Professor Funk

Jim Payne Holds Court On The Art Of Groove

by Bill Milkowski

"I'm coming out of that whole bag of being able to have it groove but also have it be interesting along the way."

As author of the acclaimed book Give The Drummer Some (Manhattan Music / Warner Bros. Publications), the definitive work on the history of funk drumming, Jim Payne is widely regarded as something of a scholar on the subject of throwing down. An accomplished drummer and composer, he has earned a reputation over the past thirty-plus years as a first-class player, producer, clinician, and educator.

As the leader of his own hard-hitting funk-jazz organ trio, House Of Payne, featuring Adam Klipple on B-3 and Al Street on guitar, Payne is currently enjoying a kind of funk renaissance on the jam-band circuit. His most recent recordings (2003's Sensei, 2005's Energie, and a new disc, Yes!, due out shortly) showcase the trio's intricate interplay, quirky lines, slick syncopation, hip time displacement, and fat grooves. As Michael Lydon put it in the liner notes to Energie: "Think Thelonious Monk meets Booker T." (Appropriately, Payne pays tribute to two heroes on that CD with the tracks "Jabo" and "Clyde," for former James Brown drummers John "Jabo" Starks and Clyde Stubblefield.)

Payne has had a hand in the burgeoning jam-band scene from its inception, as producer of two early CDs by jam pioneers Medeski, Martin & Wood, 1993's It’s A Jungle In Here and 1994's Friday Afternoon In The Universe (both on Gramavision). He's also produced and performed on recordings by former James Brown sidemen Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, and Pee Wee Ellis.

Other notable Payne productions include 1992's The Funk Stops Here (Enja / Tiptoe), featuring Herbie Hancock's telepathic Headhunters rhythm tandem of bassist Paul Jackson and drummer Mike Clark, and 1993's New York Funk (Gramavision), a slamming compilation featuring tracks by The Mike Clark Group, The Fred Wesley Group, House Of Payne, and The Pee Wee Ellis Group, with a killer rhythm section of Stubblefield and bassist Anthony Jackson. Meanwhile, Give The Drummer Some is being reissued this year, retitled The Great Drummers of R&B, Funk & Soul.

Modern Drummer caught up with Payne at his cozy downtown New York residence, just a short walk away from Ground Zero at the southern tip of Manhattan. There he held court on the art of groove playing, pointing out some funky milestones along the way.

MD: You’ve made a lifetime study of funk playing and groove drummers of all different types. What's the essence of funky drumming?

Jim: When I was teaching at Drummers Collective in New York, I used to have people from other countries come up to me and ask, "What is funk?" And I’d realize that they were coming at it from a very different point of view. The music of some cultures is very prescribed and comes out of a distinct school of rhythm where there's only one way to play it. Well, you can't say that for funk, because it really is a style of music rather than a specific beat. So while you can say, "This is the bossa nova beat," for instance, you can't necessarily say, "This is the funk beat." Funk doesn't work that way because it's a creative idiom and there's a lot of different elements going into it. And drummers have come along and done different things with it over time, so it's always expanding.

In general, funk tends to go in the cracks of straight-8th rock rhythm, and that creates a whole different level of stuff going on. You’ve got 8th notes happening and you’ve also got 16th notes. That’s really the key to it. The specific difference between rock and funk is that creative 16th-note patterns can be played on the bass drum, the snare, or the hi-hat - however you want to do it. So instead of "1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &," you’ve suddenly got "1e&a 2e&a 3e&a 4e&a." Or you can think of it as a double time being within the regular time. That went through all the James Brown and Sly Stone stuff and everything up to today.

Funk is a different way of feeling the rhythm, where normal patterns like backbeats can be thrown out the window. When Clyde Stubblefield did "Cold Sweat," he didn't really play backbeats. He played some backbeats, but he put other accents on the & of 4 instead of right on 4. That sort of jarred everybody at first, but then it started another level of groove happening. So in a nutshell, funk is about changing the normal pattern of 8th notes. You add something to it that gives you a different flow.

