Publication: Modern Drummer : MD
Author: Micallef, Ken
Date published: December 1, 2010

Susie Ibarra invigorated New York City's free and creative jazz scenes in the late '90s/early '00s and then branched out to create the duo Electric Kulintang, modifying the traditional Southeast Asian multi-gong musical form with amplification, samples, and found sounds. To her deep, dense drumming, Ibarra then added various percussion, field recordings, and "extended" techniques, exhibiting her combined skills and profound understanding of modern music and native cultures in workshops, children's concerts, and chamber and orchestral works, and in performances at Carnegie Hall, PASIC, the New School, and Columbia University, among many other venues.

A global rhythmatist at heart, the Texas-born Ibarra forges drumming that extends beyond boundaries, beyond cliché, and beyond our common understanding of what a drummer's role is and ultimately can be. "I have an affinity for a diverse array of music," Ibarra says. "Even in the drum and percussion language, I have an affinity for a diverse array of percussion. That comes out in my drumkit playing as well as in all the percussion I play. It has a lot to do with my cultural environment and what I've been exposed to and the kind of global society we live in today. I was exposed to a lot of this music at an early age."

Ibarra's résumé includes recordings with such likeminded free thinkers as Yo La Tengo, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, John Zorn, Dave Douglas, Roberto Juan Rodriguez (Susie's husband and collaborator in Electric Kulintang), Derek Bailey, Ikue Mori, William Parker, David S. Ware, Billy Bang, Wadada Leo Smith, Mark Dresser, Arto Lindsay, and Prefuse 73.

Ibarra is in a constant state of composition and improvisation, whether developing her continuously morphing drum style; working on large works for theater groups, orchestras, and soundtracks; or writing for her duos, trios, and quartets (often on piano, her first instrument). Ibarra's solo drumming album, Drum Sketches (one of her forty recordings), reveals her multilayered rhythmic approach, drawing equally from gamelan, Philippine kulintang, Southeast Asian gong, and jazz traditions. Electric Kulintang's Dialects blends samples, field recordings, Ibarra's vocals, and double drumming in a near hip-hop framework. Drum Talk, Ibarra's double drumming CD with the late Denis Charles, is a free-jazz landmark.

Whether swinging on the set, drawingon her Filipino rhythmic heritage, or composing for groups large and small, Ibarra finds a relentless sense of pulse and purpose permeating her music. As with Elvin Jones, when Susie Ibarra plays, a spirit enters the room. Ibarra's face and body seem to undergo a change of appearance, as Susie makes unusual gestures with her arms and hands that result in unique signature sounds. Her brush technique is impressive, recalling Jo Iones and, oddly enough, traditionalist Kenny Washington. Ibarra's rhythms give balance to free jazz, fold playfulness into a distinctive brand of world music, and usher a current of ancient cultures into the drummer's larger ensemble pieces.

One project Ibarra cofounded, Song Of The Bird King, is working on a double CD of the same name, to be released in 2011, which includes gong music and epic chanters and features Electric Kulintang and seven endangered indigenous tribes of the Philippines. A quartet recording, Mysteries Of Nature: Music For Strings And Percussion, will be recorded in 2011, as will a large theater work, Saturnalia, which is set in Thailand. Electric Kulintang will release Drum Codes next year as well.

"Song Of The Bird King LLC produces works globally that address cultural preservation and indigenous music and ecology," Ibarra explains. "In the next two years we'll also be producing the 'Drumming For The Gulf' piece and doing educational work with Mundo Niños as well as a multidimensional music/poetry piece with Roberto Rodriguez titled 'The Mulato Insurgency: A Cuban Story.'

"Saturnalia is very rhythmically driven," she adds, "with vocalists singing and speaking many rhythmic lines, a sixteen-piece chorus, and an eight-piece instrumental ensemble playing percussion, piano, strings, and woodwinds.

Recipient of the 2010 New York Foundation For The Arts Fellow Award for music/sound and a 2010 TED Fellow for her "unusual accomplishment and exceptional courage," Susie Ibarra is an indisputable game changer of modern music and drumming.

MD: You've worked with DJs, visual artists, avant-garde jazz orchestras, free-jazz quartets, indie rock bands, traditional jazz groups, drum duos, and children's acts. Yet you always sound perfectly at home in any setting. What's the key to incorporating your drumming into these varied situations?

