Brad Dutz, pfMENTUM, February 1998

by Jeff Kaiser

First, Brad, let's hit the bio stuff:

I was born in 1960 in Decatur, Illinois, and I STILL took up music...isn't that weird? Surrounded by cornfields and soy beans. It's not too big. At that time around 90,000; now it's about 70,000. Surrounded by farmland, it's where they make Caterpillar tractors. Archer-Daniel-Midlands is there. I got lucky because in seventh grade I had this great music teacher who hooked me up with interesting music. I was thirteen or something. He turned me on to Charlie Parker; it was pretty deep for me, and later onto Maynard [Ferguson] and Tower of Power. They were pretty big in '74. I guess that was my first introduction that led me to the kind of music I was to become interested in.

Did you start on percussion?

No. To be honest, fifth grade was cello. Illinois had this twisted thing that you couldn't start band until sixth grade, but you could do orchestra in fifth. And I really wanted to play. My mom gave me a few piano lessons, but I wasn't into it. I saw a cello and thought it was really cool, so I started that. But I accidentally dropped it down the stairs and broke the bridge off...I always wanted to play other things that you hit, you know?

When did you start mallets?

Sixth grade I started snare drum. At the same time my mom was in college getting her vocal music degree. She met this mallet teacher at Millikin, where she was at, and was able to get me a two and a half octave marimba in seventh grade. I still have it. It's in cartage; it's way out of tune, but it's a nice marimba. So I started mallets early and then started on drum kit cause there was jazz band. Then in high school I met this other friend of Mom's named Joe Wright, a conga player, and took lessons with him.

Mallets are a statistically unusual instrument. I work in the schools; kids want to play sax, flute, trumpet. Why did you choose mallets?

I never requested marimba. I was kind of lucky in that my mother made opportunities available.

What about college?

I ended up at North Texas at 17, and there were 120 percussion majors. You find out where you stand quickly. I had already started congas and mallets. I dropped the drum set at this time because I realized there was a lot to learn about this percussion thing. I didn't feel really good about the coordination of my feet...I always felt that my hands were o.k., but my feet just couldn't get it together. This led me to hand percussion. I always loved history as well, and hand percussion such as the tabla have such an incredibly rich and long history.

North Texas was, and is, one of the premier jazz schools in the country...

Yes. In '77 and '78 it was pretty well established as the top jazz program in the country.

So you were doing big band stuff?

As a freshman I auditioned both on drumset and percussion and went nowhere on the drums, but made the ninth band, the last band, as hand percussionist and mallet player. There weren't that many other 17 year olds with the experience on mallets or conga, but there were a lot of drumset players. They wouldn't really judge you on your hand percussion playing, because most of the teachers didn't know about that stuff. They would look mostly at your sight-reading ability. So, piano lessons, theory and my limited mallet technique...which I had started four or five years earlier helped. In six semesters I went from the ninth band to the first.

What about extended mallet technique?

When playing a mallet instrument you are not dealing with all the different inflections that can be achieved by, say, a wind player, so you develop other mallet techniques to expand the vocabulary. Soft mallets get a different sound than hard ones. If you flip them over and strike with the part you normally hold you get a "clicky" sound along with the tone. You can strike the bar on one of the nodal points [Ed. note: See Pythagoras for more on nodal points] and bend the note by holding the mallet down while pulling it one direction. You can use bows, to bow the sound like a violin. A lot of this has been pioneered by the film industry for sound effects, by experimenting, and by just standing behind the same instrument for hours on end. Ron George actually clamps the bars to dampen the tone. You can also lay stuff on the bars to make it sound different, slide paper under it. Now I just mainly work on making the mallets blend with other instruments. I particularly enjoy marimba and bass clarinet.

When did the ethnic hand percussion come in?

After college. I was never even exposed to tabla until age 20.

So looking at your bio, I see you played with Maynard Ferguson. He had a reputation of going to North Texas and grabbing the best musicians to tour and record with him. Is this how you got the gig?

He did that ages ago, but when I got in, it was a hand-me-down generational thing. He'd ask whoever was leaving to recommend a replacement. I got in when he added more percussion. I was lucky enough to have Tim Reese on sax and Ray Brinker on drums, and they said, "We know a percussionist." So it was in '84, the phone rang at two in the morning; it was five in New York; it was Tim offering the gig. I was like starving. I'd been in L.A. for two years; I had no money, was hauling carpet around for work and other odd jobs. I spent half of '84 and half of '85 with Maynard before I got too burnt to keep going. I came back to L.A. and was desperate. I called up churches and offered my services as a timpanist. I accompanied dance classes. This is the kind of stuff they didn't teach at college...how to make a living. That's why I do these clinics. I did one last week at North Texas. I teach at Cal State Long Beach. The students don't know what to do. So I give them these ideas...letters to churches, et cetera. So what happened at this church, this volunteer orchestra, this composer Ron Jones was one of Pete Carpenter's and Mike Post's writers. This guy, Ron, gets hired to do Star Trek: The Next Generation. And it's like BOOM, I'm doing like major stuff. Of course, I'm a Trekkie too. I'd been there five years, and it was finally going. It takes time.

