Vinnie Colaiuta Interviewed by Sweetwater

hi I'm Mitch Gallagher welcome to the Sweetwater minute this time out our own Dixie Virgilio sits down for a drummer to drummer conversation with Vinnie Colaiuta one of the all-time greats Vinnie is here recording in the Sweetwater studios with this group Jing Chi consisting of Robin Ford and bassist Jimmy Haslip they're making a new album here it had a lot to talk about as far as that goes as well as his background as a drummer and what it takes to be a great drummer these days check this out how you doing everybody Nick Dee Virgilio here in my very special guest in house today as mr. Vinnie Colaiuta sir and Nick welcome thanks a coming to Sweetwater it's your first time here yeah and what do you think of the place it's it's unbelievable it's really I had no idea what this would be like it's an amazing amazing place it's it I mean I had no idea that it would be its own ecosystem which it is and it's it's great in that regard I think I think it's just great for everybody that's for them for the whole staff here and for people like us to come to visit you know it's just everything's under one roof and you've got this amazing recording facility here video facility food court doctor and a doc yeah even a dog don't feel sick though I know I feel good good thing and and and it's fantastic I had I literally had no idea and the studio's been very very comfortable the gear everything I'm used to playing is is there and I feel comfortable everything sounds great it's just it's I was dumbfounded you know I really it's really amazing cool guys have a great operation here well thank you very much it's pretty fun place to work now you're here with two other amazing musicians Robin Ford Jimmy Haslip recording a project that gene about saying that correctly genes he yeah and how's that going it's fun you guys making some good music I'm sure yeah it's it's really great fun and of course you know my my cohorts Robin and Jimmy are amazing and and and and it's great because we have a great friendship as well so we go way back and and we always have fun because even though you know we we all have our sort of identities we have a good chemistry and we're all like books so so anything can happen and we're very very amenable to all kinds of ideas and so and we you know it's it's been a while since we've done a project so it was time to do another one and this one's really interesting because it's more of a conceptual kind of an album meaning that how can I say this if there's just a sort of overriding concept of what the whole thing should be versus versus just any kind of tunes you know that we mix together which we did that on the other records but we still made it cohesive but this one is um is a little more um maybe cinematic I don't know I don't mean that to be that it's grandiose or anything like that it's just it's it's it's it's kind of like little environments you know it's it's very it's very cool well from what I heard it sounded really great some serious grooving going on yeah yeah there's a lot of groove oriented stuff and it's it's really cool cool now you've had a long and storied career I was checking out your website I think it's really great your your discography page well it's 32 pages long you're just good right so you played with just about everybody Under the Sun and all kinds of different styles of music from metal to fusion everything in between you know pop jazz country so how do you attribute your your ability to go to all these different styles and make it feel good how do you switch from playing in a country project to you know your craziness with Zappa and Joni Mitchell where you're sort of outside and then to Duran Duran or even Megadeth I mean you've really kind of covered a huge variety of stuff how do you jump in between those different styles well I think that that a lot of it has to do with the fact that you know during my formative educational years I was I always listened to everything and I didn't I didn't really differentiate between genres I just I just embraced everything and I had so much music coming at me just all kinds of different music it was it was a very fertile period of of creative growth and music and at that time and and I think that that just you know beginning my music education I sort of embraced everything I never really thought about those kinds of barriers you know and ever it never occurred to me it was either music was either good or bad to me so I think that when you really just love listening to all kinds of music and you're learning then it's it's not something that you feel like you have to decipher okay you don't you don't really feel like you you have to go into this decipher mode where you're sort of thinking okay I don't really get what this is about but I'm going to deconstruct it and study it and kind of paint by the numbers and learn the sort of rules so to speak and try to you know what I'm saying that the process never really so I think that eventually I started getting into doing sessions and I was confronted with having to do that and so if there were some types of things that I wasn't that familiar with I would just listen and try to sort of practice and get into my whole thing is just to get into the whole character of it into the whole what is it about much more so than saying well this is the kind of pattern that you play because then if you I feel that if you do it that way then you have to find a home for those patterns and you have to figure out why you're learning a pattern versus going in there thinking well I've got this vocabulary of you know 20 beats that work for this kind of music and I'll pick one right you know it doesn't so I think if you can kind of get inside the concept and open yourself up to what that music is saying to you then the other things will follow I just think in general that that seems to be the way the way it is for me anyway you know some people think it's like being I can I've been called a chameleon but really I just all I do is just kind of listen to it and immerse myself in it and say well okay what what are you telling me let me just