Rhythmic Reconnection (with Dave Smith)

I wonder, have you ever felt like your rhythm skills aren’t quite what they should be – but you really didn’t know what you could do about that?

We’ve found that typically, the rhythm side of things is massively overlooked by music learners. The basics come easily, and then we kind of forget about actually improving our sense of rhythm. So even though it’s a huge part of the difference between an “okay” performance and a really great performance, often we aren’t actually working on our rhythm skills the way we could or should be.

Today we have a mini-interview with drummer extraordinaire Dave Smith, whose approach to developing your sense of rhythm and your connection to the pulse of music is really special and really powerful. So I’m excited to share it with you.

Before we dive into today’s mini-interview, a couple of updates.

On Saturday we had our live training, “Discover Your Musical Core”, and it was so much fun. It was a big success.

We had a huge group there. I was really pleasantly delighted by how many showed up live, and, and yet it felt really intimate. And so I wanted to thank everyone who came live. That was so much fun to do that with you guys. And to have the range of people we did, from complete newbies who’d never been with us at musical u before, through members, through even some of our Next Level clients, were there with us.

And I think it lived up to the promise of really delivering something valuable for all of those groups of people. I invited people to share if they had big insights or epiphanies, and we just had a flood of them. It seemed to really land with people, and what I was most happy with was that it seemed to really bring a lot of relief and clarity to a lot of people, to better understand who they are as a musician and who they truly want to become.

That was my number one goal with the training, and it seems to have really hit home with people. So that was awesome because I was sharing for the first time some new concepts we’ve come up with at Musical U that can really just… I don’t know, it’s one of those things where once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And so this was my first time testing it with a bigger group. I’ve discussed it a lot with the team and with individuals, but this was the first time I was kind of laying it out there, and I’m happy to say it seemed to really work. It seemed to really resonate.

And that’s exciting because this is going to be big for everything we do at Musical U. It’s one of these big things like our H4 framework, that are just going to be the basis for everything we do inside membership and everywhere from now on.

So I’m super excited to share that with everyone later this month. This was kind of the behind the scenes first tester and it went well. So that’s awesome, and look out for news coming up this month about how that’s going to impact membership and how it’s going to help us to help you a lot more.

Speaking of live trainings, I’ve been sharing these mini-interviews and masterclass clips the last couple of weeks on our livestreams and our new episodes from the amazing Guest Experts we’ve had over the last 18 months or so inside membership. But I wanted to kind of skip ahead a little bit with this one because actually our most recent guest expert, Dave Smith, he’s a really high-level jazz drummer and has a particularly unique style of drumming.

But the reason we brought him in is that the way he teaches any musician to get in touch with their sense of the pulse and their sense of rhythm and their rhythmic creativity is really distinctive and particularly compatible with everything we do at Musical U in terms of rhythm. And so it was super exciting to have him come in and he has a live workshop coming up next week on Tuesday, 14th May. And so I wanted to kind of bump this one to the top of the list to give you the chance to meet Dave, hear a bit about his approach, and see whether that workshop would be of interest for you.

We’ll have the link in the shownotes. I’m going to drop it in the chat on the livestream now, which will hopefully show up as comments on Facebook and YouTube. So do check out the link.

And I asked Dave if he could set up something special for all of you in the Musical U-niverse, and he very generously set up a 30% off discount code. So just to say, if you enjoy hearing from Dave today and in the masterclass clip I’m going to be sharing this week, do check out that workshop and you can enter coupon code MUSICAL-U, all capital letters, MUSICAL-U, when you buy your ticket to get a really special pricing.

And honestly, the pricing was already remarkably low for the quality of the material he’s going to deliver and the fact that you get like lifetime access to the recording. So definitely check that out if you want to level up your rhythm and you enjoy Dave’s perspective.

Let’s dive in now to that pre-masterclass mini-interview with Dave Smith!

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Today I’m joined by UK-based jazz drummer Dave Smith. Dave is known for melding west African drum music and European jazz, and he’s had such a wide ranging career so far in the uk jazz scene and beyond. Honestly, I found it hard to know what to mention in this intro.

It includes six years with Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin in his project Robert Plant and the Sensational Shapeshifters – that was touring the world and recording two albums. And he’s actually playing on now with members of that band as the newly formed Free Four. He also plays with the Cloudmakers Trio, who just recorded at Abbey Road and in Ethan John’s band Black Eyed Dog.

