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Jon Hazilla, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Playing brushes is a dying art. Brushes are hard to play and even harder to teach, because there's no standard notation; for one thing, a lot of it is visual. The foundation is the patterns to specific tempos: ballad strokes, mid-tempo strokes, up-tempo strokes, and specialty strokes. Students need to be able to play steady time within those tempos before we can talk about soloing."
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Mohamed Kamara, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"It goes together—African drumming and dance. You don’t count the steps. It’s a whole different way of communication. We have a lead drummer who will give you a signal, which lets the dancers know when to start the steps, and I can give them a signal that tells them to change it to speed up, to stop it. There are hundreds of rhythms, and each one is unique, each one is done for something different, because each one has a different break to tell the drummer when to start and stop and when to start again."
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Robert Kaufman, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Practicing is a disciplined study of ideas and information. Hopefully, this new information will reach deep parts of your mind and body and will eventually become a part of you. If you try to remember what it was like when you learned to walk and speak, you will acquire a more accepting and patient outlook toward yourself as you approach learning new material."
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Steve Langone, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"I studied with Alan Dawson and use many of his approaches in my teaching. Even with technical exercises, Alan would have his students sing a song and play an exercise at the same time. It’s relevant, when playing a groove, to have a melody going on. Singing helps you internalize the physical motions; what your hands and feet are doing becomes subconscious. I’ve applied Alan’s methods to Brazilian, Afro-Cuban, jazz, funk, and other kinds of world music. Alan Dawson was and still is a great source of inspiration."
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Jerry Leake, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department
"Living in current competitive conditions, drummers need to develop fundamental skills playing world percussion: congas, frame drums, cajón, or dumbek, for instance. With these added resources, assimilating traditional rhythms to drum set becomes easier and more profound. By focusing on the process of learning music (taking small steps), after years of work you will have traveled a great distance in your own journey. I tell students not to be determined to reach a goal or play like their heroes; rather, be devoted to the love of the art itself."
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"It's not enough to learn a drum pattern. You also need to know how the pattern works within the context of the music at large: how to pace yourself, how to balance the voices you're creating in your pattern, how to relate to the melody, and how to come in at the right point. I've been fortunate enough to have had a chance to play original music with people from Turkey and other countries, to get an idea of the sound and aesthetics associated with these styles. That's what I'm trying to transmit to students."
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Victor Mendoza, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"There is a misconception that you take one course in Latin music, therefore you know it all. That'd be like saying you studied one Bach prelude, therefore you understand Baroque music. When it comes to Latin music and Latin jazz, it goes very deep."
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Ricardo Monzon, Associate Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Traditional styles have been played the same way for many years. It can be hard to break that tradition if you're not from the area where a style comes from. You may have ideas but hesitate to express them because of the fear that natives of that area will criticize you; when somebody outside a culture makes changes to a tradition, sometimes people don't take it that well. I would say, respect the tradition and study it, but then build from there. Experiment and express yourself, make it your own. Don't let the tradition stop you; use it as a starting point. Because things have to keep changing."
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Rod Morgenstein, Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"Most drummers are not involved in the creative songwriting process, and the bottom line is that, by and large, that is where the most significant amount of money is made. If you're one of those drummers who sits in the corner reading magazines and eating pizza while waiting for the rest of the band to get the song together so you can just add your oom-pah, oom-pah-pah to it, you can have a scenario where you'll still be home living with your parents and driving your 15-year-old car with 200,000 miles on it while the main songwriter in the band pulls up to rehearsal in a brand-new Porsche. . . . So I encourage my students to dig down deep and see if they have any kind of creative songwriting abilities. I want them to avoid what I had to live through. It took me a while to say, 'Oh, I get it. Time to come to the party.'"
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Alberto Netto, Assistant Professor
DEPARTMENT : Percussion Department"When I was younger, I had one occasion when I was asked to play samba for a group touring in Brazil. I'm from Brazil, and I didn't know how to play the samba! The moral? Don't take it for granted, just because you're from a place, that you know that culture really well. You need to learn your own cultural rhythms sometimes. Now I teach drum set, and my expertise is Brazilian music."
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