MD: What are some landmark moments in funk drumming?

Jim: Way back in 1959, Earl Palmer introduced the concept of playing 16th notes on the bass drum on the intro to Fats Domino's hit "I’m Walkin'." You can also hear it on James Brown's "I Got Money," with Clayton Fillyau on drums, who played with James through his early period, including the Live At The Apollo album. That was totally new ground. It was the birth of what they call the James Brown beat.

To me, that was definitely a monumental breakthrough. When I heard that I realized there was a whole new world of rhythm out there that you could mess with. James Brown's "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" was a funk landmark. Melvin Parker, who is Maceo's brother, played the ride cymbals and a very simple rimclick on the snare drum. But the bass drum was kicking it. All those bass drum notes on the &s were like ... wow! And he's very clean in his technique. The drums on that song kicked everybody out of their seats. Melvin was an innovator, definitely, in that respect.

And then, of course, Clyde Stubblefield with "Cold Sweat," when he displaced the backbeat, was another landmark. That was a very important milestone in funk drumming. In terms of other monumental changes, of course, the ghost note that came in with the James Brown thing was an important step in the evolution of funk drumming. By utilizing those very soft notes in between the accents, the drumming had this undercurrent bubbling along with the whole thing. Jabo Starks was definitely into it. Clayton Fillyau played ghost notes all over Live At The Apollo. He credits a New Orleans drummer named Charles "Hungry" Williams as the guy who started it. Earl Palmer says he thought Hungry Williams was the guy who originated that beat, although other people thought it was Smokey Johnson who came up with it. But whoever it was, that beat definitely came out of New Orleans and it was perfected by James Brown's drummers, beginning with Clayton Fillyau.

Clyde Stubblefield's innovations were to play quarter notes on the hi-hat over the top, like on "Mother Popcorn." And then again, once that song came out, you had to go back to the woodshed to learn the coordination to be able to get that beat. Back in 1966, Joe Tex had this song "Papa Was Too." Clive Williams played drums for him at the time, and he introduced some new kind of 16th-note patterns on the bass drum. And there's a great drummer named Rodney Brown who played with Dyke & The Blazers during the mid-'60s who was also a proponent of that beat.

And then, by the late '60s / early '70s, came Tower Of Power. You've got to say that Tower's drummer, David Garibaldi, was a tremendous innovator. When I heard "Soul Vaccination" in 1975 at a party in San Francisco, it floored me. I just kept going back to the record player and playing that song over and over because I couldn't believe it.

MD: What was Garibaldi bringing to the legacy of funk drumming?

Jim: I think he was coming out of the James Brown bag, but greatly expanding that vocabulary in a very logical way. He decided to not only break up the snare drum and play 16th notes on the bass drum, but he also broke up the right hand pattern on the hi-hat and incorporated some Latin influences.

Gariibaldi had this pattern called the King Kong beat, which is an 8th, two 16ths, a 16th-note rest, two 16ths, and a 16th-note rest. And he would use that or things like that on the hi-hat and then incorporate another level. So at that point funk drummers had a broken-up hi-hat pattern, snare drum parts that could go anywhere, and bass drum parts that could do whatever you wanted.

MD: So this level of independence was developing a whole new tributary off of that funk mainstream, which continued with Mike Clark and on to players like Dave Weckl and Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez.

Jim: Right. And back in the late '60s and early '70s, you would never imagine that somebody could actually do the kinds of things that are being played today. But, of course, the human psyche is a funny thing. As soon as you say something is impossible, somebody somewhere is going to find a way to do it. And Garibaldi was able to do that very complicated stuff - different hi-hat, snare, and bass drum patterns - that people considered impossible back then. And not only that, he had accents and unaccented notes going along with it.

