“Voyager” with Vinnie Colaiuta — the cuts don’t get much deeper than this, do they?
I was introduced to this album by a different drummer, Jeff Porcaro. Well, not personally — the Musicians Institute in Los Angeles has done the world a public service by sharing footage of a clinic/Q&A that Jeff did with the school back in 1986:
The whole video is great, and it’s so fascinating to hear his perspective on various topics, even if these topics are dated. Case in point: toward the end of the video, Jeff talks about the horrors of direct-to-disc recording.
If you don’t know, direct-to-disc recording involves sending the signal of the music straight from the mixing desk to a record lathe that cuts the master vinyl as the artist plays live. Direct-to-disc is typically used in the context of bypassing reel-to-reel tape to improve fidelity by avoiding the noise and distortion of tape, especially the generation loss of sending one tape machine to another.
Of course, if you want to record a 45-minute LP direct-to-disc, you and the rest of the musicians on your album have to rip through every side of the record live in the studio, playing each song one after another in a single glorious take. There’s no opportunity to rerecord or even to adjust levels, so if something sounds wrong, the band has a tough decision to make regarding whether or not they want to do the whole side over again from the top.
(Now, and this is just my opinion, but direct-to-disc seems like a miserable way to record an album, especially in the era of multi-tracking.)
Anyhoo, Jeff brings up a then-upcoming direct-to-disc album by keyboard player Bill Meyers, with Vinnie Colaiuta on drums. Meyers is more of a bigwig arranger than a pop artist — in the words of Jeff, the music on the album is “out there stuff.” Jeff also declares it to have the best drumming he ever heard from Vinnie (as of 1986).
I tracked down the album, Images, and after looking into it, I don’t think this was actually a direct-to-disc recording, but rather a live digital studio recording. I can’t say if it was done live for fidelity, or if it was easiest simply because there are so many musicians on each tune that overdubbing just wouldn’t have been practical.
Now that we covered all that, I can say that this is “out there stuff,” but it’s also a very good-sounding album — some of the best fidelity to come out of the catastrophe that is 80s music. While I don’t think Vinnie had to play each song as one take, his playing is still top-notch, and on the third tune, “Voyager,” he gets the opportunity to show off with a 16-bar drum solo.
“Voyager” opens up with what I call Renaissance fair music, apparently much of it based on Symphonie No. 1 by Louis Vierne. This isn’t all that uncommon for progressive styles in the 70s and 80s (think of The Alan Parsons Project; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and, of course, “Stairway to Heaven”).
Some of the intro is honestly quite beautiful. Other parts… don’t quite work for me. After the “Prelude” section, “Voyager” launches into a rather greasy shuffle around two minutes and thirty seconds in (I presume this is the “Liftoff” movement). The tempo is fast, and the swing is hard. At 4:15, we get the drum solo, which is built with a vamp from the rest of the band that goes something like this:
Most of the drumming in the solo uses 8th-note triplets, with a bit of a linear flair and some intense flam licks. There’s heavy use of the flam drag as well as tap five-stroke rolls with a flam on the accent — you could think of that as less of a five-stroke roll and more of an extension of the flam drag.
Vinnie also uses some straight 16ths, with some phrasing that obfuscates where the beat is. The finale has a big run of 16th-note quad fills, played with the kick drum double in the middle of the beat:
I am very wary of using straight 16ths in a swung context; most of the time when I hear them, they really don’t work as well as the drummer probably imagined they would. But the accent pattern of the tom hits creates a hard shuffle feel, and so I ultimately feel like this is a neat changeup.
It’s also quite difficult to play at this tempo. Vinnie flubs it a bit at the end, but hey… it happens to the best of the best of us.
