Coloring books. That was a big thing for me as a kid, like it is for most kids. But those different sized, thick and thin black lines that we were supposed to fill in, or not, or go outside the line. I saw the drum set like that. I saw the shapes; the shapes of the stands and the cymbals. They were like coloring book pages in real life to me, in real form. The other thing about the drum set is that it was not set in stone as to how it was going to be set up. The cymbals could be high, they could be low, they could be tilted. The drums could be more than three or four drums or only one drum. Angled, tilted, or flat, it lent itself to being creative even with the way you approached how you set the instrument up.

 When I lived in Europe, I was introduced to a lot of musicians from Turkey and Morocco, and found out the tambourine wasn’t something that was just played the way we heard it in rock and in blues and in R & B. The tambourine had a whole history behind it. When I started learning about that, it just opened up the whole realm of research and culture and cultural connections to the instruments from other countries. Especially the hand percussion instruments. In the mid 1990’s I started working in metal, using the combinations of the drum set and the hand percussion and still continuing with my art forms.

I had a reputation in the metal shop I was working in because I was always banging on things at work. I would hear somebody from way across the room saying, “Hey, Smith. Over here.” And he would be banging on something. I would ask him to save that for me. They would throw it off to the side. So I started collecting things that were going to be thrown away or recycled. As I worked more with welding I started wielding things together making sounds that interested me. In this way I started coming closer and closer to the actual sounds that I had in my head from when I was a kid and couldn’t find the instrument that would equate to that particular sound. So I constructed these musical sculptures that in a performance I was able to create the music I really wanted. That way the rhythms had another whole pallet of colors that I always wanted to reach, but couldn’t.

 I always change my drum setup because it forces me to use creativity so I have to keep things fresh. I like to do it that way because it is sculptural for me, and I hope someone will enjoy the visual aspect of it. When I’m at a performance, but I’m not on stage yet and the drum set is there, it’s always fun to look at people to see if they are laughing. I love it if people think what I’m doing is humorous. That’s like the icing on the cake. I like to do things that are visually exciting for me and for others so I can work with independence. I can use both hands, arms, legs, and feet to easily capture a creative moment, and be able to do that with a fluid motion.

 I’ve always enjoyed working with other performers, especially performers who have studied improvisation. Improvisation is a realm of music expression that means a lot to me. I started through rock music and I continued to develop as I learned about jazz and interaction with other performers, like dance for example. That influenced how I could effectively use improvisation with a particular choice of instruments. And that’s a big thing for me. I have so many instruments that often I have to go into a certain mind set. You could say it’s psychic if you want, but before a performance I will often focus on the people that I am working with and remember something that they’ve done in a musical context in my sound memory. That’s the way I would approach deciding which instruments I would bring to that performance. I would bring something I know would compliment what they’re playing.

I’ve worked with jazz musicians and I knew they were hiring me because of voicings that I use, or again colors. They want me to play in colors, always in time of course, but colors that would accent an actual chord or a series or group of notes that would be something different than if I just played two splash cymbals and accented that with a timbale or something like that. Instead I would use mallets to crescendo the cymbals and then grab them, to crash and grab or choke the note. I do things like that so it compliments more of the music.