performed by Luther Gray, and members of the Coast Jazz Orchestra, Taylor Ho Bynum.
This drum kit concerto is a social experiment. I was awarded a MacDowell fellowship in 2019 and was given complete freedom to create whatever I wanted. So I decided to write an homage to my favorite instrument: the drum kit. What does it mean to be a drummer in a band? The drummer keeps the time, helping everybody else be “on time” …What is time? The piece draws inspiration from Carlo Rovelli’s ideas presented in his books The Order of Time and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Basically, there’s no shared present. And there’s quanta of time (micro particles) that we only notice once we interact with our environment, which in turn, is an agglomeration of interactions. Life itself, you could say is mad up of this infinitesimal interactions. So the Drum Kit Concerto is that: an agglomeration of interactions. When people interact, they create time. There’s no common beat that we follow. We create and draw time ourselves. And what better way to revel in time-making, than in a rock band.