RHYTHM KING
Houston drummer Chris Dave proving he’s music industry’s
The phenom has played with the best musicians in jazz, hip-hop, pop and rock. Now he’s stepping out to make music on his own.
On his first day as the president of the storied jazz record label Blue Note, producer Don Was welcomed Houston pianist Robert Glasper to his office. Glasper came with some early mixes of the songs that would become his Grammy-winning 2012 record, “Black Radio.”
Was was transfixed by th percussion.
“I couldn’t figure out what kind of samples he was using to get the drum sound,” says Was, whose career includes production work with the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. “How he manipulated them to do what he wanted them to do.”
Glasper informed Was that the drums weren’t samples but rather beats played by Chris Dave, five years Glasper’s senior and a fellow alumnus of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Was wanted to hear more. “A month later, I went to see Chris play live and was blown away,” Was says. “His approach to a groove is unlike any other drummer on Earth. If you think of it as just bars of music, a grid of where the beat can go, the thing that characterizes each individual drummer is the space they choose to fill. And nobody fills spaces like Chris. He puts notes in really unconventional places, yet he grooves like a mother (expletive). Nobody plays like that. Nobody in the world plays like him.”
Superlatives come easily when people start talking about the drumming of Dave, a 44-year-old Houston native who has become one of the best young drummers in the world while laying down the beat for a startling selection of artists that span jazz, soul and R&B, as well as some of the biggest pop acts of the past decade, including Adele, Ed Sheeran and Justin Bieber.
No slouch himself, drummer Questlove of the Roots and “The Tonight Show” calls Dave “the most dangerous drummer alive.”
The hyperbole rests in lowlying relief to Dave himself. Not your traditional thrasher behind the drum kit, he approaches his kit less like an implement for conjured thunder and more like the whisperings of the wind. Away from his instrument, he speaks in murmurs.
This month Dave releases “Chris Dave and the Drumhedz,” a recording that positions him not just as one of the most in-demand session drummers in the world but also an innovative recording artist in his own right, a producer and composer whose work suggests a creative person who wants to stay ahead of culture’s beat.
‘On his own planet’
A record catches Dave’s eye, so he walks over to the S section at Cactus Music and thumbs through some LPs, pulling Cat Stevens’ “Catch Bull at Four” from its bin and inspecting the front and back.
“I played on his last record,” Dave says. “He was such a cool, Zenned-out-type cat. You see this guy so happy, like there’s not a bad day in his life. And you know that’s not the case. That he spent some time on defense. But he has his (expletive) figured out.”
Dave at times tells stories that suggest an aloofness with regard to his session work. To wit, he spoke about serving as the in-house drummer at superproducer Rick Rubin’s ShangriLa Studios in Los Angeles.
“Friends, especially back when, will ask me what I did yesterday,” he says. “And years ago it’d be like, ‘Man, I worked with some dude, Josh something
Groban? Funny guy, cool as (expletive), we hung out all day.’ My friends are like, ‘Nope. Don’t know him.’ Then months later (Groban) walks out on Oprah, women are crying and (expletive). Rick told me he had a lot of fans. That’s what it’s like working with Rick. You go to the kitchen in the studio for breakfast, and there’s Josh Groban making coffee.”
But Dave also doesn’t make many distinctions among the work. Asked if any single call for a session caused particular excitement, he suggests they all had their own allure and appeal, from his days as a kid drumming on Kim Burrell’s first gospel record to his more recent work. …
“He’s equally great setting the music direction for a band through playing as he is reacting to what other musicians or singers bring to the table.” Rick Rubin, producer
In addition to Rubin, Dave is a regular player on sessions by producer Blake Mills, which explains Dave’s name all over the credits of “Eternally Even,” a solo album by Jim James, frontman for the rock band My Morning Jacket.
“Chris is amazing, he’s on his own planet,” James says. “His grooves are unbelievable. … But you don’t realize until you try to play the drums what a great drummer really is. It’s just about the millisecond between each beat, each time the kick hits or the snare hits. Listening to him, we were just transfixed. We just sat there with our mouths open, like, ‘Jesus … .’ ”
Despite his measured manner discussing session work, talk to Dave long enough and some hierarchy among his sessions begins to come into focus. He brings up Mos Def, the elusive and enormously talented hiphop artist. Dave refers to him as “more like a brother than a guy I work with.”
Dave was on a plum touring gig with Maxwell when Mos asked Dave to join him for a three-person, one-off on “The Late Show With David Letterman.” Check the clip on YouTube: It’s a striking piece of music. Having received some guidance from Dave, Mos drops a heavy beat on the timpani. And on stage left, almost obscured by shadows, Dave hits on the 2 and the 4 like a syncopated spider spinning its web. On a single play, it’s merely a compelling piece of music with a visceral groove. On the 20th play, it’s a revelation of construction. Dave admits he jeopardized his Maxwell gig that day, slipping out to do Letterman with Mos.
“But like I said, he’s more like my brother. And that’s what you do for your brother,” he says.
Rubin says he hadn’t heard Dave before but was watching Letterman that night.
“The feel of his playing stunned me,” Rubin says.
He hired Dave to be the house drummer in his studio, which resulted in Dave providing the beats for songs on Adele’s “21” and Ed Sheeran’s “x” — two of the better-selling records of this decade.
