 As keyboardist David Garfield and drumming greats Gregg Bissonette and Vinnie Colaiuta were sitting at the bar conversing, Garfield broached the topic of recording a tribute piece for Tony Williams for his next solo album. Vinnie and Gregg were so into it, the threesome started writing out ideas for it on the back of a napkin.
"I knew Tony was important to both Vinnie and Gregg," Garfield recalls. "In
fact, I had been rehearsing with Gregg when Tony passed away. When we got
the news, Gregg was devastated. It drove home the point just how important Tony was to so many people."
"I've done a lot of double drum recordings over the years," Garfield says, "groove stuff with Carlos Vega and Jeff
Porcaro, Vinnie and Carlos, Vinnie and Jeff, and Jim Keltner and Richie Hayward. But the drum parts were never
written out or composed. This time we wanted to plan ahead."
Gregg Bissonette recalls, "David said, 'One guy could play this and one guy could play that,' and he put his fingers
together like a puzzle and said, 'It would fit together like this,' and he sang a groove. Vinnie and I both said,
'Cool.' I was excited, especially since I'm the biggest Vinnie Colaiuta fan on the face of the planet.
"When we rehearsed the tune, we took what David had written on the napkin and talked about what part each of us would
play," Gregg continues. "Once we started working on it, the parts fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
We did a rehearsal first with Jimmy Johnson on bass and David playing keyboards, and the first time we did
a run-through, there was a click going on. The first thing that struck me was how amazingly well Vinnie plays with a
click - probably better than any other drummer. I've done certain albums where we've both
played on individual tracks, and I've asked to hear Vinnie's tracks. Nowadays you can look
on a computer and with Pro Tools see where the click is and where the recorded drum part
is. Vinnie is always perfect and his time is so locked. That made it incredibly easy
to play double drums with him. And, of course, it was so musical. It was like a drum duet as
opposed to a drum duo. Also, like Tony Williams, Vinnie is very passionate when he sits down and plays.
It was really inspiring."
Anyone who knows Gregg Bissonette knows how passionate and enthusiastic he is
about music. Gregg's excitement about the project and his mentor, Tony Williams, was
contagious. "Tony was the king of the passionate aggressive flam," Bissonette says. "I had the honor of
studying with him for about a year, off and on, before he passed away. I
would fly from LA to San Francisco and go to his house. I feel so fortunate to have had that experience."
When it came time to do the recording of "Tune For Tony" for Garfield's recently
released album, Giving Back, the drummers brought their usual gear. Bissonette brought
in his Mapex set and Colaiuta used his favorite Gretsch kit. Both used Zildjian cymbals:
"I had a pair of Trash Hats that gave a real staccato sound," Gregg states. "I think
they stand out on the track. We both had coated Ambassador heads on top of the
toms, and our kicks were tuned similarly. But my snare was a little higher-pitched."
"We set up Vinnie and Gregg in two separate rooms," Garfield recalls. "But they
could see each other. What was amazing was their precision. It almost sounds like one person
playing, even though it would be impossible for one person to play such a part. They
created the drum part, and I composed the tune. It was the most ambitious thing I've
ever done, because the melody was ridiculously hard."
When asked to recall the session, Vinnie starts detailing the drum parts as he listens
back to the tune. "Some of my splash cymbal stuff is panned to the center," Colaiuta says.
"A lot of Gregg's stuff is panned right and I'm panned left - a lot of the hi-hat and
snare stuff. It sounds to me like the bass drum is two different drums split up. Gregg
was playing 8th-note hi-hat time and snare time and I was playing fill-ins.
"There were times when we weren't playing exactly the same thing," Vinnie goes on,
"like during the intro. Gregg plays 8th notes, heavily accented on the downbeat, maybe
even quarter notes. We split up the bass drum between the two of us, where he'd play
the main beat and I'd play around it. I would fill in between the 8th notes he was playing
with these little snare, hi-hat, and splash fills. The result was like one guy playing a pattern
with a lot of embellishment.
