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Paul Wertico's Secret Story
by Bill Milkowski
Pat Metheny's Paul Wertico is a bundle of contradictions: a highly exploratory drummer whose solo album is far from a chops-fest; a sophisticated accompanist who never took a lesson; a mainstream musician with avant-garde tendencies. Just who is this guy?
It's the dog days of August and Paul Wertico finds himself back home in Chicago enjoying a rare break in the action from touring and recording with Pat Metheny. It's a gig he's had for the past twelve years, and of course it takes precedence in his very active career.
But Wertico has always had quite a few other irons in the fire, and right now the focus of his attention is on Earwax Control, the audacious, ultra-improvisatory trio he began some twenty years ago with bassist/guitarist Jeff Czech and keyboardist Gordon James. Although the band hasn't officially played any gigs in a few years, Wertico is busy compiling a "best of" collection from the various Earwax Control DATs he has stored in his home studio. The stuff that he's ultimately settled on dates back to three separate nights in 1986 at the now-defunct Orphan's, apparently one of the only venues in Chicago where the renegade band could get a gig. And now that too is gone.
Nevertheless, Paul presses on with boundless enthusiasm for this outré project, as if the stuff were recorded yesterday. A cursory listen to these outrageous gig tapes quickly reveals that Earwax Control is coming from a different part of the galaxy than the part that produces the flowing lyricism of the Pat Metheny Group - representing as large a chasm as exists between Sun Ra and Sonny Bono.
Jeff Czech himself has referred to the sound of Earwax Control as "audio horseradish," while DownBeat alluded to their bizarre theatrical nature by suggesting that the band had to be seen to be believed. But perhaps the Chicago Reader's Neil Tesser came closest in describing the music of this seemingly indescribable trio when he wrote: "It resides somewhere around the intersection of jazz, performance art, Samuel Beckett, and an electronic kaffee klatsch."
It's hard to imagine that the drummer who played with such sensitivity and nuance on Metheny's Grammy-winning albums First Circle, Still Life (Talking), Letter From Home, Secret Story, and The Road To You is the same guy bashing hubcaps, triggering shards of horrible feedback, and raising sonic hell in Earwax Control. But that's not all. Wertico's got plenty more irons where that came from.
Back home in Chicago he also leads the highly adventurous Trio New, as well as two other unique groups, Paul Wertico's Quintet Thing and a two-bass, two-sax, and drums group called Strapagander. There have been further collaborations with former Cecil Taylor drummer Gregg Bendian, as well as sideman work with legendary Chicago bebop saxophonist Von Freeman, trumpeter Bobby Lewis, and New Age icon Paul Winter. He's even backed poet Ken Nordine for the past ten years and appears on the word/jazz guru's Upper Limbo CD.
But Paul comes by his eclecticism honestly. No greedy gun for hire or confused dilettante, he truly digs all the music that he becomes involved in. And, incredibly, he is able to convey enthusiasm in each context, bringing something of himself to every situation.
Purely self-taught and uncommonly open-minded, Wertico reveals some of his secrets in a new instructional video, Sound Work Of Drumming (for Rittor Music in Japan). And his first album as a leader, The Yin And The Yout, was released earlier this year on Intuition Records in the States.
I spoke to Paul while he was still deeply in Earwax Control mode. A few weeks later he would be off to New York to shoot a video for Metheny's new record, which had yet to be named at the time of this interview. By the outset of '95, he would be back in Metheny mode, touring relentlessly as a member of the most popular jazz attraction of the last decade. A presumably lucrative gig, and one that he undeniably loves, it represents only one part of Paul Wertico's secret story.
BM: You seem to have all these long-standing relationships in your life.
PW: Yeah, I've been with Pat for quite a while. I've been with Earwax Control for twenty years. I've been with my wife [keyboardist-composer Barbara Unger] for eighteen years. I've known all my friends for twenty years. And it's not like I'm a creature of habit, either. I've been really fortunate with people I know.
BM: So you have these two musical situations - Metheny and Earwax Control - that are ongoing and really diverse. Not opposites, but extremely different expressions.