One thing that I think the fans of your cds might not know about you is the amount of studio work you do for the film industry, television, stage shows, pop music, straight ahead jazz...

Yeah, I have to make a living [laughs]...Dream Girls, stuff like that. It's really hard because there is never any rest. Every cue is going by and you have to be looking at the director, change a timpani note, while playing the bells and grabbing the timpani mallets all at once...shows are so written out...I don't want to do alot of this but I...it just fell into my lap.

And tell us about your sponsors, Remo is one of them?

Yeah, I hooked up with them when I was with Maynard. When you're with Maynard, you can call them up and they will help you out as sponsors. I also do clinics for Remo with Russ McKinnon. We called up Remo and said, "Look, here's a hand percussion specialist and a drum set specialist. The two of us could do a clinic and show your entire line...everything you

make!" We had an outline, composed pieces. They liked it. Sent us to Canada; to Europe twice.

Did this lead to the educational videos you did?

The videos came before the clinics. There are eight volumes. Have Fun Playing Hand Drums. Beginning and intermediate congas, djembe, and bongos. And then a combination-beginning and a combination-intermediate. They were made in conjunction with Interworld, Warner Brothers, and Remo.

One of the things I love about your album Making Ice, the fifth cd of your own music, is the breadth of composition. One of the tracks, No One Knows What You Just Ate, is one of my favorites.

Thanks a lot. That came from a concert we did at Angels Gate Park. My trio and Stubig's quartet [Steuart Liebig]. I knew we were on a double bill so I wrote it for seven players. [Jef] Gauthier on violin, [John] Fumo on trumpet, Trey Henry, Kim Richmond, me...the great thing is that whenever I get one of these guys over here, I learn more about their instruments.

Then you go to There's A Gorilla On My Head...

That's the ballady thing with bass marimba/bass clarinet that I was talking about. I had Emily Hay on piccolo on it, but I learned that piccolo was to harsh for that...

A single piccolo will cut through a 600 person orchestra...

Of course, so I had her play on the upper range of the flute and then ended up with the melody on alto flute. One of the great things about Emily is she has facility on all of those.

So this album is more compositionally oriented than your album Krin...

Some of the tracks on Krin were literally, I layed down four percussion tracks and then had Vinny come in and wig-out over them. And if that is going to work, I have to make sure the groove is interesting enough to hold your attention and change it every few minutes. I am writing less that way now, and more in front of the piano. Both can be good. Laying down this weird African djembe track and then adding Cuban cajon... like Wig Rag on Krin, that came from me putting down a traditional Irish bodhran rhythm and then adding Iranian Zarb. And since that was so intense and driving and low, the best melody would be xylophone, and then I doubled that on marimba. An intense low groove. Intense high melody.

I Iove the track on Railroads that has tuba, banjo and...

xylophone. Isn't that a crack-up! Just like glass marimba, clarinet, and acoustic guitar. The cool thing about a mallet player is that since you don't have the change/inflections available...you tend to buy more instruments. I like to hear different colors. That's why I work more with a woodwind player than a brass guy, because there is more of a difference between flute, sax, bass clarinet than say trumpet and flügel. Though I am going to do more with that. I am working with Clay Jenkins [trumpet]. I need to learn more about cup mute, straight mute, harmon mute, and trumpet as opposed to flügel as opposed to C trumpet. As a percussionist you have so much homework to do to know the difference between a tar, gaval, bendir...they are all frame drums. And kanjira and riq. I have to take so long to learn about this. What's helping is composition. O.k., so now I have these million instruments; I've learned how to play them. Now I need to make my compositions grow and expand.

How many instruments do you have?

Mmmm, ballpark, I'd say over 500 including shades and variations.

My god! How do you practice them all!? Do you have a set practice regimen?

No, [laughing] this is really disturbing to me because I figured I always should have. I had a friend in college who said the only way is to do marimba at 8 am, 10 am; snare drum, 2 pm; timpani. I tried it. It lasted two days. So I just go by feel. If I wake up and feel like playing tabla, I do that. The next day marimba. Forcing myself became unproductive. I don't practice a lot because I'm doing it enough in my life to where I'm staying on it. I do practice some difficult cues from cartoon music. Some of that stuff is crazy.

So, looking at your duo cd with John Holmes, I see this label name that I am not familiar with. Truemedia JazzWorks, out of Ohio?

Yeah, it's a small label with several percussionists. They have a Greg Bendian and Paul Wertigo duo. They just totally improvise on two drum sets. What a risk. No melody instrument. Just two drummers...wigging. I loved it. So I sent them me and Holmes, and they loved it. Truemedia also did Making Ice. This guy is great.

So what about this love of trains? You have this whole room in your house dedicated to an incredible train set with cityscapes, miniature junkyards, people, autos...you name one of your albums Railroads...a marimba even kind of looks like train tracks if you squint your eyes...

I just like trains. It's just a hobby I started a long time ago.

What are you working on now?

At the end of the night in Ventura, Vinny's and my trio will combine to form a sextet. I'm working on a new piece for that group. It's called
Fish Don't Cough...