"There's a sort of bridge section," Colaiuta continues, "where you can hear the drum part
thicken with a bunch of tom-toms. I was augmenting the groove with toms, which was normally
kick, snare, and hat, while Gregg was playing more intricate stuff on the cymbals.
Then when Jimmy took his bass solo, you can hear where my drums are panned because the
other drumset comes out. And then when you hear the low piano octaves, that's Gregg playing.
Then there's another section after the bass solo that has a boogie woogie piano thing
where it's Gregg.
During Mike Brecker's solo, I hear my China playing time, and during the
trumpet, Gregg is playing the upbeat of 2 on the snare. Then we've got a groove going
together and he's augmenting the backbeat with an auxiliary snare. Then it's the two of
us playing off each other. That solo section ends with trumpet, and you hear the groove
get broken up, and that's me doing that.
"When the drum solo section starts," Vinnie continues, "it's Gregg and me playing
the same groove. On the second half of the drum unison solo section, we displace the
groove. At the end of the eighth bar, I shift the groove a 16th note behind and Gregg
shifts a 16th note ahead. That goes on for two bars, and then I change it again and start
blowing. Gregg stays on his displacement, and at the end of the phrase we play a Tony
figure together - a flammed Tony-ism. It's like a series of flams in unison."
Bissonette describes it this way: "We played that loopy groove together in unison,
then one guy started displacing it and then the other. I had a piccolo snare, which was
tuned a little bit higher than Vinnie's. So when we did things off each other, it sounded
neat because of the way they were panned. After we displaced it off each other
for quite a while, we did a unison lick that's very Tony inspired, but it's a lick I often
attribute to Vinnie. I call it the 'brashta brashta brashta brat brat brat brat brat.'
That's the lick that brings us out of the whole double drum jam thing."
"On the last melody," Vinnie explains,"Gregg is on the China and we're playing it
louder and stronger because it's the last head. At the end of that last melodic phrase, it's a
series of 16th-note triplets that we both play in unison with everybody else, and the song
ends with this loud flurry. On the recording, an edit happens at the end. That edit sounds
like it's in another time signature, but it's not. It's just an edit."
'The sixth take was an amazing one that I loved," explains Garfield of the edit. "In the
solo section, Vinnie modulated the time, and I was so knocked out by that section that I
was adamant about using that take. But Gregg pulled me aside and said, 'No, please
don't. It's really hard to get these bass drum things and snare hits to sound exactly in the
pocket. We need to do it again.'
"They nailed the part on take nine," Garfield continues. "In fact, there was no
digital reworking needed, so that's the one we went with. But I liked the bit from take
six so much that we tacked it on the end of take nine. At the end, you hear this kind of
big fermata, like an ending note, and out of that comes this other time signature. Then it
comes out of that and goes back into the original groove.
That's the solo section from take six. It was just a special moment. Vinnie
did one of those things that only he can do, where he takes the time and messes with it."
Of the overall project, Gregg states, "One of the things I remember most was that it
really seemed musical. It wasn't like two drummers trying to have a battle. It was
held together in a real musical way. For instance, I remember at the end of the song
throwing out a lick that is a total Vinnie lick, a double pedal thing where you play
the right hand on the floor tom, then the left foot with the left side of the double pedal,
then a left hand on the floor tom, and then the right foot on the double pedal - and he
answered that and the tune faded out. That was just great. It was such a blast."
"What I was really impressed by was how well Gregg and I were mixed,"
Colaiuta says. "It was almost like a seamless drumset. We talked about it a little
beforehand and then we just sat down and played. That's why I love playing with
Gregg. Not only is he a great drummer, he's one of the very few people I can
think of that when we play together, it's complete cooperation. And as a result of
that, there's a synergy greater than the sum of its parts. With Gregg, the operative
term is cooperation, not competition.
"Compositionally, the tune sounds like something Tony would have played on
where his identity would shine through," Colaiuta concludes. "We played it in that
spirit. Tony was always looking for new vistas to explore, and he went through
several areas over the course of his career that he explored really well. On 'Tune
For Tony,' there are moments where we tried to tip our hat to him. I think we
played some things that were a part of the Tony vocabulary."
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