JAMAICAN PERCUSSIONIST LARRY MCDONALD + Special Guests
‘DRUMQUESTRA' RECORD RELEASE PERFORMANCE
Thrusday June 25, 2009
@ BOUCAROU LOUNGE NYC 10003
64 E. First Street NYC
6-8 pm / No Cover / www.boucaroulounge.com / Tel: 212.529.3262

Drums have been the pulse of the Black Atlantic experience since, well, forever. That pulse made it straight to Jamaica, where the drums kept so many effectively connected to

mother Africa. Rhythmic rituals - exotic and folk-soaked - are everywhere.

As further evidence, McDonald's "Backyard Business" taps Kumina drummers from Bath in Jamaica's St. Thomas parish. Kumina's roots go back to 1838, and one of their elite players, Bongo Shem weaves entrancement here.

In the early 1970's, McDonald led an advanced percussion ensemble named Truth. For his 21^st Century album, McDonald is joined by former aider and abettor of

Truth, Mutabaruka, a living part of Afro-Jamaican music. A globally celebrated dub poet, Muta dreams and imagines along with McDonald on "Free, Man Free". The horrors of the slave trade lead to a triumph - a transcendent recapturing and rebuilding of what was thought was lost.

McDonald's 20 years of collaboration with poet Ras Tesfa moves "Drum Say" forward stealthily. Tesfa hiply hypnotizes, speaking as one with McDonald's conga in an astonishingly deep duet.

Toots (sans Maytals) comes out of Earth orbit for a moment here, only to ascend again on the unforgettable "What About the Children". This spirited embrace of the next generation gradually soars higher and higher, as mothers and fathers, sons and daughters join festively in spirit, in song and in soul.

The star power keeps up with Bob Andy, one of reggae's most sophisticated singer- songwriters ("Feeling Soul", "My Time", "Going Home", "Too Experienced"). On "You Got Jazz", Andy is in vocal command, maneuvering around Larry McDonald's wizened oral tribute to the history of jazz and Jamaica. Hearing McDonald speak on his heroes is enlightening - as is every moment of Drumquestra, in the deepest sense of the word.

What It All Means...

Just as a single listening to Drumquestra would be totally inadequate to comprehend this landmark work, so would one or two paragraphs be insufficient to sum up the album's significance.

The more you hear Drumquestra, the more there is to absorb. Producer Sidney Mills has channeled every ounce of spontaneity, improvisation and sonic satisfaction that reggae's most revered musicians lovingly give, to one of the world's most revered and accomplished percussionists. In 2009, there may be no purer concentration of reggae's founding fathers and mothers than what has been assembled on Drumquestra: A remarkable number of the genre's earliest pioneers are alive and well, at the top of their game, and mingling quite amicably here with music's rising stars.

You can hold up Larry McDonald's dedication to family, music, friends, history or a thousand other ideals as the drivers for Drumquestra, but really, why overthink it? This album, and McDonald's incredible legacy are all about the drum. His innermost union with the beat is on vivid display here. All we have to do to win this joy for ourselves is perform one simple act, as McDonald shares on "Drum Say":

"Listen to the drums. They will tell you everything. The drums will tell you all.

"Just listen."

-- David Weiss, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

About David Weiss ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ):

David is an NYC-based writer. He covers music and a wide variety of technology fields, in magazines, on the Web and for people and companies the world over. David is the NYC Editor of Mix magazine, a longtime contributor to Drum! magazine, and author of "Music Supervision" (www.musicsupervisioncentral.com). In addition, he produces and performs electronic music at Impossible Objects, check him out on iTunes or www.myspace.com/impossibleobjectsmusic.

In recording Drumquestra, Larry McDonald had a vision: mix together musicians and friendships that spanned generations - the old, the not so young, and the younger - in an all-percussion ensemble. The goal was an album that would take ears into startling new places, while tapping into the inspiration that recognizes the drum as one of humanity's most primal sound sources.

The Players Come Together

Starting from there, McDonald had no problem encouraging Carl McLeod - known for 40+ years as one of Jamaica's top jazz drummers -- to lend his hands and feet. Despite the chronic arthritis that had sidelined him for nearly two years, McLeod was ready to be heard again: He jumped to abandon the solace of retirement in the Saint Andrew hills and enter the studio.

