Horacio Hernandez drums for the sun
AT THE ATLANTIC FILM FESTIVAL
SEPTEMBER 17
PARK LANE 8
9:30 PM
A shoe fell in New York in 1969 for NFB film-maker John Walker. He wasfd 16 years old. The other one took almost 40 years to flop on to a 300-acre farm in Ontario between Ottawa and Kingston.
“I heard about this drum camp,” Walker said over coffee as traffic buzzed nearby on Chebucto Road in Halifax this week.
“My immediate reaction when I heard the line-up was, ‘I’ve got to go!’ Within 10 or 15 seconds after that, I had to go with a film crew. I was going to observe, make a film, not learn the drums.”
The line up included Mike Mangini (the fastest drummer on the planet); Paul Rekow (conga-ist from 1976 with Santana); virtuosically creative rock drummer Kenwood Dennard who has played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie,Gil Evans and Joe Zawinal; Horacio “El Negro’ Hernandez who has presided over the marriage of jazz, rock and Cuban music to becom Afro-Cuban music’s most visible drummer; Giovanni Hidalgo a congaist from Puerto Rico with an irresistible joy in music who is in a class by himself; and Dennis Chambers, whose power and speed let alone his invention with players like John Scofield, John McLaughhlin, Steely Dan and Santana dazzles the senses.
All this high-powered talent was gathered together by another extraordinary drummer, Canadian Nasyr Addul Al-Khabyr. He is part-owner of the farm which hosted some 40 young drum players eager to learn from the masters. Nasyr, as Walker calls him, teaches at Vanier and Concordia Colleges in Montreal.
“He put it up on the website that these seven artists were coming,” Walker said. “They were getting calls as far away as Australia saying, this is a hoax. This can’t be true. Giovanni Hidalgo? If you’re a fan of congas, he’s it. His knowledge of conga is encyclopedic.”
John Walker
Walker knows. He’s a drummer himself from the age of 8. He played in in a band called The Downbeats who were in New York in 1969 preparing their first record. The band was heavy, Hendrix influenced. Their agent sent a tape to California.
“My Montreal band was invited by Frank Zappa to open his concert in Haight-Ashbury,” Walker says in his bio. “The thing is, a few days later I was offered a summer job in a film studio.”
His 22-year-old band leader helped him consult the I-Ching. “The great Chinese oracle revealed that I was faced with two roads and whatever choice I made would be for life.”
“I chose the studio—gave away my drums and never touched a pair of sticks again.”
He must have had many second thoughts on that Ontario farm. Great drummers, top of the line gear, and a heady ferment of day and night-long drumming.
Classes and lessons and practicing went on all day, then dinner. In the evening, one of the artists played drums, frequently inviting other teachers to sit in since they all pretty well knew each other not only by reputation but often through personal experience as well. Several of them played with Dizzy Gillespie at one time.
“It was like a three-ring circus,” Walker said. “Then we did the Master Jam, the one where all the musicians jammed together.”
To capture this inspired uproar, Walker and his cinematographers Kent Nason
Kenwood Dennard
and Nigel Markham, filmed the performances. They also filmed interviews with the artists and sometimes took shots of students as they set up their traps by the lake and entertained the fish.
“We had four cameras. Kent and Nigel shot with big HD cameras. The overhead camera suspended above the drum set-up was static. When we got into shooting three musicians I took a third camera, just one of the little cameras to cover more of the musicians. So there was always a camera on one of the musicians.”
“I didn’t think there would be three playing, just the one drummer. In the end all seven played together.”
The resulting sound is amazing, but the visuals are equal to it. They both put you in the middle of the drum set, so much so, that by the end of the 83-minute doc, your head is buzzing.
Walker chose camera positions to show close-ups of the set-ups. At floor level you can see that Mangini had six pedals for his feet, four more than the usual ones for high-hat and bass drum. We get a mouse-eye view of it all.
“I tell people I was on a non-drug-related high for weeks after that,” Walker said. “ What I liked about the experience for me was I wasnt only connecting to the music but to the personalities - the dynamic quality – their passion for each other, their camaraderie – their friendship, their openness, their desire to pass on their knowledge to these kids – just such incredible artists.”
Mike Mangini the fastest drum in the West
For Walker there was no need to show any lessons being given or taken. On one level, he said, the film is a masterclass on Life. “The open-ness and love they showed for each other, their way of working hard, it wasn’t just about how to play the drums, but about how to live your life.”
NOTE: Not all photos available at publishing deadline. Will add more when (if) they come in. SP