PW: I don't look at anything as being opposite or anything like that. I just look at it all as music. Once I played this gig at a country & western bar. I didn't know any of the tunes and these were some serious guys who had played with country & western stars. But I played the gig and had a total blast. After that they wanted to make me the house drummer in this country band. So it's just a question of playing what the music calls for. I'll even do jingles occasionally, but they usually call me for more creative stuff, not just something that anybody else could just as easily do.
When I get called for sessions and jingles it's usually for real wild stuff like dropping a hubcap on top of a bunch of milk crates or something. That's what I'm kind of know for around Chicago, for just being myself. People call me up for all kinds of wacky things like that because they know that I'm into it. I mean, you really can't go wrong being yourself.
BM: Who were some important role models for you in this regard?
PW: Any drummer who ever made me feel something. In jazz, definitely Roy Haynes. When Roy would play, he'd make me laugh. It's like he's telling a story when he plays. In rock, Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, Mitch Mitchell. And it wasn't just that these guys played the drums so well, they were involved in making music. They made the particular music they played even more interesting by the way they sculpted it. That's always been attractive to me.
BM: I once asked Roy Haynes to describe his approach to the snare and the whole interaction between his feet and hands, and he said, "Just watch boxers...check out Sugar Ray Robinson."
PW: Interesting. The thing is, in the last few years I've become more aware of the follow-through and of the flow of the dance rhythm of what you're playing. The way you follow through has a lot to do with your sound. Some people pull their punches and some people dig into the drums. Some people pull off a lot from the drums.
It's like pitchers in baseball. Every good pitcher is going to have a great windup and a great follow-through. That in turn is going to give him the momentum to be able to throw the ball fast. And the same with the drums. The motion that you use is going to make it easier for you to do what you do, and it's also going to give you a rhythm that's going to help you stay in time.
BM: I guess the implication here is that all these things - boxing, pitching, drumming - are really intuitive, organic art forms, where it's not so much about counting or memorizing as much as it is about feeling some kind of rhythm in your body.
PW: Right. I gravitate towards more organic music and organic drumming. I've always been more interested in hearing a drummer who doesn't follow "the rules." When I hear somebody play and I know exactly how and what they're doing - if it sounds sort of academic - I kind of lose interest. Once you boil drumming down to numbers and mathematics, it has the distinct possibility of losing a little bit of the magic.
BM: Do you continue to make discoveries as a drummer?
PW: Oh yeah, all the time. It's an ongoing process of just discovering what feels good, what sounds good. To me, there's no right and wrong, so you're always taking chances. And you kind of increase your batting average as you go along. You never want to sound safe. If someone sounds safe playing the drums, that's fine if that's what they want to do. But for me, the adventure of taking chances and playing stuff that you've never known before ... that's what has always thrilled me.
I'd go see Roy Haynes and he might sound great one night and not quite as good the next night. Or even within a good night he'd be batting .950; once in a while he'd miss a little bit just because he was going for it. But that gave me a sense of adventure and a sense of wanting to hang with him because he was taking me on a trip. I don't want to hear someone play in a way where I already know the end of the story.
Music is an expression of yourself. You listen to some players and somehow you don't feel anything from their playing. So you just have to find the things that mean something to you. I think that's really important in music because that's how you start out. You don't start playing drums to make a lot of money - you feel something and you just want to express yourself. So you take a lot of chances in those formative years, and I think that's really something to hang with.
BM: On a given tour with Metheny after so many dates, does knowing the set in advance lock you into a way of playing, or does that give you more freedom?
PW: Well, it's never locked me in because while we might end up playing a similar set every night, I can do a lot of things within that whole framework that will shape things up. If someone is used to a fill and I put a big hole there all of a sudden, that keeps the band on its toes. With Pat, I have a vocabulary of ways to play that particular music that's ever-expanding.
Sometimes when you play music with someone you've never played with before there's a big picture and everything is new. When you play with someone for a long time there's a lot of things that you already know the answers to, but there are all those little details within that, which really make you delve into the microcosmic thing. It's really fascinating.
BM: It almost sounds like playing standards - the vast realm of expression available within a familiar form.
PW: Absolutely. And when you add sequencers and machines and all that stuff, that defines the parameters a little bit more. When you're playing standards with people you might want to take a breath, but if you're playing something that's in perfect time you can only take a breath to the point where you don't sound like you're getting off something that's going forward. When you play with a sequencer it's like playing with a percussionist who has great time but doesn't listen. So you have to work within these little parameters and, in turn, it just heightens your sense of listening.
