Books That Have Shaped My Playing (Without a Single Drumstick in Sight)

Recently someone asked me to suggest books that have influenced me — not drum books, but books from completely outside the world of drumming. It's a great question, and honestly, some of the most important things I've ever learned about music came from places that had nothing to do with music.

Here are three that have stayed with me.

Max Ernst

Many years ago, I encountered a large-format Abrams book on the artist Max Ernst, and something clicked. Looking at his work, I thought: I can do this with my music. I can create a framework — be the frame of the canvas — within which the other players put in the lines and colors. I can even be the canvas itself, something for others to paint on.

I went to his retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1975, and it was one of the most intense experiences I can remember. You start at the top of the museum and walk the spiral ramp all the way down, moving from his earliest work to his latest. It was like watching a mind unfold.

Later I came to understand that what I was experiencing had a name: synesthesia — a neurological phenomenon where stimulating one sensory pathway automatically triggers a response in another. A synesthete might see a specific color when hearing a musical note, or even something more like a painting or a film. When I discovered that Elvin Jones talked about seeing colors when he played, I thought — okay, I'm in good company.

R. Murray Schafer — The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Destiny Books)

Schafer writes about the world surrounding us and how it shapes our understanding of what music is and can be. He traces this through history, arguing that mechanization — combines, cars, trains — actually fueled the creation of many contemporary rhythms. His example that has always stayed with me: the wheels of a train car rolling over gaps in the rails, producing that clickety-clack, is the shuffle rhythm. It was right there all along.

Pages 110–114, "The Meeting of Music and the Environment," are particularly worth your time.

Alex Ross — The Rest Is Noise (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007)

This one was recommended to me years ago by my friend and fellow drummer Henry Cole — a brilliant player who's been with Miguel Zenón's quartet for decades and has recorded extensively as both a leader and sideman. Henry has excellent taste, and this book proved it.

Ross traces the history of 20th-century classical music in a way that's genuinely gripping. It reads more like a story than a history book, and it fundamentally changed how I hear music from that era. If you haven't read it, start here: therestisnoise.com