Susie: My parents listened to a lot of traditional jazz and classical music. My first records as a teenager were by Monk and Miles and Coltrane. I came to New York as a visual artist. I was invited to play drums at various rehearsals while I was still at [the New School's] Mannes school of music. That was part of how I got exposed to free jazz and also to the downtown improvised music scene with John Zorn and Dave Douglas. That informed my playing a lot in the '90s; it developed my vocabulary as an improviser.

MD: You wouldn't call John Zorn's music free jazz, right?

Susie: They are pretty diverse scenes. It's different, even the rock noise groups. All of these genres meet in improvised music, but they have different backgrounds. I played with Pauline Oliveros; her improvised music comes from classical and new music. She played on my record Flower After Flower. Improvisation is one form in which many genres of music meet.

CHANGING COLORS

MD: How does your drumming change when you go from a record like your own Dialects with Electric Kulintang to working with John Zorn or Pauline Oliveros? Do you change your touch or your physical or mental approach?

Susie: It changes every time. Whenever I play, it depends on who the musician is and what the music is. And it's also about being open and not trying to inform the music or force it in a way that it's not supposed to be. Whether the music is composed or improvised, it's about being sensitive to what's required: playing more, playing less, what kind of colors are needed, what kind of traditional elements or abstract elements are needed.

MD: Can you give an example of how you might change colors in going from Pauline Oliveros, an experimental electronic artist, to Yo La Tengo, an indie rock band?

Susie: I played pitched timpani bass lines with Yo La Tengo, coloring their songs with percussion. I might be playing support rhythmic lines, melodic lines, or texture. With Pauline, I played a conceptual solo drum piece at Carnegie Hall in 1996 that she wrote for me, "All Fours For The Drum Bum." I played in cycles of four, but I didn't repeat. Improvisation is a big part of it. And texture. Sometimes I have a traditional support role on drums, and sometimes it's about coloring and dealing with melody, sound, texture, space. Whatever the composition needs.

MD: How does your drum coloration concept differ in the Mephista trio, which includes electronics and piano?

Susie: It's really a percussion trio. Ikue Mori [on electronics and laptop] comes from a percussion background. Sylvie Courvoisier plays piano, which is another percussion instrument. And I play drumset. Some of the drumming can be energy driven; some of it is very textural. I tend to leave more space in the group. It's largely an improvised group.

EXTENDED TECHNIQUES

MD: In live performance you often use unusual techniques in the motions of your arms across the set. Do you have different methods for achieving different sounds on the drums?

Susie: I have traditional jazz technique on the kit, and I have extended techniques that I've found just going for sound. The sounds either happen during concerts or while I'm practicing. I've studied extended techniques, like muting drums, with Milford Graves. I studied traditional brushes with Vernel Fournier. And I studied traditional technique on Philippine gongs, djembe, kulintang, and Javanese and Balinese gamelan. So sometimes I bring in physical techniques as a performer that I want to emulate or a sound that I want to bring onto the drumkit, or I use conceptual techniques-either rhythmic OT melodic techniques.

MD: What are "extended techniques"?

Susie: There are standard jazz techniques, but what if I want to get a sound that is not standard? That is extended. Like muting the cymbal. I like to do a thing with the rubber part of the brushes and also with mallets to create reverb on the cymbal. I use one hand to dampen and mute and the other hand to play with a stick, mallet, or brush. Sometimes I use metal. That creates a certain reverb; that is an extended technique done within traditional playing.

Sometimes I want to create a sound like a Tibetan chant with cymbals. I might use small Chinese cymbals on top of my regular Paiste cymbals to create that sound instead of using sticks.

MD: And sometimes you ride on the cymbal while using your other hand to drag bells over the drums.

Susie: That's soloing and accompanying at the same time-playing an accompaniment with the ride cymbal and playing a solo with the left hand. Maybe I want two textures with bells or shakers, and I might want to add another color by dragging the bells or shakers over the drumheads. So that's two textures. You can vary the rhythm or the melodic pattern of what you play with that, so it's really an accompanying and a solo part together.

MD: When you're dragging the bells over the drums, is that performed in time?

Susie: It depends; sometimes I do that on cymbals too. I do it to mark points where I might make certain attacks. Other times it might just be an effect, a wash coming in and existing within the other time playing or other music on the drums. It's also a dramatic effect. That can really control [the music] by attack and texture and nuance and choice of notes; it can affect the outcome of the music.

FINDING THE CENTER

MD: To many drummers hearing free jazz or improvised music for the first time, the point of reference for the rhythm can be a mystery.