BM: When you play with sequencers on some of Pat's tunes, do you wear headphones?
PW: No, never. I just get it in the monitors. Everyone in the band has good enough time that we don't need headphones. We never get off the time. So you just kind of use the sequencer as a reference to where the tune is. But we never had a problem with that. I think one of the reasons I got the gig was because I could play with sequencers, even though I had never done that before I joined the band. It's just a matter of how much you move around. Whether the gig is Von Freeman, Earwax Control, or Pat, it's all about phrasing with musicians. And if you're playing with a sequencer, it's sort of like a musician up on stage who's dictating the parameters of how far you can fluctuate one way or the other.
BM: Has your role with Pat changed over the years?
PW: Well, things always change. The music evolves and I play whatever the music needs. So it changes in that way. I don't see it in any black or white kind of situation. I'm just playing what the music demands. I have to cover the time and stay with the sequencer, yet I kind of have to be the bridge between that and Pat's soloing. I'm right next to him, so he's kind of riding off that energy. And we play really well off each other. So there's all these different things to take care of in a given set.
And even though we may play the same set night after night, it never gets old. As long as you're open to the infinite possibilities of everyone playing stuff that they never played before, it's impossible to get bored. We've been together twelve years and I still have a blast, and that's probably why. I mean, you never ask the triangle player in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra if he was bored playing the triangle part. Because the thing is, even if it was ten bars in the whole piece, those ten bars are important at that time. If you're just part of the music and it's a very selfless kind of thing. when it's your turn to do something, you just do it.
BM: A lot of times drummers and bass players will play off each other. Is there anyone in Metheny's band that you're keying on?
PW: No, I always cue into the melodies no matter what I'm doing. To me, the melody dictates everything you should play on drums. So I always try to teach drummers to learn songs. Cats come in for lessons and they want to learn jazz, so I teach them form and songs so that they actually have something to play jazz "inside of," as opposed to just playing a beat. That's real important.
BM: How did you approach your solo project, The Yin And The Yout?
PW: I didn't want to make the first record a "Here I am, guys, check this out" kind of record. Again, I'm always more interested in music than just playing some kind of stuff. But this was my first experience with dealing with lawyers and publishing, so it was really interesting to go from just playing drums to having to deal with all that stuff. It was like going to school. Being the leader on that project has also made me a better sideman, because it helped me to better understand the responsibilities and pressures that Pat must go through.
My whole idea for that session was to have simple folk melodies that are emotional and very earthy, and then to get great jazz players [saxophonists Bob Mintzer and Dave Liebman, as well as a mystery guest guitarist named Yu Gno Whu] to come in and improvise, rather than have a bunch of complex chords to blow over or have a bunch of folk musicians improvising off folk melodies. I wanted to get a combination of the two, and on a number of things I think it worked really well.
There's a cool spirit on some of that stuff, like "Peruvian Folk Song" and "Dance Of The Hunters." And again, it's not even calculated. You feel certain things and then you try to figure out how to put them in a sound.
BM: On your solo drum piece, "The Max Factor," which was dedicated to Max Roach, did you have an outline of what you were going to play?
PW: No, it's totally improvised. But I try to think compositionally all the time. When I do stuff like that I think of taking an idea and finishing it. I never think in terms of just playing licks.
BM: So it's a balance of logic and passion.
PW: Absolutely. And I think if either one gets too out-of-balance, then you have problems. When I play, I compose. And then later I can remember what I composed. Remembering stuff is really important. That comes from concentration.
BM: How did your drum duets with Gregg Bendian come about?
PW: What happened was, [Chicago jazz writer] Neil Tesser called one day to tell me about this cat Gregg Bendian, who was playing at the Hot House [a hip West Side jazz club]. I don't really get a chance to go out much anymore, but when the night came I decided to go check him out. I went to the place, heard him, and really dug him. Afterwards, I went up to tell him how much I liked his set, and Neil introduced me. Gregg said, "I know you. You play with Pat Metheny." We started talking and he said he would be coming back in a month and suggested that we get together.
