Episode 12.1: History of the American drum set

Dan: In the jazz world, one of the other classic implements would be wire brushes invented by a Milwaukee hardware store owner in 1912 as a device to swat flies. And wire brushes are used most often on the snare drum. And instead of hitting up and down like you do with a stick, you get to do circular patterns. And do a lot of swishes.

Leigh: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Vandal Theory, a podcast about science and research at University of Idaho. My name is Leigh Cooper and I will be your host today. I'm the science writer and editor here at University of Idaho. I am joined by my co-host. Hello, Danae.

Danae: Hi, Leigh. I'm Danae Lenz, the external communications coordinator at U of I.

Leigh: Danae, welcome. We are starting our 12th full season of the podcast today.

Danae: I am so excited. It's going to be a good one.

Leigh: So today for our first podcast, we are actually diving into the world of music. So Danae, have you ever played an instrument?

Danae: I have played the flute for a dozen years or so. I got quite good and then I went to college and quit playing. And I still own it and I can play a little bit, but nothing like I did when I was like 17.

Leigh: Did you have like a genre that was your jam?

Danae: I had a teacher actually. My parents had me in lessons and so I played whatever she wanted me to play, which I feel like was usually classical music of some sort. Mozart, definitely some Mozart in there.

Leigh: I unfortunately never did get to do an instrument. I'm sure I threw a fit and my parents decided it wasn't worth the fight, but I regret that at this point. I do wish I had learned. I tried to teach myself guitar at one point to minimal success. Maybe sometime as an adult I will pick that up and run with it, but we'll see. It will not be today.

Danae: I wish you luck.

Leigh: Thank you. So today we're specifically going to be talking about drums and from the military rat-a-tat-tat of a single snare drum to the 30 or 40 piece drum kits played by some rock drummers, the drum kit has come a long way. While the individual pieces of the kit trace their origins around the globe, the classic drum kit got its start right here in America. Today we're taking a look at the history of this American instrument with University Distinguished Professor Dan Bukvich. Dan has been teaching, composing, performing and conducting at University of Idaho since 1976. As a professor of percussion and theory, he's spent nearly five decades at the Lionel Hampton School of Music and he knows a thing or two about drums. Today we'll dive into the story of the American drum kit and Dan is bringing his drum set and sticks to the conversation. All right. Ready to get going?

Danae: I'm ready to rock and roll.

Leigh: Of course you are. Dan, I want to thank you so much for coming on the Vandal Theory Podcast this morning.

Dan: Thank you so much for having me on the Vandal Theory Podcast.

Leigh: Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself before we dive in?

Dan: My name is Dan Bukvich. I've been at the University of Idaho since 1976. That would be 50 years. I prefer to think of it that way rather than a half century. But really the way I like to think of it is I came here as a graduate student. So I'm just starting my career here and I teach in the School of Music, by the way.

Leigh: That's an excellent way to think of that. So we're actually doing kind of a special Vandal Theory today. We're not shooting this in our usual podcast studio. We're actually in the Admin Auditorium because we needed a place for you to play your drums. You are a percussionist, yes?

Dan: I am a percussionist. It's one of many fun things I get to teach at the University of Idaho. And percussion includes this interesting American instrument, the drum set.

Leigh: So tell me about that. That's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to break down this drum set. You call it an American instrument. What's that based on?

Dan: I call it an American instrument because it's a collection of interesting things from all over the world put together, I guess like us, into a unique combination of sounds, concepts, histories, really.

Leigh: Excellent. So let's dive in. These are from all over the world. What was the impetus, the starting block for the creation of what we kind of classically think of as the drum set?

Dan: Well, the drum set, as I said, has instruments from all over the world. We'll start with the instrument that all drummers focus on when we start drumming and as we continue drumming. And it really doesn't matter what instrument we're playing. This is the core of percussion studies, the snare drum. It's a drum. It's got little wire things on the bottom, snares. So it comes from middle Europe, snare drum. And it's got a military tradition. That's how you typically hear it. It was used in the Swiss army back in the Renaissance to signal troops on the field. Military tradition went up through England and eventually to the United States.

Leigh: Is that mostly because the sound travels really well?

