Tom Teasley - Percussionist

Portraits: Tom Teasley

Not your average world-beat-spoken-word-bop-renovator, by T. Bruce Wittet for Modern Drummer Magazine

Rhythms and Rhymes of the Street

You thought you had it bad promoting your drumming.

Some day, just to build character, try to book an act consisting of a drummer and a poet. Doors close in your face. People raise an eyebrow. Yet Tom Teasley persists in his struggle and has met with success. He and actor / poet Charles Williams now have a busy concert schedule and perform in inner city Washington schools.

And that's only part of what Tom Teasley has going for him. You get a glimpse at the rest in his video The Drum: Ancient Traditions Today. At one moment he's doing a funky street beat on drums. Then he strikes the malletKAT to his right to get a dark, blossoming swell. Then it's over to a hand drum, or maybe to the roughly hammered Chinese cymbal above his hi-hat. Partly following a rough chart and partly following his instincts, he keeps you on your toes. Just when you think you've got him figured out, he pulls another rabbit out of his hat.

But don’t get the idea the Teasley is a dabbler. On the contrary, he spends time learning proper techniques and respecting the traditions of all his instruments, ethnic or otherwise. It's just that he glides around his kit, hand drums, and electronics, it looks simple and free.

Of course, that's what makes good art. Watching Tom Teasley can generate all sorts of ideas on how to make use of resources that stare us in the face. Take the snare drum, for example. He'll cross-stick it, turn the snares off and play it with his fingers like a piano, then grab sticks and do a funk beat. No instrument has a limitation for him. Once he learns the basic rules - like how to work a talking drum - he'll go off in his own direction. Give Tom a bass drum, a snare drum, and a djembé, and he'll give you part Stravinsky, part Art Blakey.

Teasley gets considerable help from drum manufacturers, academic institution, and kindred spirits. Chief among his collaborators is folk / operatic vocalist Charles Williams, fellow artist in residence at Washington's Levine School of Music. The two strike a vivid image. There's Tom in flowing white smock, his shaven head shining, and there's Charles, who could double for actor James Earl Jones.

"I have nothing up my sleeve!" thunders Williams at the outset of the duo's video Poetry Prose Percussion & Song, proclaiming righteous intentions. His partner, on the other hand, has a whole arsenal of surprises, including techniques of fingering, brushing, scraping, and sticking his drums, cymbals, and ethnic percussion.

Even if you didn't buy the poetry / drums thing initially, within a couple of minutes into their video you're hooked. It's the restraint they exercise, a control that arises from proper pacing and the knowledge of when to back off once they make a point.

Not that Tom lives by poetry alone. He has recently released a CD calledGlobal Standard Time, in which he covers Monk and other standards. Check his versions of McCoy Tyner's "Passion Dance," featuring electric guitar and trombone. Here again, Tom demonstrates his ability to inject new life into familiar themes.

Looking back, Tom reflects that his current creative bonanza probably had little to do with his stint in the Navy band. In fact, he termed it a "creative Wasteland." But it gave him daily playing experience - and enabled him to buy a house. Before that, he toddled along like the rest of us, self-taught until he got serious and took lessons with Al Merz of The National Symphony. The next step was Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory.

"After I graduated," Tom recalls, "I went on the road with Catfish Hodge. We'd tour a lot to New Orleans. We played at Tipitina's with Professor Longhair. That was a huge influence. I'd hang with Johnny Vidacovich, and we'd talk about drums. I'd watch him play every night, and I fell into that sort of thing. It wasn't on purpose, though! I was trained as a classical percussionist."

How does a classical player learn how to groove so well? Tom smiles: "It's by design that it worked out the way. I studied with Joe Morello and with Glen Velez. I would take the conceptual thing from Glen and combine it with the technical exercises I got from Joe. Right now I'm working with ride patterns on shakers, going through Alan Dawson-type exercises with the Ted Reed book."

