Page two: The Savage Samba
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By Jason Roeder
(September 14, 2000)
Ron Savage has a new outlook on samba rhythms. He has traditionally devoted some of his Umbria clinics, in Perugia, Italy, to Latin music and usually focuses on helping his students coordinate the different sounds on the drum set. But a visit to Brazil helped him realize that the samba is less a particular pattern of beats than it is a feeling. To get that point across to his students, Savage has decided to deconstruct the samba, dividing his class into sections representing each of the style's rhythmic subdivisions.
He has the students on the snare drums, which correspond to the Brazilian caixa, lay down the foundation pulse. Two of the students are pounding floor toms, the surdo and contrasurdo. One takes the downbeat and the other the backbeat, a thumping back-and-forth. He has the students without drums infuse the syncopation by striking their sticks together. The class stays hooked into the groove, even when Savage pushes the tempo. But though they're playing simultaneously, they don't seem to be playing as one.
"We have to listen to each other to play together," he says, his words recast into Italian by his assistant, Marco Volpe '84. "Everything that we play has got to fit with the feeling of what we're playing on the snare drum."
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| Savage and fellow faculty member Dave Clark demonstrate rhythm section playing in Italy. |
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| Photo by Rob Hayes |
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He wants to hear just the snares. If the rhythm's core isn't tight, there's no point in embellishing it. He wants to hear the snare beats played on the rim so he can hear the articulation distinctly. He doesn't like it.
"We're bringing our grace note hands too high," he says. "Remember, we talked about leaving our hands—upstrokes, downstrokes—in the correct position to play the right articulation. . . . We have to make sure our accents are lining up."
He counts the class in again, but stops the groove almost immediately.
"Come on, now. Move to the edge of your chair. Just because we're playing a samba doesn't mean we have to have bad posture, bad technique."
In the next attempt, it's the surdos that trip up the rhythm. The conversation between the two big drums has deteriorated, and both instruments are speaking at once.
"The drums are talking to each other. Bang, boom! Bang, boom! Bang, boom, buh-buh-buh boom! Then the dancers get into it," Savage says, with a shimmy of his own.
His adjustments work, and during the next go-around he lets some of his students solo through the breaks. Then he passes out some sheet music and passes along some advice.
"Playing a samba is a feeling more than a special drum beat," he says. "As long as you have the different voices, the vocabulary of the rhythm, how you decide to orchestrate on the drum set will be determined by how you feel about the music being played at the moment."
"By the way," he adds, "you can put the sheet music away. We just played everything on there."
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