Brandishing an exquisite brand of swing and propulsion, McLeod has long served as an inspiration in and of himself. His style combines an incredible sense of lyricism and color with intricate touch and technique. McLeod makes the drums into a melody.

McLeod's collaborations confirm his place in Jamaica's jazz history. Check out this list: Wilton "Bra" Gaynair, Tommy McCook, Don Drummond, Roland Alphonso, Roy "Bubbles" Borrows, Billy Cooke, Aubrey Adams, Cecil Lloyd, Ernest Ranglin, Nancy Wilson, and now Larry McDonald. They've all set their sights on Karl McLeod for his refined sense of rhythm and melodic focus.

McLeod had not seen or heard from Larry for nearly 32 years, In fact, he also hadn't seen Toots, Bob Andy and Stranger Cole for so long you would think the island was the size of a continent.

Following their reunion, another amazing Drumquestra moment was when master drummer Sly Dunbar arrived and met McLeod -- who Dunbar considers to be one of his heroes -- for the first time. The goodwill, warmth and camaraderie they established were selflessly exchanged, and the pair became inseparable for the rest of the session.

On kit #2, was Sly Dunbar -- undisputed global drumming hero. With his usual unhurried approach he kept metronome time, filling spaces with quick interjections and precisely placed accents for the songs "Head Over Heels", "Crime or Music", "Drum Say", "Tootie", and "Got Jazz?" It's a polyrhythmic excursion, drawing on texture and timbre for nuance. Dunbar simultaneously controls the weight of the beat, blending the fleet and the fluid with a rock-steady focus to give McDonald and the others extraordinary freedom.

With tradition and organic modernity, Drumquestra's umbilical connection to mother Africa is achieved with a mix of musical styles, each with guest performers who represent the scope and rich legacy of Jamaican pop music.

The curtain rises with the opening song, "Head Over Heels", where McDonald and Dollar Man aim straight at the hip hop/R&B audience. Hot on its heels, Shaza provides the vocals to "Brother man," a musically massive treatise on mankind's diversity.

Next up over a hot dance rhythm, everyone's on the guest list to a "World Party" hosted by Shaza. This up-tempo rhythmic workout is a joyous tribute to "Larry Mac" -- a diasporic trip across continents, countries and islands. It shakes its booty to artful vocals and beats over traditional percussion, a groovy exercise for the dance floor. Then cut to "No More", a laid-back multidirectional track where Shaza draws inspiration from the grand wizards of the Black Consciousness arts movement, the Last Poets.

On Drumquestra, veteran singer Stranger Cole steals the show on "Crime or Music" along with his son Squidly Cole, a drummer and talented producer, as their call/response vocals ride a percussive locomotive.

McDonald's almost peerlessly inventive rhythmic pulse is featured on the song "Tootie," Even more notably it transcends in "Mento in Three," which McDonald recorded using the walls of the appropriately named "Runaway Caves" to drum on. These caves, now renamed Green Grotto, were slave hideaways during Jamaica's colonial times.

Now, more than forty years after he first encountered them, they have set the master percussionist's creativity free: just one more resplendent ascent to the new world of sound that is Drumquestra.

STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE OF THE LARRY MCDONALD STORY.

We had finished all the Jamaica drum tracks and were wondering whom we would ask to bless them; ‘we' being my producer Sid Mills and I. At the time all we had were naked tracks but had planned to cover as much of the musical spectrum as possible blending the traditional with the current. We already knew what kind of feel would be built on each of the tracks. So now it was down to the who; we needed voices. Of immediate concern was the first track the Drumquestra played. I was leaving for a week and wanted to choose a singer/poet/DJ before I went.

Sid suggested Dollarman. I knew his work firsthand. He had been a force on the New York reggae scene for some time and we had been on a couple of albums together. I immediately agreed, we gave him the tune and I left town.

You never really know how things will go when you start them rolling. I knew Dollar would crush the track, but to do it he would have to get out of his comfort zone a little bit; this one was different from his usual style.

As I am kind of a "let me wait and see" kind of a guy I was not worried while I was gone. I trusted that between my producer's expertise and Dollar's talent, worst I would get was a great track.

Well long story short it was an amazing piece of work. Dollarman followed Sid's chords so closely it was as if Sid had written the words. I don't think any of us had done anything like this before, and I was glad it happened on my album. Whatever I may have imagined, this was way beyond it.

Then I learned Dollarman is a drummer. It figures. Us drummers are dangerous.
LarryMac