Dan: Yes. And it wasn't originally a drum like this. It's very deep drum. You can get online and find the history of the snare drum. It's kind of fascinating. Yeah, the sound travels really well.

Leigh: So for the music that we listen to on the radio and things like that, is the snare drum the classic, is that what they use to add the beat?

Dan: That's a great question because you're not going to hear this on the radio. You're going to hear this. That wacky sound is called a backbeat. It's the heart of all rock music and in subtle ways, all popular music of the 20th century. So that's what you would listen for rather than... And it combines with the bass drum.

Leigh: Okay. So now we're moving on to piece number two.

Dan: Piece number two. From the Middle East, moved into Europe. You see it in symphonies. It's the great big drum in the back, usually played by a single person, right? Or you see it in a Sousa band or concert bands, one bass drummer. Well, in the United States, the invention of the bass drum pedal allowed one player to play the snare drum and the bass drum. And combined with that back beat, it's the heart of rock music.

Leigh: So is the goal of that then either to just get rid of an extra band mate or because you control all of it together that you can have more control over the sound that you're creating personally?

Dan: I think what happened in military bands at the end of the 1800s is they wanted more horn players, more brass players. The easiest thing to do was try to move somebody from the percussion section instead of having sometimes three players (crash symbols, bass drum, snare drum). This allowed two of those players to play trumpet or whatever. That's a way loose history, but it's this technological invention that created the heart of the drum set. Bass drum, that's the big drum you see when you look at a drum set. It's the big circle thing. That's a bass drum and the snare drum is what's sitting between the drummer's legs.

Leigh: So at what point did those two work their way into kind of American music?

Dan: Early 1900s. The bass drum and snare drum worked its way into popular music in the early 1900s. Ragtime, early New Orleans music.

Leigh: And while we're listening, what is it you're hitting the snare drum currently with?

Dan: Sticks. Drum sticks. Sometimes they have little plastic tips last longer when you hit these symbols and often, most often they have wooden tips. Doesn't sound that much different, but sticks, the sticks themselves can be instruments in my world.

Leigh: Are those, the using of the wooden instruments together, is that a classic American technique or has that been around for ages and it just gets added depending on the band?

Dan: No, I think drummers will hit anything as their parents will tell you. So we just beat on things all the time and we're always testing, "Oh, what does this sound like?" Or, "What do the legs of this drum sound like?" Experimenting with sounds. Yeah.

Leigh: All right. So okay, so we've got the snare drum, we've got the bass drum, we've got the sticks. What got added next?

Dan: Cymbals. Cymbals from Turkey and Middle East and East Asia.

Leigh: Who added them in? 

Dan: They were added by New Orleans drummers in the ragtime era, early 1900s, mostly then cymbals from China, later on cymbals from Turkey, and you would hear them not too often in old time music. You've got a couple different kinds in front of you. Got one large one and then two slightly smaller ones that are imposed on top of each other so that they come together like two plates. Tell me about the difference between these two.

Dan: Well, the larger cymbal, which is probably the cymbal later on that we would listen to the most in listening to a jazz concert. Larger, played with sticks in a variety of ways, sometimes played with mallets. You hear this in symphony orchestras, concert bands, movie music all the time. And these two cymbals on a foot pedal kind of take the place of crash cymbals originally, right? So back to military music. Okay? Foot operated, but these cymbals together are called hi-hat cymbals. And in the popular music world of the 1920s, 30s, 40s, they were played not only with the foot, but with the sticks.

Leigh: You talk about how as a drummer, you just hit things just to see what the sounds are.

Dan: Well, yeah, sure. Yeah.

Leigh: Do these keep innovating? Like do you keep hearing as you've worked here for 50 years and listened to music throughout all that time, do you hear innovation continuously on how to use these various pieces of equipment?

Dan: Oh, sure. The things that surprise me about playing this instrument sometimes are what I end up coming up with without thinking about it. Sometimes I'll combine these symbol sounds with drum sounds. But players are constantly coming up with new sounds and maybe new instruments even.

Leigh: So we've got at least two more instruments here, one drum on the floor and one drum attached to the bass drum. Tell me about one of these.