it's like stepping inside of a picture sure you know I mean and you step inside and you go well it's kind of cold I need a coat you know it's raining you know I need an umbrella you know and it really is that I think concept rules and I think a lot of times nowadays it seems to be the focus has shifted a little bit on some extreme technical facility but but it's like you have to have a everything is is context in contrary I was gonna ask you that's kind of leads me to my next question I was in what do you think of today's crop of musicians and drummers specifically because there's a lot of great guys out there and gals who can really play their butts off what do you how do you feel about today's music I think I think that that there's this a lot of great players it's so you know you that's unquestionable okay you know so I can only sort of I think that um that if the environment today is a little different because everyone has a chance to be seen and heard so true you know there's always two sides of of anything and so the thing is is that you've got content pouring at you constantly so trying to sort of stand out above the crowd you know I mean it's it's it happens occasionally and and I think that um it's it's a it's great that you can you can get this kind of accelerated sort of learning through modeling things with these with video channels but I can say that that's from my own experience that as good as that is I think that sometimes you can get stuck in modeling phases and sometimes um you know these environments can be breeding grounds for homogeneity and so you know I can sort of flip back through my own history and corroborate that with other people from the year that I grew up in whereby its we sort of spoken with this with various people about this it's like it's like individual voices were championed and so somehow you had to find whoever you were and you know a counter-argument to that would be well how do you do that today when there's so many people where everybody's unique everybody is unique so um you just have to take that same vocabulary and sort of you know somehow just be yourself because at the end of the day that's all you've got so you know I have I have mixed thoughts about a lot of it but I think that there are a lot of people on every instrument that have a ton of facility sure it's great and and so people want to play and it's a good thing can only be a good thing you know you started as a young kid yeah how did you fall into the drums I mean I didn't before you got your first drum kit because it's something they fell into manhood were you just drawn to it as a young lawyer you know you know it's it's you know how you just got you see a child just just gets drawn to certain things that they like and there's no it's almost beyond analysis it's just these some people just I think born with something like that that they gravitate towards too you know it could be anything some kids maybe want to you know play baseball they just start playing with baseball or whatever it is but for me it was I was always doing that ever since I can remember it's just gravitating towards just music in general music really spoke to me and and I was always the typical kid that was just beating on things and taking silverware and to teach you know and pots and pans and then came the toy drum kits and and then a semi-pro kit so I kept breaking and then you know it just was that progression and for me it was just like you know I could just sit down behind the drum set and play I never had a problem with see this what what is this do and you know so I I don't know I just it was just a natural thing for me do you remember what your very first drum kit was like your first real drum kit yeah it was a Rogers kit and I remember that I was I I saw I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show I don't know I was maybe six or something and and you know I that was it I had to have ringo's drums you know so that you know really it impacted me so by the time you know I ended up getting a pro q I was trying to find Ringo's drums and nobody had them in stock so so that the music deal with the local music dealer said well here have to be swatch and they were this kind of psychedelic swirl color and and they were great drums they were great drums and you know I had them you know to my high school years and stuff and then and then I by the time I got to college I I was exposed to that great great sound which it really is and and it just impacted me really deeply as well and it just I said yeah this is it you know awesome yeah you went to Berkeley at Berklee College of Music and I was interviewing Russ Miller just the other day and I question for you is how important is it you've done a lot of jazz music in your career how important is that as a basis of learning I'm not sure I've mind my reason I ask is a lot of young players today I don't know if they get exposed to that kind of stuff and that kind of education as young players as much as they used to how do you feel as that as a basis of a player's I mean it's a starting point yeah um you think it's really important to have that kind of vocabulary in your in your your bones I think yeah I mean it's it's a really broad arena and you just say jazz because first of all it deals with an overriding improvisational concept but the approach on the drumset to that is you could you could it is possible that you could develop an approach and a touch based on you know the fact that you want to choose certain sound sources that honor that kind of music that will enable you to play dynamically and so if you get used to doing that and physiologically adapting yourself to that will it translate to you if you suddenly want to start playing death metal maybe not okay but but if you just take some of the elemental parts of what you might call jazz and and you just look at it conceptually and the sort of time feels and the idea the concept of Swing and and and I mean it's definitely by and large invaluable so so I think it depends on what you want to be right but but but the short answer is absolutely okay you know because those those