Sure enough, a month later he came over and we set up my two drumsets in the basement and just played. We didn't talk about anything ahead of time; we barely knew each other. We just played, and I recorded the stuff on DAT with some stereo microphones in the room. Afterwards we came upstairs and listened to the stuff and were both amazed at the chemistry we were hearing. We agreed right then to do more stuff. We actually did a couple of other live gigs, opening for Gregg when he played here with [avant-garde saxophonist] Peter Brotzman. And then we did a thing where we opened for [Chicago saxophonist] Roscoe Mitchell and [renowned European improvisor] Evan Parker. We did a duo, then Roscoe and Evan did a duo, then we all got together and did a quartet, which I think is going to come out as a CD pretty soon.
So Gregg and I got together and put material together for a CD. We took four of the pieces from the first time we ever played together in my basement and then two from the two nights that we played gigs in town. For me, it's some of the best stuff I've ever done. When I play with him there's no ego. We're different kinds of players and we complement each other really well. He's really together technically and he's an amazing player, and we just have this great chemistry together. Now we're good friends and we're going to be doing a Berklee percussion seminar that's coming up. And we're going to be doing a lot of other stuff together in the future. Roscoe is talking about the four of us going on tour and doing some recording together.
BM: You seem very excited about this new musical outlet.
PW: It's funny. When I got the gig with Pat, some people around Chicago couldn't believe it. They asked Pat, "Why did you hire Paul? Isn't he a free player?" Well, I wasn't specifically that, but I did have a rep around town from playing with my bands Spontaneous Composition and Earwax Control ... some really different stuff.
Recently when [free-jazz saxophonist] Charles Gayle came to town, he hired me to play the gig. And people asked him, "Why did you hire Paul? Doesn't he play with the Pat Metheny Group?" So it had come around full circle. Bur for me ... I just play. I don't have any predetermined beats or anything in mind ahead of time. My attitude is, you just react to who you're playing with and the music that you're playing. And it should be able to become music if you keep it honest.
BM: This duet with Gregg Bendian had such an intimate, conversational quality that I would never have guessed the two of you had just met. Did you augment your kit for those duet sessions?
PW: It's all acoustic, for one thing. But a lot of that is just prepared drumset. In other words, we might have put a hubcap on the floor tom or we might have taken a cymbal and put a clothes pin on it or something. So we had some different sounds happening. Both of us had a lot of weird stuff like pressure cookers and all kinds of things. Gregg is really great at preparing his drumset. He's also got an amazing touch on the drums so he's able to get some cool sounds.
BM: Do you have a name for that situation?
PW: We're going to call it Bang.
BM: Appropriate. But I also remember seeing you play some serious bebop at the Jazz Showcase with Von Freeman and Ira Sullivan, and you seemed to be digging that just as much.
PW: I really try not to play favorites for anything. If I'm improvising or if I'm just holding a steady beat without fills, all of it is just fun. I'll be challenged in trying to make the music and the musicians sound good and as comfortable as possible. That's the thing...I think if you're a drummer and you only think about yourself and what you're supposed to be doing - then you're in trouble.
BM: Was there a period in your development before you arrived at this point of view when you were more conscious of technique?
PW: Not really. For better or worse, I've always had that kind of attitude. And the development of technique has almost been secondary. I always had pretty good technique naturally, but I think the development of technique came through my not playing up to my standards and then trying to figure out why that happened. To me, technique is just something to use to be able to express yourself. I was never one to really sit and play paradiddles forever.
BM: Did you ever feel trapped in a musical situation where you didn't dig the music or no one else on the bandstand was listening?
PW: Sure, but any time I've been in that type of situation I've always tried to finish the gig. And no matter how painful the situation was, I always tried to play the best I could. If you give up or sabotage the gig, then it's just bad vibes and everybody thinks you're an asshole. You just have to have pride within yourself and play the best that you can. Luckily that hasn't happened in a long, long time.
A lot of times you can actually make bad players sound better. If you play really well, even if the music is not happening, sometimes people will find possibilities within themselves. And even though you might not play with them again, I think you can leave a positive mark on the band. We're only here for a certain amount of time, and music is just too important for any kind of ego trip.
BM: Do you have any specific teaching methods?