He teaches workshops, classes, private lessons and has an online Rhythm Academy that now helps hundreds of musicians to dial in their sense of the groove and improve their rhythm chops.

So you can see why we’re so fortunate to have him in with us as our guest expert here at Musical U this month. He’s going to be in coaching our Next Level members this coming week, and today he’s here to present our monthly masterclass for all members on the topic of “Rhythmic Roots”.

Dave, welcome to the show!

Dave: It’s great to be here. Thank you, Christopher.

Christopher: So I’d love to start with my favourite question to ask musicians and music educators, which is: what does musicality mean to you?

Dave: Okay, musicality, it makes me, firstly, just think of connection and the, yeah, like, you know, bringing all the tools and everything you learn when you play an instrument into the moment when you, when you play, to be connected to what you’re playing and connecting to the sound and connecting. I probably mention this word “connecting” a lot, actually. But yeah, having a kind of an ability to place your sound in that moment of time that’s complementary to everything that’s going on.

That’s what first comes to mind. I could ramble on about musicality! Yeah, it makes me think of improvisation and being playful with sound and rhythm.

Christopher: Yeah, I love it.

Dave: If that’s enough to go on!

Christopher: That’s fantastic. Well, like you, I could ramble on about it for days.

So that’s a perfect answer, though. And that word “connection”, it’s a favorite of ours here at Musical U, particularly when we’re talking about performance, that being in the moment and making sure you’re connected to the music, to your instrument, to the audience, to the other musicians. It’s so critical, and I love that you highlighted that in your views on musicality.

So one thing we love about you is how you focus on that deep connection, non coincidentally, to the beat and the pulse and how the rhythm is moving and I’d love to understand… because you’re such a phenomenal drummer yourself and yet you teach these very fundamental, critical, I hesitate to say the word basics, but fundamentals of rhythm. Tell us a little bit about where you came from as a musician and your own journey with the pulse and with rhythm and with rhythmic creativity.

Dave: Sure. Well, I started playing drums when I was eight and from a slightly musical family. My dad was a bit musical and played a bit of piano.

I was always tapping on the steering wheel, listening to like Paul Simon and Dire Straits and stuff like that. And they were really supportive of me learning an instrument. And I grew up in Norwich and actually in like late eighties, early nineties. The music service there, like a lot of the country in the UK, the county music services were really happening, you know, and there was lots going on. I’m not quite sure what it’s, what it’s like now, but I was lucky that there was stuff going on in school and there was lots going on out of school at the music center.

So by the time I’ve been playing a few years and I really kind of fell in love with playing drums and percussion, but drum kit in particular. When I moved to drum kit I was like, oh wow, this is, this is really cool, I love this.

But there was just, I was just kind of… I didn’t really leave Norfolk, didn’t have like a global awareness of like different music from around the world, really. But there was this kind of community of young people coming together like every like four or five days a week in different formats. Orchestra, brass band, wind band, jazz orchestra, percussion ensemble. And that kind of gave me, I don’t know, there was something via osmosis, I guess. Like a lot of music learning is like that, you know, what we surround ourselves with is what we absorb.

So I feel very fortunate. And yeah, it was in a county music festival, I had a drum solo and the adjudicator, David Campbell, clarinetist, recommended that I go to Wells Cathedral school, apply to the specialist music department there. And so I ended up doing my 6th form at Wells.

And that kind of just helped me again. I was just, I mean, I was like really out of my depth there. There was folks practicing a lot, early morning practice and doing hours and hours.

But again, I just kind of really benefited from being in that environment and being surrounded by young, passionate musicians. And then I went to London and joined a jazz, the Guildhall jazz course. And by that time I knew that I really wanted to just focus on playing jazz music. And it was at the end of my first year. No, it wasn’t the end of the first year, I’m going to skip to the fourth year where a place came up on this trip. It was kind of like a pilot scheme to join this group of swedish students in the Gambia in West Africa. And up to that point I’ve been playing a lot of kind of hard bop and got into some freer stuff.

I’d also been training samba, joined a samba group and training every Sunday for 4 hours. So I got into some world rhythms. But I hadn’t really thought about visiting Africa and checking out.. I don’t know, I was just still in my bubble, my little bubble of college, I guess.

