a lot into history later on, so he was always interested, "Okay, where's the Spanish from?" So I think at one point, Spain kicked out a lot of Jews from Spain, and I guess a bunch of them... I guess they scattered, but a number of them went to Morocco because it was just across the Straight, and it just stuck. They just kept speaking Spanish in the house, and that was probably in the 1500s, I guess.
So my dad fought in the war of '67 in Israel, and then they came to Canada, because my dad, at that point, he had French and English, and he was an accountant, so he was like, "You are a..." And they wanted to move. I mean, they were pregnant. They had my sister, who's three years older than me, so they had her, so they decided, "We're staying together." A bit of fire and ice, but anyway, that's okay. Well, my dad didn't want to move to Denmark and I don't think my mom really wanted to move to another country in Europe, so they said, "Well, let's..." My dad really wanted to go to New York, I guess, because maybe in those times, he maybe didn't really know about Canada so much.
But they suggested, "Move to Canada, you'll have opportunity right away. Because you have this professional degree and you speak French and you speak English, you'll be fine in the federal government of Canada. You'll do great." So I guess they thought about it and said, "Okay, let's do this. Let's go to Canada. Let's go to this place in Canada." My dad didn't like the cold. I'm sure he didn't like the cold so much. Coming from Israel and Morocco, I'm sure he didn't appreciate the winter so much. My mom did. She liked them, does still. But yeah, it is an interesting history, for sure, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Mm-hmm. Did you learn your skill in carpentry from him, or was there someone who taught you that?
Mike Essoudry:
I don't really know. My dad did stuff, for sure. I never did any of it with him. I was too young at the time when he was doing it, and by doing it, I mean just doing the basement of our houses and stuff like that. I was really into Lego as a kid. I would make Lego and stuff and I would make my own things. I'd make my own vans and rigs and houses and stuff, and I would come up with all kinds of things, trains. I would have a little motorized Lego...
Mike Essoudry:
... come up with all kinds of things. Trains, I've had a little motorized Lego train. This was rare at the time. Lego was a little different. This was in the, I don't know, '80s, I guess. Early '80s. '70s, early '80s, it was different.
My mom was from Denmark, so she would go and get the real stuff from Denmark, from Legoland. I had all the interesting stuff. You could get it in North America at the time, but it was limited.
I had space Lego, and I had train sets, which never even came over here, Lego train sets. I'd make these things and little villages and towns and stuff, with the train and stuff, you know.
And my space Lego, I would make different things where I would make a little van with the thing, or I'd make an 18 wheeler, a model 18 wheeler and stuff. I would just make those things by myself. They weren't models that they had instructions to make it, I just made them myself.
When I was 14... I had always wanted a tree house. I had always, always wanted a tree house, but we never really had a tree to make one in. So then we moved to this place, this townhouse one time, and then, and out the back, it backed onto this NCC creek, and there was a huge tree.
It was just a big, it was just on the top of the crest of the valley going into the creek. This big tree, it must have been four feet in diameter, big maple tree. Just went straight up in one big trunk, and then it just opened up like a hand, like this, at about 25 feet above the ground.
At some point somebody had put stairs up there, nailed in pieces of wood up the thing, but it was high. I was like, "Whoa, that's high." So I said, "All right, I'm going to do it." So I went up there, I said, "I'm going to make a tree house right here." Because it was really close to my house too, to where I was living.
I got to make a tree house here. There was a lot of construction going around in the neighborhood, so I'd sneak a piece of wood here and there and built this tree house, or built a platform first. So I was like, "Oh wow, this is amazing."
And then I'm going to build walls. I was like, "Okay, I know how to build walls. You have a sole plate or you have a piece here and a piece there and studs in between. And then you have some wall." Where I got that idea from, I don't know, I just assumed everybody knew that.
So, all right, okay, this is what you do. And put the wall and put the wall. Put the wall. And then I said, "Oh, I'm going to make a balcony right here." This was the best part. It was so close to my house, that I could have three 50-foot extension cords and power tools in the tree house.
And it was great that my parents let me do it, so I had, not big power tools, but it was an electric drill and a jigsaw. So I would tie them to a rope, go up the tree, pull up the thing and pull up the extension cords and cut a hole in the wall. Built my balcony, so then I built balcony and then I looked around, "I'm going to build another balcony right there." So I built another one. And I had a roof with little skylights as well.
And I was 14. I don't know. I have an ability to look at something and, yeah, I know how to build that. I can build that, I can do that. And then since I started doing it, I've figured out other things like some basic wiring, plumbing, some of the more basic plumbing stuff. I don't really know where I got it from, but there it is. And that's what I make, I make a fair bit of... I built my drums, for example. These drums, I built them. I bought plywood and I-
Leah Roseman:
Really?
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
That's fascinating.