Dan: These other drums, tom-toms from East Asia, Africa, from the United States, or what became the United States, Native Americans. Tom-toms, Africa, as I said. A variety of tom-toms. On the ragtime drum sets, they were tom-toms from China, quite different from these. And if you listen to your favorite rock drummers, you will hear many, many tom-toms, eight, nine, 10, sometimes two bass drums. It's expanded. But this set: bass drum, snare drum, cymbal, hi-hat, two tom-toms, that's maybe the heart of the drum set.

Leigh: What gives the tom-toms a different noise than the bass versus the snare?

Dan: Well, their size and the snare drum has snares on the bottom head. Well, not always. I can make it a tom-tom. I can turn them off. So tom-toms, it's size and tension. I can tension the heads to different pitches. So they're all technically tom-toms. Is that true? Maybe. Could be.

Leigh: Well, so tell me, there are different things. You've talked so far about sticks and you've talked about mallets. What else are some of the classic choices that drummers use?

Dan: In the jazz world, one of the other classic implements would be wire brushes invented by a Milwaukee hardware store owner in 1912 as a device to swat flies. And wire brushes are used most often on the snare drum, and instead of hitting up and down like you do with a stick, you get to do circular patterns and do a lot of swishes.

Leigh: What are some things, maybe some patterns or techniques that are jazz specific?

Dan: Well, some things that are jazz specific that when you go to Jazz Festival, you might want to listen to. Maybe the most obvious thing is this big cymbal here. You can kind of ignore, at least for a while, whatever else is going on. And maybe a great recorded example of this would be on the great Miles Davis album, "Kind of Blue", on the very first cut, "So What", played by the great, great jazz drummer, Jimmy Cobb. It's this big cymbal here. It's easy to hear because of its higher pitch and its cutting kind of attack. You can hear it easily in all the music, right? So you have to kind of listen past all the other instruments, but you'll be able to hear that cymbal. And at Jazz Festival, that's the cymbal that is most often played. It's typically played with the drummer's right hand. There are some left-handed drummers, but not, you know, it's right-handed. All the other stuff is color, kind of, except for this other pair of cymbals, the hi-hat. So listen for that big cymbal.

Leigh: Is that going to be different than, you know, I go to a rock concert, they're not going to play it. Is it the beat that they're changing up?

Dan: The beat changes, but it becomes less important. It's the drums in the rock world that become important. I have cymbals, but it's the drums, bass drum and snare especially, that give me the groove. Whereas in jazz, it's this cymbal and the hi-hat cymbals.

Leigh: The cymbal's the main character as opposed to in rock.

Dan: For the most part, yeah. Watch the drummer, watch the drummer's right hand. That is kind of fun.

Leigh: So you're talking about what's driving the music?

Dan: The drums are the obvious beat. The drums don't drive traditional jazz. The bass player does. The drums add color to that. Here's maybe a classic jazz beat. There's the cymbal called a ride cymbal. The beat rides there. Most of the music we listen to has a four beat pulse. This hi-hat is on beats two and four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And the bass drum, instead of being played loudly like in rock, is played at this volume. Called feathering it. I'm feathering it like you're playing with a feather. So the driving beat in jazz... ride cymbal, hi-hat, feathered bass drum. And everything else is an accent color.

Leigh: You've talked a lot about ragtime, which obviously pushed a lot of this forward. What are some of the other either genres or bands or famous drummers that pushed how they use this equipment forward?

Dan: Yeah. Well, in the history of the drum set, famous drummers who's playing advanced, not only the music world, but the development of the instrument itself. Well, one maybe most familiar to people who listen to traditional jazz would be Gene Krupa. And Gene Krupa's drum set is kind of what this set is. A hi-hat, a cymbal over here, tom-toms and a snare drum. Gene Krupa, most famous to the general public for "Sing, Sing, Sing" from the great Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall concert, 1938. Played on what we call a floor tom, because it's over here on the floor instead of up there and pounding bass drum. Why pounding bass drum? Well, in a huge dance hall, some of the dance halls in the '30s were the size of the Kibbie Dome. I don't mean height, but I mean floor space. You couldn't hear most of the music. All you could hear was this. Dare I try this, Lionel taught me the stick trick that Gene Krupa taught him. And I don't practice it ever.

Leigh: Well, see, as this is an auditory podcast, I can say that was brilliant.