But anyway, a few weeks later, place came up and a few weeks later I found myself in a village in West Africa, a village called Jawara, which I ended up is a Wolof village. So their instruments are Sabah drums, different from djembes.

And all the sounds you play on the drum, all the different sounds with the stick and hand, you can say. So I got really into that. And there’s obviously a lot of movement as well, got really into the kind of relationship between, like really saying the rhythm and playing the rhythm.

And when I was there, I saw these kind of crazy events. Like there was an all-night wrestling match where there was drumming for 12 hours. It was just mind blowing, you know, these huge kind of tribal rhythms that were just…

I just came back and I felt like a different musician, really.

So I started taking more trips there and found some funding and some help. I won a bursary, a three year bursary with the BBC Performing Arts Fund, who basically funded some trips there and funded some albums that I made, one of which was this big collaboration with five drummers from Jawara.

And that was also an Arts Council funded thing. There was no business plan behind that project. It was just purely like musical, like, let’s get stuck in and see how this existing band, Outhouse, which was a kind of left-field jazz, kind of influenced by downtown New York, kind of free open, but very kind of, you know, written grooves that maybe just kind of exploded out. And two saxophones, bass and drums. So no harmony instrument.

So it had kind of a rawness to it. And we collaborated. We wrote a load of music together for three weeks in the Gambia and the drummers visited the UK for three weeks.

We did some workshops and a recording. And just that that whole experience has really impacted my playing and me as a person and my career.

I wouldn’t have met Justin Adams if I hadn’t got into west african music and got into all these kind of syncopated polyrhythms. He’s a collaborator of Robert Plant, but also very passionate guitarist and rhythmist who has, like, he’s steeped in kind of blues and rock and roll and punk, but has spent a lot of time in North Africa.

So, yeah, it’s interesting how. Yeah, I mean, I didn’t plan any of it, really.

It’s just, yeah, continuing the path and the exploring and discovering and trying to find a way of making ends meet along the way.

But it helped that I lived in a shared house with five other musicians, and we were running gigs together and, you know, making meals together. Didn’t need a lot of money back then, so it was all possible. And yeah, that’s like the long story, I guess. I don’t know. I’ve been talking for a while!

Christopher: No, that’s awesome. Thank you. And I particularly love hearing about how that connection to movement and spoken rhythms came into the picture, because my feeling is that’s a central thing to your educational approach to rhythm now.

And I know that, via Andrew, some of your ideas around that have influenced how our rhythm curriculum has developed here at Musical U in a really beautiful way. So I’d love to hear more about what you’re doing educationally these days and how you think about teaching rhythm and helping people level up their musicality of rhythm.

Dave: Yeah, sure. I work with musicians of all different instruments and all different levels and abilities, and we do work with… I mean, this is what I find most like when I go to practice.

Like, sometimes there is complex music to learn or to work on, and I’m working to kind of develop some more advanced, complex stuff. But there’s always a part of the practice which is dealing with the fundamentals and the foundations. And it’s kind of, you know, it would be easy to just walk this earth, and, you know, we use the earth to walk on, but to just to go down and touch and see the ground, you know, and to reconnect with the ground.

So this reconnection is quite an important part of my practice. And it’s become apparent that from teaching one-to-one’s over the last 20 years and in workshop situations, that these are some of the rhythmic foundations are some of the kind of missing links in a lot of people’s playing. And I think in the west, we just don’t have a… There’s not, like, a path for anyone to take. You know, we’ve got the book systems for learning your instrument and the technical exercises and the sound and there’s all of this stuff.

But it was that, yeah, we don’t have a lot of movement in our culture. I mean, you might end up doing some movement if your parents are into dancing or something, or if you’re into dancing or if you’ve got a music teacher that is teaching, like, stepping, actually, samba groups, like, often you’ll be stepping in samba. That’s where a lot of this came from, actually. But, yeah, the importance of moving your body and engaging with your body has been a kind of key in teaching, developing the teaching around the Rhythm Academy and, yeah, connecting your vocals with a clap and just getting in sync, like, actually synchronizing yourself to it.

