It’s not often you encounter the work of a percussionist who is as wildly as inventive as one can be, yet can be prone to veering off where (he should know better) that none should follow, such is Brian Slawson’s Distant Drums which gets an unequivocal recommendation from me. Mr. Slawson is much like your favorite musical instrument virtuoso, a hit with the Guitar Center and “chops” crowd, but rarely remembered for this, his more tasteful side.
Distant Drums shows that side in full flight. It’s both an album sharing how far forward his percussion technique can be taken (expanding outward from his marimba beginnings, into all sorts of other mallet instrumentation) and how he can take it back a bit and explore world music in a way that’s surprisingly rare.
Brian’s beginnings are in the U.S., Connecticut, specifically. A precious gifted drummer from a young age, Brian easily outpaced the scene he came out of and tried to challenge himself to learn his craft, elsewhere. Finding himself accepted in Juilliard, he had to resort to busk with his marimba on the streets of NYC to pay off his tuition. It was on the streets, he was discovered by CBS Records and signed for a deal that would allow him to create his debut: Bach On Wood.
Bach On Wood, was that rare record that could cross between the classical, jazz, and Pop world. Consisting largely of insanely detailed marimba-led takes on the classics from Bach, Vivaldi, and Pachelbel, its popularity brought him to appear on the Tonight Show and cemented him as an act people wanted to see perform live. CBS proffered him with a much larger budget and let Brian fully establish his own vision for the next album.
On the next album, this album, Distant Drums, he’d gather friends from the New York City jazz scene, some gifted session musicians from his own label, and even a wayward blues guys you might know: Stevie Ray Vaughan. Not for nothing, it seemed, that CBS wanted for Brian to take his act to the next level and to create something for the radio.
Somehow, Brian, cut it both ways. On Distant Drums, there are cuts where you clearly hear the machinations of the industry place their hands on his. However, the reason I recommend the album, are for the various songs where Brian seems to dig deep for inspiration that’s not quite Western, that’s a bit more floating.
On songs like “One Bad Elephant” African music allows Brian to explore polyrhythms with instant flourish all the while his jazz friends (notably Lenny Pickett) go for some halfway point between them and those of Indian Carnatic influences. It’s a wonder of arrangement that they’re able to do this in less than four minutes. “Song For Segovia” and “El Viejo Y El Mar” both are quasi-Balearic ballads with the gifted guitar playing of Swede Georg Wadenius (another quiet hero of this album). When one of your most dated tracks is the one with the “star”, that should tell you something. Brian works best when he holds back a bit and lets the music, a lot of which has fantastic melodies, do the movement. Brian’s latin jazz-tinged excursion with post-bop horn legend, Freddie Hubbard, works wonders simply by letting go of technicality and letting the groove ride a bit.
The best parts of this album lie in that stretch from “Distant Drums” to “Puddletalk”. Coming close to that wonderful minimalism heard in Mkwaju Ensemble, it’s Brian taking his percussive exploration to the world of Steve Reich and Eastern-influenced music. In many ways, this part sounds the most personal. Most of these songs largely feature him working solo, getting in touch with the timeless spirit of bell and wood instruments, sussing out of them some truly meditative stuff that straddles the line of New Age or ambient music. Witness “Colossus Of The Harbor” a floating conversation between horns, guitar, and percussion that brings me back to the work guitarist Elliot Randall did with Steve Hiett just a few years earlier.
Distant Drums is simply a fascinating album when it hits its peaks. “Drums By Chants” is fourth world music for all intents and purposes, showing Brian’s adept study and recreation of all sorts of Pan-Pacific styles through electro-acoustic arrangements that wouldn’t sound out of place on your favorite, forgotten ‘80s reissue.
If we can forgive, the admittedly awesome recreation of “In The Hall Of The Mountain King”, we can find tracks like “Puddletalk” an electro-acoustic barely there bit of ambient which has few peers in that era. I don’t know, Brian might be known for other things but my favorite find is this bit of time where a lot of the things he did were far from his comfort zone, when things were less learned.