“Playing seems to come so naturally and effortlessly (to him),” Rubin says. “He’s equally great setting the music direction for a band through playing as he is reacting to what other musicians or singers bring to the table.
“He can play the simplest, most ordinary beat, but when he plays it, it transcends the simplicity also through which we can access a different dimension.”
High, cosmic stuff, by Rubin’s accounting. And it all started in the church.
‘What is this kid doing’
Dave says he grew up in Houston pulled in different directions by his family. His father went to stacks of jazz LPs, his mother gravitated toward gospel, and his brother brought the hard funk. Even then, though, he says all three were comfortable breaking outside their favored forms.
Dave got his first drum kit at age 5. And within a few years, he got his first real break playing with the gospel ensemble Kathy Taylor & the Choraleers, which put Dave in front of audiences weekly in Houston.
At Johnston Middle School for the Performing and Visual Arts, he drew the attention of Craig Green, a revered music educator in Houston, who himself studied under the legendary Conrad Johnson in the Kashmere Stage Band.
“Right at the beginning, I knew Chris had a natural talent,” Green says. “He was a creative young drummer with a lot of natural ability to play. The culture of gospel playing was a little untamed and wild, but what impressed me was the maturity in his playing. I would hear him do different stuff and think, ‘What is this kid doing? Come on, he’s in the sixth grade.’ ”
Dave went to high school at HSPVA, where he quickly distinguished himself. As a sophomore, he filled the drum seat in the school’s first jazz band, a designation usually reserved for juniors and seniors. He made the All-State Jazz Ensemble that year, too, which meant that of 106 high school drummers, he was rated among the two best. He did the same his junior year.
After graduation, Dave went to Howard University. There he quickly found himself pulled between study and opportunity. But it was a right place/ right time situation for a young drummer.
In the early ’90s, he skipped an evening concert-band class — “something I actually hated,” he says — to attend a show by R&B band Mint Condition. As students in a prestigious music program, Dave and his friends had a chance to meet the band, as well as Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the industry legends working at the time with Janet Jackson. The two producers took an interest in their young visitors and wrote down phone numbers.
“In my mind, they weren’t going to call,” Dave says. “So I just gave them my girlfriend’s number. … Then you get this call. They tell me they want to fly me to Minneapolis. I asked, ‘When do I leave?’ ‘Tomorrow.’ ” Dave was 19. So he called his parents and let them know he was flying from D.C. to Minneapolis and jeopardizing his scholarship because Mint Condition had a vacancy in the drum seat just prior to leaving on a tour with Jackson.
“That led to so much work,” he says. “Mary J. Blige, then Kenny Garrett called. Marcus Miller. Meshell Ndegeocello. That was the moment that opened things up.”
‘A great artist with vision’
Dave’s work since then has been all over the map and compelling at every turn. His jazz bona fides — difficult to come by for drummers — are established thanks to his time with Garrett. Still, one of Dave’s best decisions was looking beyond jazz.
“I think he was the first of our prominent jazz graduates to start looking in the direction of hip-hop,” says Robert “Doc” Morgan, whose jazz program at HSPVA fed more than a generation of top-line talent in New York. “When he graduated, that was fairly unusual.”
Green, his junior high instructor, says Dave’s direction makes sense considering what he heard from the drummer as a teen.
“I’m not surprised he’s doing so much different work. He was always able to be creative and adapt to any style music we played. … When he was leaving PVA, I told him, ‘This’ll probably be the last time I get to hear you play for free. You’re going to follow a crazy career path.’”
Dave deliberately set up shop in Los Angeles rather than New York, where the more regular jazz players are based.
“Movies, TV jingles, those are interesting opportunities for me,” he says. And then there’s the association with producers such as Rubin and Black Mills that get him additional work.
But all along, Dave’s vision extended beyond a drum credit on others’ albums.
Like Glasper, Dave views music not as an invitation-only situation based on style but rather a free gathering where all are welcome. He created Chris Dave and the Drumhedz, an ensemble that can play all styles, but prefers to fold all those styles in on themselves until they become something recognizable, and not.
For example, a mixtape he put together several years ago opened with a meditative riff on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” before taking a long, winding path through hip-hop and R&B.
Even as his schedule took him out on tours with D’Angelo or into recording sessions with Sheeran, Dave always returned to his Drumhedz. There weren’t rules for a Drumhedz session other than, Dave says, “It just had to be more about sonics than anybody showcasing their skills.”
So Was told Dave to go make a record. Then the producer waited. And waited some more.
Finally after about five years, Dave turned in “Chris Dave and the Drumhedz,” his first album, which will be released this week. It flows like a single piece, rather than a collection of songs, though there are songs with established guests, including Anderson Paak and Bilal, as well as newcomers. The album is more formal than a mixtape, but it has a mixtape’s spirit of collaboration and adventure.
Dave is already working on the second Drumhedz record, which he says will have a distinctive Houston bent. He was home last month recording for it.
Was thinks Dave will leave more thumbprints on popular music than just an admirable scroll of drum credits by the time his career comes to an end.
“It’s simple. I believe in him,” Was says. “Who breaks through, that’s still somewhat mysterious. But he’s deserving of being viewed through that lens, of a great artist with a vision. The guys who do their own thing, those are the artists who endure.”