Speaking of Santería

Ramón Gardella is an outrageous percussionist, playing with more ensembles than I can count. He is the hardest working man in show business. Ramón came to Cologne at the exact same time that my wife, daughter and I did; he, for the Hochschule, while my wife established herself in the ensemble at Oper Köln. After being hired to play in the orchestra pit for THE STRANGERS, Ramón reached out to me on the socials. Ingratiating and friendly as all hell, I became enamored with his playing and generally enjoyed being around his energy.

After THE STRANGERS  closed, Ramón and I worked together on a monumental opera by Bernd Alois Zimmermann called DIE SOLDATEN; it’s a show that was once deemed unperformable, and is totally worth your time. Ramón was, of course, employed in an army of percussionists and I was a guest with the men’s chorus. We toured Cologne, Hamburg, and Paris. 

In the Kantine at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, I asked Ramón about collaborating on a project and he said “How about a piece for Drum Set?” Great! Now what? 

I hadn’t approached a solo artist before. Money being the first hurdle (or so I thought), I didn’t understand the concept that projects where money isn’t the driving force - or, counterintuitively, can be the after-effect of a successful collaboration, through grants for continuing performance opportunities, for example - was an actual possibility.  It’s a world with which I had zero experience. 

The approach was also an entrance into the arena of modern chamber music in Germany, with which I had been completely unsuccessful getting into in the preceding decade. It’s no wonder, as I was 1) not good at making connections in that realm (I suppose) and 2) my writing was focused on things that were not standard fare for these types of ensembles. Both of these are excuses that prevented me from making the connections that could have led to meaningful collaborations and a stretching of my technical skills, but that was then and here we are now. 

Back to the issue at hand.

On one hand, Drum Set was a known quantity, having written charts with Set since college, and exploring writing for Trap Kit in a linear fashion (as opposed to grooves) through several jazz-laced concert scores, culminating with the opera, THE STRANGERS, where the Kit was a central piece of the orchestra, sonically and physically. 

But in terms of solo Drum Set writing, I didn't know how to start or organize a solo piece. Theme? Style? Those sounded like traps to me. Up to this point, I had written only one work for percussion ensemble, but that’s a different animal.

Enter the Internet.

The algorithm knows I enjoy the intersection of jazz, virtuosic playing, and screwball comedy, and I often find videos of players playing along with - or harmonizing - spoken text by folks with dramatic flair and melodious voices. (or rather, they often find me).  I sent a few examples, apologetically, to Ramón, whose response was “cool.” Long coffee dates ensued, ideas and strategies were bandied, including a terribly interesting glimpse into Ramón’s activities as a professional purveyor of contemporary music funding schemes, program planning, extended collaboration - a major departure from the choral/church/stage vocal works in style and substance. 

Still latched onto the use of speech rhythms and melodious vocal patterns, I began considering source material, a cantus firmus if you will. As is often the case, I turned to my wife. 

I’ve had the pleasure and difficulty of writing for my wife’s voice over the last 20+ years. Pleasure because I love her voice, and her ability is singular; difficulty because she is a tough and exacting tactician who would readily expose holes in my technique and understanding of the voice as an instrument attached to a living, breathing human being. My writing for voices is better because of the many unapologetic and well-deserved ass whippings I got from her in rehearsal. 

Her speaking voice, however, is another story. She hails from New Orleans, Louisiana, has German, Cuban, and French Creole roots, trained in the Southern, Mid-Western and Northeast US as well as England, and speaks three languages and gets by in another two. Her speaking voice is a bubbling cauldron of these influences peppered with a lightening wit and a sardonic, Gen X sensibility. I love it. 

There is a special character her voice takes when speaking to the small cast of characters that knew her as a feral child in Louisiana. Far from a drawl, she has a pointed, arch Metairie accent and placement that maintains rich color and expressive melodiousness indicative of Southern urban/suburban Louisiana-growing-up-in-the-80s ease. This is the shrimp boil, falling asleep on the couch in a Saints jersey during the Thanksgiving Day football game, show choir and church choir and mass choir, growing up artsy in the least likely of places type of speaking voice. 

I don't think I made a conscious decision to record this voice when it presented itself, but I found myself embarking on surreptitious, clandestine, without her knowledge (so as not to sully the natural qualities of this voice) Bartok- and Kodaly-esque field recording excursions to capture examples of her speaking with this voice in the wild.

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Carl Hiaasen was a long-time Miami newspaper man who had a side career as a best-selling author of nut-job comic caper novels that all took place in Florida, with the running theme being the overdevelopment of the state at the callous expense of its natural beauty. Familiar ensemble characters in his novels include environmental crusaders, evil developers, hapless rednecks, small-time criminals, and somebody who would perish messily, succumbing to a merciless Mother Nature: being mauled by big fauna, or being impaled by debris in a freak storm, for instance. My wife and I are big fans. 

One particularly free-wheeling book includes an amateur Santería practitioner who, predictably, gets gored by a goat intended for sacrifice, and finally gets attacked by an illegally-procured primate intended for the same ill-fated hope of using a mystical sacrifice to get out of debt. We had just finished this book for the second or third time (I read to her, doing all the voices, as is my wont) when she was speaking to her maid of honor, a fellow Louisiana native with whom my wife has been friends since high school. Mention of goats (context unknown) led to Santería, which led to Hiaasen’s technique of introducing new characters who play a pivotal role in a story’s development and then exit in a matter of paragraphs, much like Hiaasen’s own presence in this essay.

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I ran the concept and recording of my wife talking on the phone past Ramón. “Great!” he said. I offhandedly suggested the possibility of releasing the work as a video, which intrigued him. 

And we were off. 

SPEAKING of SANTERÍA is a “theme and variations”-type work combined within a head-chorus-head Jazz format. This means that the work is bookended by the complete recording of my wife’s voice combined with the drum track inspired by her speaking, which aligns and echos, is in conversation with, and riffs off of the spoken text.

Within these bookends are four “sections” in which the text is parsed, split, or re-arranged to open new possibilities for meaning, and the drum set spins off in directions set by the text fragments. Interspersed between these sections and three interludes in which grooves are established, and then thrown off by snippets of text. The player is asked to react to the text, finding a way back to the groove much like someone balancing on one foot must reestablish balance after being whacked on the shoulder.

Watch the world premiere video performance…here.

Listen to a special edition of the Resonanz Podcast with Ramón Gardella as my guest…here.