Garibaldi had two types of notes on the hi-hat and the snare drum. For the snare, he had ghost notes and accents, on the hi-hat he had accents and regular notes. And putting an accent on a right hand pattern on a hi-hat, again, takes it to another level. And then underneath that you’ve got a varying snare drum pattern. Just amazing! He must’ve practiced for hours to figure out his stuff. And I’ve worked on transcribing what Garibaldi has played. I can play the stuff, but I don't sound like him!

You learn a lot by copying the people you respect. But can you play something that a guy has originated himself and sound like them? Not with the masters, including Garibaldi. Go back and listen to Back To Oakland [1972] and the Tower Of Power album [1973]. Or check out Tower Of Power live today. Garibaldi is back in the band playing with bassist Rocco Prestia. It's definitely an education to see Garibaldi and Rocco, the same rhythm section that played on all those hits from more than thirty years ago, out hitting it again today.

MD: What about Mike Clark's innovations with Herbie Hancock's Headhunters?

Jim: I think Mike was coming from a different place. He, of course, lived in Oakland, which was a hotbed of funk in the late '60s and early '70s. Sly Stone was there, as was Tower Of Power. I moved out there at the time just because of that whole scene. I lived there for three years to try and pick up on it. But Mike was really coming out of jazz and funk at the same time. His eyes will bug out when he listens to Clyde Stubblefield just the same way when he listens to Tony Williams. His idea was, "Let’s try to combine this stuff."

In funk, the creation is in the beat or the groove that's going to happen. For a lot of those tunes that James Brown had hits with, whatever beat Clyde came up with became, in essence, the song. Mike Clark's thing was entirely different. He decided, "I’m going to improvise as I go along." But you’ve got to be careful because if you do that, the groove is going to go out the window unless you have a bass player that will work with you, as Mike had with Paul Jackson. So they were able to kind of trade places, so to speak, while keeping the funk flowing and steady.

Jackson was and is a tremendous bass player. He was able to play lines and have some spot in the line that would be the same every time. So he'd improvise around these lynchpin beats that you know are going to come around, and that locked it together. That gives the drummer freedom to do his thing, to use the beat but kind of get freer. Bootsy Collins did that with Jabo in James Brown's band on tunes like "Sex Machine," where he bounced around with 16th notes like crazy while the drummer laid down backbeats and also dialogued with what Bootsy was doing.

MD: That concept of Mike and Paul shifting roles back and forth sounds almost like a funk version of the relationship that Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian had as a rhythm section in The Bill Evans Trio, which was highly interactive kind of jazz counterpoint.

Jim: That's it. And that's the kind of thing I'm into now - implying the beat and playing around with it. I don't care if you play, don't play, or if you leave the stage altogether, the time is still going to happen. So I can sit on top of the groove and beat it out to everybody, or I can do what Elvin Jones did, where he just let it go and then kind of hit it from behind a little bit here and there. He knew what was going on and he felt the pulse, but he didn't state it all the time, which is what Mike Clark does and hopefully what I'm doing too. I'm coming out of that whole bag of being able to have it groove but also have it be interesting along the way.

MD: What about the incredible push-and-pull hookup between Zigaboo Modeliste and George Porter of The Meters?

Jim: Zig was an amazing innovator on the drumset. I saw The Meters at the Apollo way back when “Sissy Strut" was a big hit for them. And I was amazed because when they played that tune in concert, Zig was playing it two hands on the hi-hat. Every once in a while he'd take his left hand and hit the hi-hat and then he'd take his right hand and hit the hi-hat, which was totally unconventional. When you hear the song, you think he's just hitting the hi-hat with his right hand. But playing it with two hands affected the feel. Zig really incorporated the second-line feel, where you have a bass drummer, a separate snare drummer, and a cymbal player too. And he was trying to put all of that together, and he had the coordination to do it.