Dan: It is a visual instrument and drummers have always been, well, especially in the swing era, they were judged on their show and that's kind of fallen off a little bit, especially in the jazz world. It is no longer cool, sadly, to get up from the drums and play the stage. And that's what all of those great drummers would do. They'd play the hall, they'd do stick tricks on and on and on, and that's fallen away. But drummers in the swing era were all judged on their show. How high could you throw a stick and catch it? And Lionel was one of the kings of great stick manipulation.

Leigh: Are there any other really famous where everyone was like, "I'm stealing that."

Dan: Well, every junior high kid in the world knows what came out of "Sing, Sing, Sing". It's called "Wipe Out". I think originally played up on this drum.

Leigh: I would say that most of our listeners probably will recognize that one.

Dan: Yeah, or maybe heard it next door or in the apartment above.

Leigh: At three in the morning, that's the best time to hear it. 

Dan: At three in the morning, yeah. For a kid who's getting into drums, what's your best piece of advice for them?

Dan: Well, my best piece of advice for anybody getting into the drums is traditionally, you didn't start with the drum set. Traditionally, you started with a rubber pad and a pair of sticks, and that's where you learned how to manipulate your hands. And that's probably what kept mom and dad sane. These days, people start with a full set, which gets, it's a little tricky. So if you're really serious and you think, "Oh, I might want to do this for a living," you might want to go old school and get a practice pad and some sticks and have somebody help you learn how to do the long roll. All your flams on and on and on because that's still the heart of what's going on. But should you buy a drum set? These days, there are thousands of quite good lessons online on YouTube. Don't have to spend a lot of money on a drum set, unlike other instruments. I can tension these and make quite inexpensive drums sound good.

Leigh: Any last things you want to leave with the audience? Any take home messages?

Dan: I would like to say that as a final statement, I mean, there are all these different sounds and we think of drums as being loud, but they don't always have to be loud. Lot of subtleties. But when you go to Jazz Festival, 60th anniversary coming up, and you wonder, "What should I be listening for in some of this seemingly crazy music?" Just watch the drummer. Watch the drummer's right hand for starters.

Leigh: All right. Dan, thank you very much for coming on the podcast today.

Dan: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

Leigh: Can you play us off? Well, Danae, how was that for a podcast?

Danae: That was so much fun. I can honestly say that in the years we've been doing this, I have never been bopping my head along to an interview, so that was quite fun. I really just loved... as I said, I played flute, I was in band, I'm familiar with drums to some extent, but I really just enjoyed the tour of the drum set, learning more about where everything comes from. And I love that he says it is an American thing despite all these different parts being from all over the place because that's kind of like how America is. We're an amalgamation of a lot of different things. I don't know. It was really cool and I'm really happy that you did something different for the podcast because it was fun.

Leigh: It's just so fun sitting there and watching him play his drums. We kind of talked about the fact that, oh, we're going to walk through the different drums and what they do and what they add to the music and where they're from, et cetera, et cetera. But we hadn't come up with a list of questions or anything, so he was really just playing whatever he thought would help teach what he was deciding to talk about off the cuff. So just watching him be so creative, he's obviously incredible, and just to watch him play at the drums was just super fun. And be able to hear the differences when he was trying to make a point like, "Oh, rock and roll. It's all about the incredibly steady, hard beat on the actual drums themselves." Well, jazz, let's switch over and you're going to see the beat with the cymbals. And it's like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I can hear that." That's something that I can easily pick up from the way he talked about it and showed with the drums. So it was just really fun.

Danae: Yeah, obviously I was only listening to it. I couldn't see it, but even then I learned a lot. It was really fun.

Leigh: If you really enjoyed Dan's performance here, especially the parts that were all about jazz, we hope you'll come take a listen at the 60th annual Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival, which takes place April 14th through 17th, 2027 on the Moscow campus. All right. Thank you for listening to The Vandal Theory. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform to help others discover conversations about science, research, and innovation at University of Idaho. Email us with research topics, questions, or issues you'd like explored in a future episode at vandaltheory@uidaho.edu. To learn more about research at University of Idaho and listen to past episodes of The Vandal Theory, visit go.uidaho.edu/vandaltheory. I'm Leigh Cooper.

Danae: And I'm Danae Lenz. 

Leigh: Thank you for listening.