Yeah, that’s the first port of call, really. So rather than trying to play in time, actually just synchronizing and connecting and making new connections like we do when we learn different scales or different rudiments or whatever it is, it’s like we’re kind of, you know, making the connections in our brain and there’s muscle memory and all the rest of it. So, actually, a bit of training and maybe realigning yourself physically, getting used to your voice and what you can do with your voice as well, like, the way you can articulate, the way we articulate is, like, so important, right?

So applying some of those kind of deeper fundamentals of language and communication into some rhythm work has been the evolution, actually, over the last few years.

Christopher: That’s fantastic. Yeah.

And I’ll probably talk a bit more about this when I introduce the masterclass shortly. But, you know, we definitely here at Musical U, I’m sorry to say, neglected the rhythm side for quite a long time because, as you say, we kind of take it for granted that part of learning music, we focus so much on playing the right notes, we don’t spend nearly as much time really dialing in that rhythmic side. And it’s something we’ve been paying more and more attention to because often it is that missing piece for people, and you need some structured way to get better at rhythm if it doesn’t just, you know, magically happen because you’re born “talented”!

Dave: Yeah, yeah. And there’s this weird thing that I remember it when I from, like, at school when I was younger, and, like, just kind of expected to know how to do something or play something in a specific way. And it’s like, without being given a really clear kind of practice structure to get you there, you know, and actually counting subdivisions and stepping away from the instrument, because the.

The instrument is, you know, you get behind your instrument, whatever it is, and it immediately is triggering all sorts of stuff that you’ve, like, been working on before or, you know, and actually separating. Doing a bit of rhythm practice away from your instrument is really beneficial and. And then kind of linking it to… I always try and, you know, invite students to go to their instrument after doing some of this work because it’s. I mean, that’s just a fun. It’s fun to feel like you’re picking up your instrument and you’ve got these fresh ideas, you know, awesome.

We can talk more about. I’ll talk more about that in the workshop as well, just to having fun, trying to have fun, which I’m sure you talk about as well.

Christopher: 100%, yeah. Well, I can see people are piling up in the waiting room, waiting for the masterclass!

For anyone who’s not a member of Musical U and interested to learn more about your approach and get involved, where’s the best place for them to check you out online?

Dave: Yeah, I’ve got a website which is Davesmithdrums.live, and you can see what I’ve been up to musically in there.

And there’s a free training and there’s also a Facebook group that I run called “musicians improving their rhythm mastery”. So just do a little search for that and you’ll find me.

Christopher: Fantastic. Well, I highly encourage everyone to check out Dave’s stuff and experience some of what we’ve been talking about today for yourself.

Speaking of which, we’re going to go dive deep now with our members on the live masterclass. Big thank you, Dave, for joining us for this pre-masterclass interview, and I look forward to having you on the show again. Cheers!

Dave: Take care. Bye bye.

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Christopher: Wasn’t that fascinating, that idea that, you know, we always try and improve our rhythm with our instrument in hand, if at all, but actually, we could first be connecting and building those instincts for the pulse and for rhythm purely with our body.

It was so much. I’m really excited to share a clip from that masterclass with you because it was one of my favorites, you know, seeing so many of our members stepping and clapping and speaking rhythms together.

And for me, it was really notable that, you know, I’ve been learning drums for four or five years now, and there are particular exercises you do on the drum kit where you really understand those layers of rhythm and how to put this one over that one and how to connect with each layer of granularity with the beat. And Dave basically gave us a way to do that purely with your body.

No drum kit needed, but really understanding, you know, the quarter notes and the 8th notes and the 16th notes and really being able to practice that and refine it so that then when you pick up your instrument, you’re so much better. So I’m looking forward to sharing a clip from that masterclass with you this week.

If you are a member of Musical U, it’s already in there waiting for you. Go dive in! But yeah, it was one of my favorites for sure.

And just a reminder, Dave has an exciting live workshop coming up next week, Tuesday the 14th May. We’ll have that link in the shownotes or in the comments alongside the livestream.

And as a fan of Musical U, you can get a 30% discount on an already low price by using coupon code MUSICAL-U.

And I would yeah, wholeheartedly recommend checking that out. I’m going to be back every day this week to share things like a clip from that masterclass, our next Coaches Corner episode, our next Meet The Team interview, which I’m looking forward to, and two other episodes packed with ideas and insights and inspiration to encourage you onwards in your own musical journey.

Thanks for joining me and I’ll see you on the next one. Cheers!

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