There’s a Bakersfield school of country-rock guitar playing. In the 1950s, there was a San Francisco school of Dixieland jazz. There’s a Chicago school of classical trombone playing. And there is, of all things, a Cleveland school of kettle drum players.
One of the best of them, Jauvon Gilliam, has been behind the timpani with the National Symphony Orchestra for a decade. His Cleveland approach to the tubs has brought to Washington a style of performance that is not only entertaining, but a valuable example for musicians struggling to build an audience for orchestral music.
The Cleveland school had its start with Cloyd Duff, principal timpanist with the city’s symphony for some 40 years. He taught Paul Yancich, current principal of the Cleveland Orchestra, who taught Gilliam. Lesson No. 1 was to think of the drumhead as a hot skillet and the sticks as your fingers. You don’t press your fingertips down and burn them; you yank them away at first touch of the sizzling metal. So, too, with the sticks and drumhead; you don’t push the mallets down and into the calfskin, but lift them up and away at first touch.
For Gilliam, that up-and-away often means that after striking a drum, his sticks end their graceful arc held above his shoulders. It’s not quite the stuff of a Black Watch tenor drummer twirling his mallets, but Gilliam’s elegant flourishes come as a delightful surprise in a classical context.
“You have to connect with audiences,” Gilliam says, and do so not just musically but visually. “I’m an entertainer. If that means playing in a way that is visually entertaining, then I embrace that.”
As long, of course, as the show doesn’t interfere with his core responsibility. The timpanist, by keeping time from the back of the orchestra, acts as a sort of assistant conductor, helping lead, as it were, from behind.
Gilliam has the freedom to flourish, but it’s hard to carve out room for such individual expression in other sections of symphony orchestras, where anonymity is often the overriding virtue. If you can pick the third-stand second violinist out of the crowd of fiddlers, she’s not doing her job. If her bow is not in sync with the others she’s not doing her job. It’s a tough environment for creative individualists.
But even given the opportunity to express themselves more extravagantly, many legit players would balk. In much of the classical world there’s the wrong-headed notion that performing with flair is unworthy of serious musicians.
Some singular musicians have learned to use a little Barnum to focus audience attention. Consider Duke Ellington, who as a young man in Washington was subbing in a band at Mrs. Dyer’s, “a dance hall where all the nice young society kids used to go.” A showman at heart, Ellington was frustrated by how little attention he was getting for his piano playing and chafed at the prospect of settling into a career as a journeyman sideman.
Which is when Luckey Roberts came to mind. One of the pioneers of “stride” piano, Roberts had huge hands that seemed to fly off the keyboard. Ellington had seen him at the Howard Theater and was paying attention. He “would throw them up in the air when playing piano in a flashy, acrobatic manner that I copied at Mrs. Dyer’s,” Ellington recalled. “That was where I started throwing my hands up in the air,” Ellington said. Striking a chord, his hands would bounce from the keys up to shoulder height. The audiences loved it. They “all said, ‘Oh, yes, Duke’s a great pianist. Send him back again!’ This,” Ellington joked, “although I still knew only about four numbers.” The results were immediate. “In two minutes, the flashy hands had earned me a reputation. And after that I was all set.”
Gilliam’s flashy sticks similarly benefit the National Symphony and demonstrate that there are types of showbiz that add to, rather than detract from, the orchestral experience.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