Mike Essoudry:
Maybe you didn't know that. Yeah. All the drums I play, except for my snare drums, but all the drums I play are drums that I've built. I built them about, I don't know, almost 25 years ago now, I built all these drums. So I don't know. Again, it's one of those things that I just assumed that everybody knew how to do this stuff.
Oh, well it turns out that not as many people know how to do this stuff as I thought. Rob Frayne is a terrific musician in town, and he was doing some renovations on his house. I actually learned quite a bit there. He probably recognized it in me that I said, "Oh no, you know how to build stuff. You know how to build. You just look at something. It's like, okay, you do this, this, this, this, and this."
So he would just say, "Okay, go do this." Okay. So I would just do it. And it was great because I learned a lot about say like hanging doors on door jams and putting in windows and things like that, putting up drywall, all those types of things. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You strike me as a very intuitive learner.
Mike Essoudry:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
With your music and other things.
Mike Essoudry:
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. That's what makes me... I often think, should I teach more? And I'd have to admit that I didn't necessarily learn that way. I did take some weekly lessons and stuff, but they were really, and I did learn from them, but there are things that don't necessarily jive with how I like to learn, and those types of weekly lessons. I just learned a lot about drums and building drums and I don't know, I think maybe the first thing I did when I got drums is I took them apart. How are they put together? I put them back together. That's how they work.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Mike Essoudry:
I'm that type of person. Visual as well. All right, okay, well how do you make round things? And then I built my own tools to make them, and it's just a sort of thing that I just figured out how to do. And I do a lot of my learning that way, just figuring it out.
And it was different. This would've been in the, I guess, late nineties, so there was no internet or anything like that, but I knew that you could bend wood. I knew that. Either by steaming it or just soaking it. So that's what I did. Thanks mom for the bathtub. I cut wood and filled the bathtub and soaked out it and soaked it and soaked it in the bathtub for eight hours. And then I made molds and got special clamps. And then for gluing, I had special gluing jigs, a whole convex jig and a concave jig that would go around the outside of the drum and glue pieces together like that.
So again, I thought nothing of it. I thought it was, oh yeah, this is easy. Everybody can do this. But no. No, apparently. So this is what I do and it is my living, basically.
Leah Roseman:
Doing carpentry?
Mike Essoudry:
Doing carpentry. I wish it was music, don't get me wrong, if there's anybody out there who wants to hire me. We just recorded an album with the Atlantis Jazz Ensemble this past weekend. And then Megan's release is coming up on, Megan Jerome's release is coming up this Friday. And then I have another gig, I have another large group. It's an eight piece band. It's called Alouette Space Agency. And we have... That's a really interesting band because there's two drummers in that band. This organ...
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask you about that.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay. This organ, clavinet and Rhodes, and then two drummers, and then three saxophone players and a trombone player. So I, it's, and it's music that I'm writing for that. So that's really fun. It's really fun. The two drums is, the true drums is great. I think it's a really neat idea. And I'm trying to approach it as a way... You can approach things in a different way, like the same tune in a different way.
So I was saying, "Okay, well, I'll approach it this way, you approach it this other way, and it'll be great." It's going to end up... So for example, I guess you'll just have to imagine, but if I'm playing groove like this... On top of that, I could do this.
As long as we're both playing it in time, it's going to sound, this large big fat groove of two different possible ways to do this. You could have sticks and brushes or like if you had that groove.
And then just that basic groove on top. So this, trying to get those two different ideas to have a really thick drum set texture happening rather than drums and percussion. Two drummers, two drummers, different sounds. I try to have, my kit is tuned a bit more, probably a bit more rock, a bit more staccato and shorter in sound, and I let Michel have the more open sounding, maybe higher pitched sounding drums.
And then I think it's working really nicely, just having those two different approaches on the drum set to the music. I hear it. I hear it crystal clear. Some people are like, "What are you?"
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Mike Essoudry:
Anyway, I think it's great. Plus everybody in the band is, I've hired everybody in the band, or got everybody in the band, that has a real certain theme to what they do. Don, the organ player, his time is so good.
He's generally the person who's doing the bass function in the band. But his time is so good and his groove is so fantastic. It's like, oh, he's just perfect at that role. And Pierre has this real funky kind of clavinet thing going, perfect for this. And then the horn players, they're all my, some of my favorite horn players in Ottawa. Then they just play in a certain way. But they all play different.
So trombone is, trombone is the different one of the horns, but all three saxophone players, they're all fantastic soloists, but they all sound different. They all have their own, a really strong individual voice. And then Zach plays alto and Peter and John, they both play tenor, and they both solo, but they sound completely different. So there's never a competition. And they've all both gone their separate ways and have their different influences and stuff, and they're really deep into those. So they never sound the same. So they can solo right next to each other and it'll sound completely different.
