Ralph Peterson 35th Annual Student Music Awards - Downbeat

all his own, for how could I get all of my music to sound different and the
same at the same time. Certain harmonic passages were therapeutic. They
could change the way I feel. Whenever I found something like that at the
piano, I wrote it down, and it became part of a composition.”
The son of a police officer who rose to be mayor of Pleasantville, N.J.,
Peterson took up trumpet in fourth grade. He describes his early drumming
personality as a self-taught “basement experience.”
Peterson initially was a trumpet student at Rutgers, but he quickly persuaded
drum professor Michael “Thabo” Carvin to take him on, beginning
a profound master-apprentice relationship.
“Michael told me to pick someone and make him my guy,” Peterson
said. “He’d watch me sit in their space as long as I could, as deep as I could
go. Then he’d tell me to divorce myself—‘Don’t play that anymore when
you come into my room.’ That forced me to learn somebody else. When
I came back to my guy, the two were connected. It’s the process Tony
Williams referred to in his 1979 Zildjian Day interview, when he was asked
if he had his own style. He said that he was just playing what he thought
Max Roach and Art and Elvin would be playing if he were them.
“That’s what I teach my drummers now. They name guys who are
younger than me, and I say, ‘OK, but do you know who they listened to?
How can you effectively copy them if you don’t know where they came
from? Then you’re tracing a lineage.’ That’s what some young players don’t
understand about the importance of music as art, as opposed to as popularity
and product. One is not going to be around in 50 years.”
Reinforcing that sensibility were components of Carvin’s pedagogy
that transcended technical particulars. “Thabo taught me that all drumming
is sleight of hand, like a magic show. If you watch videos of Papa Jo
Jones, it doesn’t look like he’s playing the things he’s playing. Before I knew
who Papa Jo was, Carvin took me to his apartment—we’d clean it, and he’d
fix some eggs. Later, it registered how important those moments were.”
Closing in on his 50th birthday and his 16th year of sobriety, Peterson
talked the talk of someone comfortable in his own skin.
“I almost killed myself trying to be somebody else,” he said. “I failed
miserably in every conceivable aspect. Trying to figure out how not to be
completely swallowed by my love for Art Blakey. Having the same experience
with Elvin. Where do I fit in? Am I swinging hard enough?
“Now I’m not making things happen; I’m letting them happen. I’ve
stopped trying to be the mighty oak. There’s a tune on my new record
called ‘Bamboo Bends In A Storm.’ I’ve started to fold my arms and let
storms in life blow over. As my musical IQ increased, my desperate need to
cover shit up with velocity and pyrotechnics has rolled out like the tide. The
dialogue is multi-directional within the group, not binary with soloists. It’s
more thoughtful. It’s more considerate. But I still push music to the edge of
the energy envelope, because I believe that’s where creativity is.”
Those dynamics mark Peterson’s playing with Zaccai and Luques
Curtis on the sextet tracks of Duality Perspective and on their 2011 release
The Completion Project (Truth/Revolution), which offers him the opportunity
to lock in with percussionists Pedro Martinez, Rogerio Boccato and
Reinaldo De Jesus. It’s evident that the drummer—who played alongside
percussionist Pernell Saturnino during a 1999 engagement with David
Sánchez—has devoted much energy toward assimilating the fundamentals
of Afro-Caribbean drum dialects.
“Pernell pointed out that the first word in ‘Afro-Caribbean’ is not
‘Caribbean,’” Peterson said. “I started to feel clarity—that I have a relationship
to timbales and music of the Afro-Caribbean culture because I was
born into it. Instead of trying to be the African American who was attached
to the Caribbean piece, it’s OK that my grandmother was born in Trinidad
and raised in Barbados. A thread runs through the music of that region
back to West Africa. I may not play the Afro-Cuban grooves in 7 and clave
the way the Cuban purists believe it should be done. But it didn’t start in
Cuba. It actually started in Guinea and Senegal. My affinity for loving Art
and Elvin is born of that same thread. So I’m accepting me.
“Why you play something is more important than what you play. Don’t
check out the thinnest, newest branch on the tree. If you dig into the root
instead of being distracted by the fruit, the root will teach you what the fruit
means. Then you can push forward.” DB