Zig was looser than a lot of the funk drummers in that respect, depending on what period of The Meters you’re talking about. I prefer the earlier period. During that time, drummers didn't have to play too loud. Most of the early James Brown stuff, from the beginning until about the '80s, the guys didn't play loud at all, and that allowed them to play with more finesse and a better feel, and they seemed to get out a lot more ideas that way. The same was true of Zigaboo. On those early Meters recordings he's not really whacking the hell out of the drums, so he was able to get a lot of nice little ghost notes happening. It's a very creative style of funk drumming.

It's too bad that a lot of drummers from that era weren't able to sustain those original grooves. What happened to Zig was what happened to a lot of guys, including some of the drummers with James Brown. When they got into bigger venues, they started playing louder. And then when disco came in, which involved a real pounding action, some of those guys thought, "Well, I gotta play like that now." And they ended up playing louder. But by doing that you end up losing the potential to do all that finesse underneath. So it kind of squelched the development of funk drumming, at least for a while.

MD: What about Bernard Purdie's contribution to funk?

Jim: He's one of the true masters. All you have to do is pick up a copy of Aretha Franklin's "Rock Steady" and listen to it to understand that. I listened a lot to the Aretha album Live At The Fillmore West, and pretty much everything Purdie did. I met him years after he had done the Aretha stuff, when he became a drumming icon. He called himself "The Hit Maker" at the time. He had this little sign that he would take around with him to sessions - Bernard Purdie, The Hit Maker - and he'd put it right there by his drums. He is, of course, a great self-promoter, but he would always back it up.

Purdie played on so many hits, and he always played great. At the time I studied with him, he had this studio at 1840 Broadway, which used to be the old Atlantic Studios. He had two floors. There was a recording studio on one floor and three practice studios above that, which is where he taught drums. He was very busy at that time, dealing with sessions and talking business on the phone all the time.

The best part about studying with Purdie was that he would take me along to his sessions after lessons. He'd do a B.B. King session, a Pepsi commercial, or an Ashford & Simpson session, and I'd tag along with him and sit behind him in the drum booth on the floor, just observing what he was doing. I learned a lot from Purdie at those sessions - about drumming and extra-musical things.

I learned that the drummer has to be a very strong, confident person to lead the thing. You have to convince everybody that this is the time and you guys sit on top of it. And then dealing with the producers and the artists is an art in itself. I remember one session Purdie did where he had some cross-sticking thing that he was doing, but the producer kept going, "No, man, that's not it. It's not working." And Purdie said, "Okay. I think I've got something that'll make it work. Let's try this." So they'd do it again and I swear Purdie would play the exact same thing, but because he had hyped it up, the producer said, "Yeah, man! That's it!" And he'd say, "I told you you'd like that one." So there's a certain amount of psychology and mind games going on behind the scenes. And that taught me that your instrument is one thing, but you've also got to develop chops for dealing with people.

MD: Is there an investigation of funk happening now with a new generation of drummers?

Jim: Absolutely. It's happening in the jam-band and hip-hop scene. Both worlds have basically given a whole new life to vintage funk grooves. And the interesting thing for me now is the jam-banders. They're what inspired me to put my band together. They want to hear real music and see people up there playing it. They don't want a sanitized show of some kind. They want to see real people sweating it out on stage. And they love the whole funk thing of breaking up the beat in creative ways.

Look at MMW's Billy Martin. He's a master of that, like a laid-back Clyde with more improvisation going on. I have students coming to me all the time saying, "How do I play like Billy Martin?" He definitely has a fresh take on it, and he's inspired a lot of players.

And while jam-band drummers are incorporating those James Brown beats in their music, hip-hop producers are busy sampling "Funky Drummer" and all those grooves from the '60s and '70s and making hit records out of them. The hip-hoppers used to make up beats on the drum machine and then at some point they decided, "Well, it sounds better if Bernard Purdie played it." So they take two bars of Purdie, sample and loop it, and that's their whole drum track. That's a testimony to the viability of those original grooves. Those vintage beats are still the essence of popular records today.