Susie: The language of jazz is so extended now. There's a place in jazz where traditional time playing is freed up. That concept of how it's freed up is interpreted loosely. And it has different styles. I like abstract art and abstract music, and some of the most complex music for me is free improvised music. I really like the playing of my former teachers Milford Graves and Andrew Cyrille, on their record Pieces Of Time, with Famoudou Don Moye and Kenny Clarke. I heard that early on, as well as the jazz greats that came before them, like Billy Higgins.

MD: When playing free, are you thinking in phrases of sixteen or thirty-two bars? Are you repeating bass drum patterns, or is every bar entirely free?

Susie: It depends on the composer and the chart. It depends on whether I'm playing a certain meter or moving through different meters, if I have to repeat [a part] or lay down a vamp when there are solos, or if it opens up during a solo and needs to return to the head or to a different part. In that style there is a lot of openness to interpretation.

MD: How has playing Southeast Asian music affected your freer improvisational drumming?

Susie: I've played in many bands with William Parker [Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, In Order To Survive], and sometimes he was writing material where the percussion parts were based on how I played. The pieces were written for me to play those Southeast Asian instruments. Dave Douglas wrote two pieces that had sections for my kulimang. William also wrote pieces where I played djembe, trap set, vibes, kulintang, and timpani.

MD: So how would you bring those rhythms to the drums?

Susie: The rhythm is always there-it's the lineage I came from. With a lot of master percussionists across genres, you can hear what the intention is and what's on top of it and what's underneath. That's one intention that I'm into as a performer: It's not just about the notes you play, it's about the intention of where those notes are played, what the audience is going to hear, what the musicians hear, and what the purpose is.

I might allude to a certain rhythm but not play the whole rhythm. It's the same as when a musician quotes another song within a standard; you can do that creatively in rhythm. It doesn't have to be quoting a specific song. I might be alluding to a different rhythm or melody, but I might not play the whole thing. Some of the great master musicians do that really well.

MD: Can you describe your transition from playing ethnic percussion to playing free jazz?

Susie: I was invited to William Parker's big band rehearsals when I was still at Mannes. In college, a lot of information is coming in fast, and it's about what you can put into action and practice. I felt like I needed more time to develop, and that's why I chose drums rather than practice all the various percussion instruments. I knew it would happen in my life at different periods if I wanted to do it right. I can't do it all at once. But New York is a different place now. Concerts are more formalized, and there aren't as many places for people to play experimental music. Learning in school was one thing hack then, and learning in the city was another thing.

SONIC AND VISUAL IMPROVISATION

MD: As asolo drummer, how do you approach accompanying a visual artist?

Susie: The artwork of Drum Sketches is by Makoto Fujimura, whom I have worked with often. We've been developing creative music and art language for a while in various ensembles I play and write fur. He was one of the soloists for Pintados Dream, a piece I wrote for the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. He has also soloed on visual arts along with my solo drums.

MD: How do you interact with a visual artist in that setting?

Susie: We're both improvising. It's more intimate when we're doing a duet; he's also performed with my quartet. But it's still improvisation and composition. In music there's color. And in visual art there's sound. We're very much in the moment, and we start creating together by multidimensional composition. You can do that in many forms, such as dance.

MD: I can more easily understand interacting with dancers, because there's rhythmic movement happening. But with a visual artist, do you have to see what he's creating in order to play with him?

Susie: No. But I do usually see some of it. Sometimes I'm leading the piece, or I may look at his painting. Often we're close, so his lines and colors and sound are very apparent. There is sound. So we cross those lines of visual and audio.

MD: How would you begin to play a duet with a visual artist?

Susie: Firstly, it should be someone you're compatible with. Find an artist that you like, and see if you connect. Also, tape it; that can be informative. I would begin the same as I would with a musician. If I'm improvising. I begin playing music and listen and see how that develops.

CREATING SOUNDS

MD: How have free jazz, kulintang, and gamelan affected your drum tuning?

Susie: I tend to tune intervallically. I don't set certain notes for the drums. I have tuned specific notes for some pieces, but it tends to be more intervallic, depending on the drumset. I know how my kits will tune on the road or in the recording studio, but each instrument tunes differently. So I tune the way the instrument will sing the best. Also, kulintang is tuned intervallicaly and it's not set pitches, so each instrument is different. And I can change tuning by muting while playing.

MD: Would the tuning in a free situation differ from Electric Kulintang with Roberto Rodriguez?

