Poetry Over Speed

Watch how people talk about drummers and you’ll hear one word more than any other: fast. The fast hands, the blistering roll, the solo that makes a crowd gasp. Speed has become the measuring stick. I think that is one of the saddest things in the percussion world — the worship of technique as the holy grail.

I teach the inverse: we prioritize poetry over hollow speed. Phrasing over technique.

A phrase is a musical sentence — it has a shape, a breath, a rise and a release. It is where you place a note, and just as much, what you leave out. It is the silence between the strokes. Done well, a drum stops being a metronome and becomes a voice. It can be as melodic and as moving as any singer.

Speed is not the enemy. Technique matters — you cannot say anything if your hands cannot form the words. But technique is the vocabulary, not the poem. I have watched players spend years building dazzling hands and still leave a room cold, because they never learned to say anything. And I have watched a student play one simple phrase — slow, with feeling, with space around it — and change the temperature of the room.

None of this belongs to one drum. Darbuka, frame drum, riqq, upright — the instrument changes; the principle does not. Every one of them is a voice waiting for someone with something to say. It is why, from the first lessons, I teach through compositions — real pieces of music — so a student learns the language and the phrasing at the same time as the technique, never one without the other.