There’s always the danger of sounding inhuman. You’re not obliged to take a breath before you do something. Wind players are obliged to be human, they have periods, question marks, exclamation marks, phrases. But there’s always the danger, with people who play piano, percussion, or string instruments, of not creating phrases that speak out to people.
– Max Roach, Modern Drummer 1979. Found in The Art of Bop Drumming by John Riley.
There’s a concept in Victor Wooten’s book The Music Lesson that’s stayed with me frequently the past couple weeks. That of “playing the rest.”
Coming from a family of three boys and all types of different neurodivergent minds at play, things were always go go go in my childhood. Rest always felt like something that couldn’t be afforded—not as a financial limitation, but as a time limitation. I had somehow gotten in my head that I was destined for something big, and that every nanosecond of rest was points toward failure.
I ran 15 miles this past weekend, the farthest I’ve ever gone by over 4 miles. I’ve had to learn the hard way over and over that you can’t endure long runs without proper rest. Intentional rest. It’s not just a matter of sleeping well, but learning how to relax in the time in between. Learning how to schedule time off, take vacations, eat well in the days leading up to these runs, and finally collapsing after them. It’s not an option. If you don’t rest, you don’t move further. You don’t just suffer physical fatigue, but there is a slough of mental anguish that comes along with it. The first time I took a leap like this, I developed a knee injury that kept me off running for ~6 months. And this time? The last couple days I’d been stuck on the couch trying to understand why I didn’t want to practice, read, or do anything either than sit there.
I think I’ve grown up with this belief that effort = progress. That by expending, or over-extending, what I have to give, that progress is achieved. The past couple weeks have completely changed that belief. I’d grown so used to feeling like I was sitting at the bottom of the barrel that the belief was cemented in my mind that that feeling was progress. That my sacrifice and my own pain was what was directly leading to the results I was getting. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. It was what I’d done while relaxed and rested that created all the progress I’d seen. That the simplest actions when I had the energy to succeed were what carried me.
Everything else was just trying to run on injuries.
The way this all relates to music is transparent to me: you have to play the rests. When every part of a solo or a song is consumed by fast notes and licks, it creates a mental fatigue as much as a physical one. You betray the trust of those around you by making them participant to your own burnout. No one wants that. When you can learn to play the silence with as much strength as each note, the fear dissipates. The structure becomes something everyone can relax into. It takes the pressure off. It makes performing feels easy.
Happy drumming!