PW: A lot of stuff I try to teach people has to do with them discovering their individuality. You can take a one-bar phrase, play it on the snare drum, and depending on how you articulate it, where you play it on the drum, the dynamics you use, and the type of stroke you use, you can get a myriad of possibilities from that one phrase. And I think that makes us all real different. You might think you only know X amount of things, but if you utilize all those different techniques and different concepts, you end up finding that you know a lot more than you thought you did.
I've always been self-taught on the drumset, so I've probably made every mistake you can make. And so, in learning how to fix those mistakes, when I see a student I can usually see what he's doing wrong or right. And to me, it's the greatest feeling of satisfaction when you show somebody something and all of a sudden they just sound better.
I had a student who had a lot of technique, but he didn't respect the rests. In other words, when he'd crash the cymbal you could just tell in his sound and phrasing that he was just waiting to hit something else. And I said, "No, hit that cymbal and let it die ... respect the rest and then go on." And as soon as he did that, he sounded like he was two years down the road. And that's really important for me, whether I'm teaching at Northwestern University or doing a clinic or a private lesson.
BM: Where did you pick up that whole notion of respecting the rest? It sounds very zen-like.
PW: Well, I'm into zen, so that's probably one of the things that had an influence on my attitude toward the drums. But even more than that was just listening to my favorite drummers over the years. I had a large record collection and I'd study them. I'd also hear tapes of myself playing and critically listen to what was happening. I always had a pretty analytical mind. I was able to figure out what was going on and what I needed to do.
BM: Are there any other important lessons that aren't technical, per se, but really leave an impression with young players about how to perceive the drums?
PW: Oh yeah, there are tons. For one thing, when you play the drums there's the whole standpoint of being the foundation. But when I play, a lot of times I'm hoarse at the end of the night because I'm singing the melodies. Rather than just play a groove or a beat or whatever, I try to use the form of the tune and then shape the tension and the release.
I try to teach concepts like what types of things particular sounds represent. You might want to hit a crash, but without a bass drum or snare, which kind of gives the feeling of jumping off a cliff. Hitting the cymbal with a bass drum is more like nailing it to the floor. Hit it with a snare drum and that's more like a jab to the ribs. So that's what I mean by thinking about the sounds you play and what they sonically represent.
BM: Sounds almost like lessons in visualization.
PW: I guess it is. When I play I'm "in" the music, trying to shape it. I think that's why drummers are good producers: We see a different part of the overall picture. It's all the nuances ... all the things that make you laugh or cry or hold your breath or make you relax - those things that convey the emotional and human experience.
BM: You mostly do one-on-one teaching situations?
PW: No, I also do a lot of clinics and master classes. But I really like the one-on-one thing. And I don't necessarily teach out of books. I like to expose my students to a lot of music. Many young drummers today who are into jazz might be into Dave Weckl, or they might go back as far as Billy Cobham or Tony Williams. But a lot of them have never heard the great drummers of the past. I'll put on Art Blakey's Free For All and watch a student's face, and it's like, "Oh my god!" so just exposing human beings to all this great stuff is important. And it's no fault of their own that they might not have been exposed to Big Sid Catlett, Philly Joe Jones, and Baby Dodds. You can't be exposed to everything. I was fortunate in that I bought a lot of records and I knew a lot of people who were into hip music.
BM: So an important part of your teaching is music appreciation?
PW: Absolutely - and also teaching songs. If you're a young jazz player going to go to a jam session that you've never been to before, if you don't know the tune or the forms of the songs, then you're just gonna be up there going ding-dinga-ding. That's like first grade.
BM: Let's discuss your group Earwax Control.
PW: We were kind of ahead of our time when we started back in 1973. It was pretty outrageous stuff. Now with alternative music and everything, people seem to be looking for something different. We're not trying to do anything different. So if we can get something out that people like and that will allow us to play live more often, that would be great. Back then a lot of clubs were afraid to even hire us because the music was so strange. People in Chicago wanted more straight-ahead things.
BM: I don't know if Metheny would have hired you if he'd checked out this gig as your audition.
PW: Well, I gave him tapes of all this really out stuff when he hired me, and he really dug it. To me that's some of my best playing.
BM: And a great example of listening on the bandstand.
