Sometimes I wonder if Tommy Igoe has ever read my “Jazz Crimes” post. There’s a very good chance he has — my article is one of the first things that shows up in Google if you punch in “tommy igoe jazz crimes.”
It’s a bit of an exciting thought… well, more of a nerve-racking one if he’s read the first version of that post. Tommy, if you’ve read that and are now reading this, I really should apologize. The original write-up was quite turgid and scatterbrained; sometimes my sermonizing gets the better of me.
I guess I’ll give myself a shot at redemption by writing about Tommy again, this time disregarding any internet drama bullshit that I can’t be bothered with. Since the last post before my coding hiatus had me talking about why so many YouTube drumming videos are garbage, let’s talk about the last great drumming DVD ever made: Great Hands for a Lifetime.
Great Hands for a Lifetime is a rather monstrous four-hour video produced by Tommy in 2009 and released in early 2010 (I think I have that timeline right). The crux of the DVD is the namesake “Lifetime Warmup,” a warmup regimen that also works to provide a sort of benchmark for the technical ability of your hands (or, as Tommy puts it, “an amazing routine that will do great things for your hands and give you a fresh awareness of your own technical facility and limitation”).
The warmup essentially uses a double-stroke roll to connect different licks, which are mainly rudiments (as well as what I call “non-rudiments”: licks that aren’t on the list of 40 but aren’t often regarded as hybrids either).
Half of the video concerns the warm-up, breaking down each part and teaching you how to string it all together, while the other half features Tommy instructing you on the fundamentals: proper grip and technique, as well as how to play the basic motions of drumming. The double stroke roll in particular gets an extended demonstration.
Great Hands for a Lifetime works toward an interesting audience; I would not call it a day-one drum lesson. There’s an expectation going into the video that you already know how to read music and are knowledgeable in the basics of rhythm (time signatures, different subdivisions, and tempo changes, not to mention dynamics). As such, I think Great Hands for a Lifetime might be too much for someone who has never picked up a pair of sticks before.
Rather, I look at the DVD as a gut check for the type of player who’s been messing around on the kit for several years (or decades) but hasn’t spent quality time with an instructor. Or, as in my case, a gut check for the kind of player who’s far removed from their time with a teacher.
When I first went through Great Hands for a Lifetime, I had been playing for about 15 years, but I was curious about the project’s content since it’s a highly regarded DVD (with the era of online lessons, it’s probably the last great drumming DVD ever produced). And I did enjoy going through it; it was effective at putting me through my paces, and there is a lot of practice material in the video. I still watch snippets from time to time — it’s very helpful for getting back into the swing of things after I’ve taken a week or two off from playing/practicing.
The Lifetime Warmup is also good fun to play, although it’s tough for me to go through the full version cold turkey without any preparation (and there’s a brutal five-minute version that I can only imagine is an effective warmup if you’re gigging every night).
The video does have a bit of philosophizing that leaves me kinda uneasy. In his opening spiel, Tommy encourages you to keep an open mind toward different approaches, methods, and techniques regarding music, while cautioning against getting too caught up in the “right” way to play (scare quotes his).
A somewhat nebulous example is this Afro-Cuban/Latin thing Tommy heard about once, where the fingers scratch the head of a snare drum. But we know what Tommy is talking about — consider the classic heel up/heel down discussion, or perhaps what exact grip to use. I can think of an infamous video that features a windbag drummer declaring French grip to be useless while also calling it German grip. I guess not researching basic things (while also having zero perspective) will get you onto YouTube’s most popular drumming platform.
Despite the importance of keeping an open mind, Tommy also routinely makes it clear that there is indeed a right and a wrong way to play the drums. In fact, about two minutes after his opening monologue, you’ll hear Tommy say “This is wrong” for the first of many times during his demos.
At the end of the four hours, you’ll probably walk away with the reasonable idea that you shouldn’t be too prejudiced while also having some discernment in what you take seriously as a drummer. It’s downright ignorant to bash on the French grip, but you must also accept that there are ways to play drums that will make your life needlessly difficult and should be avoided.
Even as I write this, I too feel a little wishy-washy. Being dispassionate can be a good thing, but it’s also OK to put your foot down and have a strong opinion on something, especially if you’re a guy like Tommy. People seek him out specifically because they want his opinions, his advice, and his perspectives.
Another problem, as always, concerns the DVD’s attitude toward the rudiments. Tommy is very receptive to them, discouraging drummers from regarding the rudiments as being old-fashioned and marching-oriented.
Unfortunately, the rudiments are, by their very nature, both old-fashioned and marching-oriented. Many of the rudiments (especially the ones talked about in the DVD) were developed by marching snare drummers decades, maybe even centuries, before the modern drum set came together.
Tommy does make it clear that the video is not a rudiment method since he doesn’t talk about every rudiment nor what to do with them on the drum set. But he is zealous towards their embrace, as if a lick is deserving of objective importance to the drum set player just because it happens to be on a rudiment list. To be clear, Tommy is hardly the only drummer with this philosophy.
The proof is in the pudding: Tommy doesn’t talk about every rudiment because not every rudiment is worth talking about, whether it applies to the Lifetime Warmup or not. While he does bring up a few licks that aren’t part of the routine, in the e‑book PDF that comes with the DVD, Tommy describes a few rudiments as “not good drumset rudiment[s] at all”.
Other ways in which Tommy proves my point include his use of a different rudiment classification system, which he probably created since the one on the list of 40 is far from robust. He also talks about the ruff,* one of those “non-rudiments” I mentioned earlier, which not many drummers know about in this day and age, likely because it’s not on the list of 40 (don’t count the single-stroke four and single-stroke seven).
I do think Tommy has a valuable perspective to share, so I just wish he was a bit franker about what the rudiments are and what they offer to a drum set player in the 21st century. I actually think he presents the rudiments with the right angle: using them more as conditioning patterns rather than something you try to use to make music on the kit. There are many valuable patterns in the list of 40, and there are just as many that most drummers don’t ever consider, for good reason.
At the end of the day, these are little more than gripes as I don’t think they significantly hurt the DVD’s effectiveness — it’s still a well-produced and coherent project. Overall, Great Hands for a Lifetime instills a healthy attitude towards drumming despite some occasional hokeyness. Some people get irked when Tommy downplays the importance of flashy playing, but he’s walked the walk.
In fact, it almost seems like a certain sullen filmmaker watched Great Hands for a Lifetime and proceeded to write a screenplay where the characters do the exact opposite of everything Tommy says, creating a rather deluded and dour jazz melodrama.
Seriously: “Is anybody breaking a sweat or feel like something funny is going on?”; “215… are you scared of a number? Who’s scared of a number?”; “There’s no sense in going on if you've reached the top of your power band.”; “Anybody have any blisters? Does anybody have any calluses? Is there blood anywhere? Of course not.”; “What happens when we get faster? Nothing.”; “Does it look like I’m working hard?”
It’s uncanny, really.
* ^ Tommy defines a ruff as a short single-stroke roll ending with an accent. Overall, this might be the best definition to use in the 21st century, but maybe I'll talk about this more at a later date…