Tom has shakers shaped like shoe polish tins, which fit snugly in his palm. "They're made out of wood, and they're flat on top and bottom," he says. "That allows me to get different colors by turning them perpendicular to the floor, flat, or somewhere in between. And they're small enough that I can cover them with my hand to muffle them. When you're playing a drum or a cymbal, you're playing one surface. With a shaker, though, you're dealing with all the areas in between, and you're manipulating the flow of gravity."

Tom is similarly casual with his electronics. He'll use stock synth sounds if he has to. "I'm using a Yamaha QY700 sequencer. I'll do a lot of manipulation with its' internal sounds. I'm interested in what would happen if, say, I sampled a frame drum and a timpani playing the same pitch - but the timpani with a mallet and the frame drum with my hand - and blended them together. I like to think that the stuff I do on electronics is an organic progression from these ancient percussion practices - just using the equipment available today."

Ultimately, electronic palettes are a means, not an end, says Tom. "It's still all about what kind of gut, rhythmic hook it's got. If it doesn't have that, then it's lost what drew me to it in the first place."

That gut feeling is what drew Tom to Charles Williams, Tom recalls, "I had heard a tape of Max Roach playing along with the Martin Luther King 'I Have A Dream' speech. I thought that it was effective. But how much more effective would it have been if they were doing it in real time and reacting with the phrasing. For a concert, we did the Martin Luther King speech 'I Still Believe.' The audience was crying. It was really moving."

Teasley and Williams perform a piece called "The Creation," featuring the poetry of James Weldon Johnson and lots of percussion, both scripted and improvised. With only one drummer to handle all the parts, it could have easily gone vaudeville. "It could have ended up being a Spike Jones thing," agrees Tom. "People immediately assume it's the quasi-beatnik thing with the bongos, but it's much more compositional. I'm reading the text. Beside the text I'll write a certain figure or style."

It means Teasley has to edit on the run. He can't beat a particular sound to death, nor can he strike blindly at his collection of instruments. As they used to say, it's all about pacing. "That's largely an influence of classical music, "Tom advises. "I try to borrow from the way composers orchestrate colors and interesting sound combinations - a gong, a triangle, or maybe a cymbal played with a mallet."

On drumset, he will frequently play with bare hands. "A lot of the drumming on my video was influenced by conga or doumbek playing, where I'm trying to exploit the nuances of the drum by virtue of how much pressure my hand is putting on the head. I use the Senegalese technique of playing with one stick and one hand, making a lot of variance of the pressure on the drum-head."

A high, bop tuning will not work, according to Teasley. "I'll tune the top heads of the drums looser. As a result, the head has more play in it, so when I'm pressing with my hand it allows the pitch to bend. I'm using Remo Renaissance heads, and they sound really natural with the other percussion." The latter includes hand drums fashioned by former clay artist Steve Wright, who also produced two of Teasley's videos.

The Levine School has recently given Tom a grant. "It's to do concerts using my eclectic approach to percussion," he says. "I'm going to co-op them with Sabian and Yamaha. The school supplies a lot of concert opportunities." Tom has hired someone to market his CD, Global Standard Time, which he places in "crossover" territory between world music and jazz. He is aware of the criticism that states that by blending the various ethnic musics, we risk diluting them. "I hear that criticism, although not leveled at me. The only thing I say is that I try to be respectful of the traditions, and combine them in a way that ultimately brings out the best of everything."

Back to that shaven head and white shirt. Is it a sign of at least a shred of religious fervor? "It almost sounds trite when I say it, but to me, drumming is my religion - or a manifestation of it. Especially the stuff I do with Charles. We do concerts in the school system, and it's very spiritual, although you might not want to denote it as such. But drumming has been part of religious traditions since the beginning of time"

Check out Tom and his CD and video releases at www.tomteasley.com, email his distributor at northcountry@cadencebuilding.com or contact Wright Hand Drum Company at (800) 990-HAND.