things cut it you know you that vocabulary can cross-reference into and everything's kind of mixed together now you know it's it's yeah okay it's really cool information there so another leaf into another question kind of in the technical side of things since you played a lot of sort of outside music some hard stuff whether it was app or whoever else how do you stay centered when you're getting into some the really odd metered stuff do you stop thinking about where this groove is in 13 or 19 or whatever and you start going with a bar line do you ever are you always thinking that bar or you just kind of always know where one is you kind of forget about it just play because it seems like you have such a freedom when you do that kind of stuff yeah I think well first of all I you learn it by counting it and by counting subdivisions and those subdivisions become uh like just you might hear one large bar of an odd time and you feel those subdivisions and so that's kind of what it is for me okay I'm not really counting as much as I'm feeling those subdivisions because I know what they are but you have to you have to learn it by counting it I think just in terms of the learning process of it for anybody you know in general you have to do that and to the point where you could feel it some people can feel it and they don't even know what they're playing so then they have to learn it's like learning to speak and then you learn the grammar okay you know I mean but for but for those who maybe don't they can't naturally feel it as well I think it's it's probably because see the other thing is everybody has different learning modalities some people are visual some people here some people have to be hands-on so I think that showing them what it is and enabling them to to sort of look at it in all of its perspectives you know counting and seeing and all that sort of stuff and go okay that's what it is you know and then then the idea is prefer to be internalized but for me you know I spent a lot of time learning how to read when I was a kid because I really enjoyed it some some people hate it but I was one of those kids that just ate it up I loved it I was always kind of a nerdy kid anyway that read and studied things and as well as the creative aspect of it so for me getting that information enabled me to to get to the point where I could just feel it because how can I say this I would be able to understand and feel these these different metric combinations in various permutations and various combinations of however they exist and and so I would practice that and and and that helped me to instantly identify you know any kind of bar of whatever in whatever permutation having said that though I think that there are some ways that that feel more natural than others and so we generally gravitate towards those things you know and and so by the time I had end up you know playing with Frank I you know I had this information and so like I mean I understood it okay I understood the language and and I really enjoyed it you know I thought well yes as we all did for sure thank you let's get on to that great great sound that you've been playing with for a long time your gear how important is that sound and that feel to the music you make it's vitally important for me because I have to know what I'm getting whenever I sit down at a drum kit and and so that sound is is a unique sound in in drums and it's very identifiable and consistently identifiable and so and I've gotten used to the feel of it so so I you know my whole conceptual playing is is has become enmeshed in that over the years so so yeah it's it's vitally important to me and then I think there's probably a lot of reasons for that you know just just the way that that the shells are built and the fact that they have vodcast tubes those kinds of things create a certain feel you know all these all these things and when you hit the drums and the pom-poms when they open up you hear this Tambor you just know I mean I I know it and I could feel it and it's all those things affect your concepts sure I think so the thing about those drums is that for one thing I can play anything on those drums but I know that if I'm going to play anything that has a certain kind of jazz element or creatively speaking the kind of sound I get out of them it just makes that one to happen and and you know depending on what head combinations or how I tuned them I can I can play anything on it and and it's you know I've it's amazing because I've played I played Gretsch drums that I can tell you once I was in London doing a session and I would some from back line and they were so trashed that me it was you know I had to I don't know what I did one of the Tom legs was falling apart and they were all scratched up and just beat like they'd fallen down a mountain or something you know and I just set them up and played them and they sounded incredible it's just he couldn't kill them right and and I've had you know why I've just had heads on there that would just destroyed just turn it up and it's just it's almost like they'll just keep going and going and going till the head basically splits right if they just always sound great you know and I don't have to I don't have to think about that like there has to be a certain kind of head on and has to be tuned a certain way they just know it nope do that thing yeah yeah yeah so those are the things that matter to me no well then II thank you so much for coming to Sweetwater wish you all the best with the project with Robin and Jimmy thank you and thanks coming to Sweetwater please come back again good luck with all your future endeavors it's really been a blast and you're talking playing so likewise Nick thanks for having me thanks for Sweetwater - hope you enjoyed this interview with Vinnie Colaiuta my thanks to Nick Deaver zillio and thank you for joining me for the sweet water minute I'm Mitch Gallagher [Music] you you [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

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Id: eqXm57kMvbE

Length: 21min 56sec (1316 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2017