Playing beautifully

One of the positive things I'm trying to take away from my forced isolation is the chance to not only practice more, but practice differently. I decided yesterday to try and play and work on whatever i was doing until it sounded beautiful to me. What were the factors in that? Well many, but some of the things I was looking for was time/groovyness, pleasing and consistent sound, good balance between the different voices of the drum set, being able to play it at different tempos and volume levels and not sound strained etc. I certainly practiced longer on smaller amounts of material. I realize using a term like beautiful might seem vague as you could say it's in the ear of the beholder, but I think that's good. We all need to decide what we think is beautiful and would to hear, and then go after that.

Also inspiring to me has been watching other talented players post stuff that sounded beautiful to me. I'm thinking about people like Ferenc Nemeth, and Toronto's own Chris Wallace, as well as non-drummers Trevor Giancola and Mike Murley.

Here's a few tunes from Peter Hum's Quintet at The Rex, shortly before our tour was postponed by COVID19. Hopefully we'll be able to resume in the not too distant future, because, this is a group that I believe plays beautifully together.