Leah Roseman:
I heard a promotional track that you guys put out that sounds really great. I was curious because you've been involved with a lot of big bigger ensembles, which it must be fun as a drummer, but you also, you have a company, propellor dance company for many years, which must be totally different gig. And then also you have a solo drum project coming up, right?
Mike Essoudry:
Well maybe. Yeah, I experiment with that stuff before. There's a lot of sounds that you can create on the drums, some electronic ones as well. Like I have a certain way to mic the drums that I like to get a certain sound. And there's other things and definitely many, many other types of resources that you can get on the drum set. But what I wanted to do was to make maybe a suite of some kind where the structure ends up driving, the content is not necessarily, obviously not note content or harmony content, but just structural content. Get into some song forms and build music on the drum set that way as a solo instrument that way. It suggested maybe a Rondo form or something where there'd be something that you go away and you come back and you go away and come back and go away and come back. Something like that.
Yes, I was thinking about that, and I might think about that again. Generally what happens for me is I get really busy in the summer with construction and decks and all that kind of stuff, so there's almost, there's the gigs that I play and I try and practice for the gigs that I do have, but then otherwise, as far as writing and things like that go, a lot of that ends up falling by the wayside. But now, it's mid-November now, so I'm still working, but there's an end coming. So I'll be taking the winter off from construction, so that's good, and my piano is now dried out. It gets really humid down here in the summer so that my piano starts sticking and everything like that, so it ends up not being playable, but now it's playable again because it's dry again. And so I'm going to get back into writing and stuff like that, which I really enjoy doing.
You sit down at the piano and it's like, "Okay, oh, this is nice chord. That's a nice chord. These two together. All right." And then that ends up being a springboard for something. Maybe there's a third chord and then it goes that way. Or then, oh, but maybe there's this rhythm that I can vent between these two chords. And then I might get that in my mind, and then I go to the drum set, it's like, I'm keeping those chords in mind and it's, "Oh, this rhythm, this rhythm, those chords. There's my nucleus of something."
And then I start building out from that, deconstructing and rebuilding and making a tune up, making tunes out of those types of things. Sometimes it depends on what I'm writing for, if it's a large group or if it's a small, more of a small tree or type of thing. So...
Leah Roseman:
In terms of keeping in shape as a drummer, do you still do basic drills or is the playing you do enough, the gigs that you play?
Mike Essoudry:
I still do them.
Leah Roseman:
You feel like...
Mike Essoudry:
Basic ones.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Mike Essoudry:
Just basic, really, really basic ones yet. And then also, playing is important too. Like listening and playing is really important too, because you have to keep your ears, there's this, but you have to keep your ears in shape too. You definitely have to spend some, when you're learning, you definitely have to spend some time doing those things. But now I know those things. So it's a question of getting my ears and my hands working together. Sometimes if I haven't been playing in a while, there can be a disconnect there. And what's nice is that when you're in a nice practice mode, it's like the more you listen, the more you're going to get here by not even necessarily practicing. Right?
So that's a wonderful place to be at. Actually, we were talking about approximating hand percussion. That would be sort of an example of something. So this is the, that's shakers, and this might be more like playing it with more bass, and this would be...
Right? So you can approximate a different thing, but it's drum set, right? There's so many different, different, different things that you can do on a drum set. It's a really, really, and I think still evolving instrument, and how people play it. One of the interesting things is there's a lot of machine beats, like beats that producers will make on drum machines. And then drummers try and learn those.
Right? So I'm playing eight notes here, but they're behind, they're by a 60 by 60 from or something. Rather than... right? So that's more, machines would've come up with that, but it's like, that's got a certain thing to it. And then it's like, what do they sound like? It's like, oh, well that's really interesting. And then you learn those rhythms and then you go do something else with them. You know? It's kind of neat. So yeah.
Leah Roseman:
That's a beautiful, big world of sound color, you know? The drum set really reminds me of primary colors. From these three colors, you can get all the colors.
Mike Essoudry:
That's right. But the drums, if there's something wrong in the drums, people, everyone knows. Or if the vocal is wrong, it's like, ooh, everybody knows. It's like the stuff in the middle, it's, it ends up not being as offensive when those things go wrong as drums, dude.
Leah Roseman:
Well on that note, I'd like to thank you so much for your time today...
Mike Essoudry:
Oh, you're welcome.
Leah Roseman:
And all the...
Mike Essoudry:
Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
Really cool demos.
Mike Essoudry:
Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Did you want to finish off with a short solo just to put it all together? Awesome, thank you.
Mike Essoudry:
Okay. Okay, great. Well, it was, thanks for having me on the show.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed getting to know Mike Essoudry and hopefully got some new insights into drumming. I have featured a couple of different drummers and percussionists in past episodes, and many jazz artists, and I continue to have in-depth conversations with a wide variety of musicians worldwide, playing in different styles and following different paths with inspiring and unique stories from their lives.