Susie: Yes, it would. On Electric Kulintang's Dialects, the purpose of the drumset is different. It's rhythm driven, accompanying electronic beats and sounds and percussion. We tune so the drums have more punch in Electric Kulintang. I usually use the Paiste Giant Beat or Dark Energy cymbals there. I use the more traditional Paiste cymbals for more jazz-oriented music. And with Electric Kulintang, sometimes I'll use the Yamaha birch kit for more punch.

MD: What do you practice now?

Susie: I do my warm-ups and rudiments, and then I practice the music I will he playing next. Then I'm constantly developing composition on the kit. I don't always have the span of hours I did when I was younger, so I might take specific time to work on music for a recording or concert, specific time for faculty on the kit, and time developing new language.

MD: What will that entail?

Susie: Different grooves on the drums. Creating compositions on the drums. I warm up with rudiments, singles and doubles, and 8th notes, 16th notes, and triplets for my feet. Time playing. I work on composition and improvisation on the drumset.

MD: In what ways do you practice improvisation?

Susie: It might be tunings, melodic playing on the kit, polymeters, different rhythms I want to play. A lot of it is composition on the kit, either for soloing or if I want to have language to pull out in a collaborative setting. Or maybe I'll work on certain rhythms I haven't played before.

DIALECTS, DRUM SKETCHES, AND DANCE

MD: You sample, play drums and electric kulintang, and do computer cut-up on Dialects.

Susie: We have loops and field recordings of indigenous Philippine artists playing bass gong or certain samba lines-the lower gong lines. We mix in field recordings and sequenced sounds with Ableton Live, and then I will play the electronic and acoustic gongs effected by Ableton Live. That gives me an extra twelve sounds beyond the acoustic sounds.

MD: There's a track on Drum Sketches that sounds like field recordings are involved.

Susie: That was recorded in the south of the Philippines at the Shariff Kabunsuan Festival, on the last day during a fluvial or boat parade. All of the provinces in the area compete for a cash prize. They decorate their boats with multicolored flags, and there are thirty people on each boat playing kulintang ensemble gong music. They come down the river with this massive sound. You have different gong ensembles crossing the river, producing waves of sound.

Some of that is on Drum Sketches, tracks 3 and 8. On those tracks you can hear the fluvial band playing a babandial line, which is like a clave line, on the side of the gong. I like the sound of the fluvial parade and the notion of New Orleans second-line drumming. They both have a celebratory feel in the way the rhythms pop. I'm playing a kit there and mixing it with the field recording of the parade. When I play the tracks live. I am the field recordings through the speakers.

MD: Dialects has elements of hip-hop, plus kulintang. samples, and your singing. What was the goal?

Susie: Roberto encouraged me to add the electric kulintang. Singing is like another instrument. They're all colors to express the music. Roberto programmed the beats. When I first look him to see the parades in the Philippines, they reminded him of his native Cuba. He related as a Cuban artist in the way the interlocking rhythms worked, especially with the bass gong, It added thai Cuban drive to tfie music.

We both come from dance cultures. Filipinos and Cubans love to dance. Rhythm is in the community-in Cuba, if you want to learn piano, they put you on drums first-and that explains why in Cuba and the Philippines they have such a deep pocket and culture of rhythm.

BRUSHES: BEYOND BALLADS

MD: You play brushes with such clarity and authority and a deep feeling of time and rhythm. What tips can you give for getting definition with brushes?

Susie: With my students, everything we practice technique-wise with sticks I have them practice with brushes. We do all the rudiments with the brushes. It's a totally different touch. I also have students draw certain forms. Then I have them trace it. Draw circles, figure eights, the lines of the strokes. Then have them work out the sound. It takes time to get that sound. Play along to masters playing brushes.

MD: Why draw a pattern?

Susie: They literally see the pattern, how the hands move on the surface of the head. It helps them get used to the motion, and then it's all about sensitivity of touch. Then you put it into groove and put it into time. I practice that all in rhythm. Then you're practicing everything with your feet and with your hands. You have rhythm underscoring what you're practicing. Simple rhythms, four on the floor.

MD: What do you tell younger drummers who want to play in the diverse styles you've explored?

Susie: I encourage them to find their own voice and to trust it and develop it. It is very rewarding to walk that walk. I encourage them not to give up on that. When I started out. I was a sponge. I encourage drummers to be open-minded and try things out. Try playing different music; have those experiences. I played all kinds of gigs in New York. Also, I would encourage them to play with musicians who are much better than they are. which will lift them up and teach them things. Listen to a lot of music. Play with your favorite recordings. They've got the masters right there. And, of course, practice, practice, practice.