PW: Yeah, because we go up there with a completely blank slate. I'm really hoping that the release of our new disc will allow us to play more live gigs. Music seems to need that right now - the balance of humor and fun.
BM: You're also in the midst of finishing up the new Metheny release. Was there a different process in recording this album?
PW: Definitely. A drum programmer, Sammy Merendino, who did one thing on Secret Story, ended up doing loops for some of the tunes, and then I played drums over that. It was real interesting. Rather than playing with a sequencer, these were drumset samples that he looped, so I really had to be accurate. It really refines your hearing doing something like that. So this new record will feature that kind of stuff, where I'm acting as a kind of bridge between the machines and the live playing.
Loops can feel really good, but if you're trying to play jazz over them, they can sound kind of static. So cymbals and all the little details that the rest of the kit can give really enhance loops or the programmed pattern you're playing with.
BM: You also appear on a few other new records coming out.
PW: Yeah, I'm on the debut of Kurt Elling, a singer that Blue Note is really high on. It's more straight-ahead - a piano, bass, drums trio. Kurt just got a six-album deal with Blue Note from this demo that we did. So I played on that and helped produce it.
There's a new Bobby Lewis record coming out that I played on. And then Gregg Bendian, Roscoe Mitchell, and Evan Parker. I also did this live concert that's going to be released soon, and the duet with Gregg Bendian and the Earwax Control thing are projects that I've always wanted to get out, and they're finally happening.
BM: Do you have a different setup in each situation?
PW: Oh yeah. With Kurt Elling I'm just using a four-piece kit with two or three cymbals and an 18" bass drum. Pat's gig involves more drums and a lot more cymbals. I approach that gig almost as a symphonic percussionist would, using lots of colors from the cymbals to shape the music. With Earwax Control, I use whatever I want. It could be totally whacked-out stuff - all the hubcaps, pressure cookers, and any found items. It's always fun to just bring whatever and make music with it. An it's all valid if you do it the right way - just expressing yourself using sound.
BM: Andrew Cyrille is great at that.
PW: He's such a master of shape - and very daring. That's the thing, too: If you're just gonna play it safe, why bother?
Eardrum Control
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...and the ones he listens to most for inspirition
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Paul's Setup (with Pat Metheny)
Drumset: Drum Workshop in candy apple red over black pearlescent finish
A. 4 x 14 piccolo snare drum
B. 5 x 14 snare drum
C. 9 x 10 tom
D. 10 x 12 tom
E. 12 x 14 tom
F. 14 x 16 tom
G. 16 x 22 bass drum
Cymbals: Paiste
1. 13" Paiste dark crisp hi-hats
2. 8" 2000 splash
3. 22" Paiste flat ride (with Pro-Mark Rattler)
4. 17" Paiste full crash
5. 11" 602 splash
6. 18" Paiste full crash
7. 22" Sound Creation dark flat ride
8. 16" Paiste full crash
9. 12" 2000 splash
10. 21" Paiste full ride
11. 20" 2000 China-type
12. 19" 602 thin crash with four rivets
13. Paiste Percussion Set
Hardware:
All hardware is Drum Workshop, including a DW5000 hi-hat stand and DW 5002A bass drum pedal, Aquarian cymbal springs used for crash and China-type cymbals.
Heads:
Remo coated Ambassadors on tops of toms and snare, with clear Ambassadors on the bottoms of the toms, clear Ambassadors on both sides of bass drum with one felt strip on each head for muffling.
Sticks:
Pro-Mark American Hickory 808 with wood tip
Microphones:
Shure
Electronics:
Roland R-8M, Alesis D4,E-mu Pro/Cussion, Kawai XD-5, Casio FZ-20M, E-mu Proteus 2-Orchestral, Multi Klone, DrumKAT, Roland Octapad 8, Roland Octapad 80, DW EP1 trigger pedals, Barcus-Berry triggers, Mackie CR-1604 mixer (with XLR 10), and various effects units
Percussion:
Various Latin percussion and Pete Engelhart instruments, as well as "found" items, such as hubcaps, pressure cookers, pan lids, etc.
Images and Information from Modern Drummer January 1995, Volume 19, No. 1, pages 36-41, 44, 47, 50, 52 & 54
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