Beating a Different Drum
Gareth Dylan Smith playing with his band Black Light Bastards at Bar Freda in New York City. Photo by Alan Rand
Beating a Different Drum
CFA’s Gareth Dylan Smith releases first solo album
This article was originally published in BU Today on June 25, 2024. By Joel Brown.
It doesn’t sound like Buddy Rich or a certain Beatle’s All Starr Band. But somewhat to his own surprise, drummer Gareth Dylan Smith releases his first solo album, Permission Granted, on Thursday, June 27. “I didn’t know what a solo album would look like,” says Smith, a BU College of Fine Arts assistant professor of music education. “I don’t play piano or guitar sufficiently well, so I don’t write songs in the way that people write songs.” But during COVID, when musicians everywhere were shut up at home with their instruments and maybe a digital recorder, things happened.
“A big thing, actually, was recording my drums for the first time,” says Smith, who has played in plenty of bands—lately the new wave outfit Black Light Bastards and the Blondie cover band Dirty Blond, both NYC-based—and on plenty of albums. “I’d always had professional musician friends who went to studios and recorded, but now no one was allowed out of the house. So I had a microphone and my drums, and I thought, how hard can it be?
“I set the mic up, played the drums, and lo and behold, I recorded it. And I thought, well, if I can do this, then I can send people files.”
Permission Granted is a wildly eclectic series of duets, the majority improvisations, some started by Smith, some by another musician, some by happenstance.
When a friend left him a voicemail, Smith “liked the cadence of her voice,” so he played along, and the short number that resulted made the album. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s a performance of Adagio Cantabile from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13: “Pathétique” with his collaborator, Austina Lee (CFA’23), on piano.
On the album, Smith often plays with brushes, which he says is freeing. Besides his drum set, Permission Granted features spoken word, piano, tabla, rap, saxophone, conch, poetry, song, leaves, violin, electronics, bodhrán, and pandeiro.
“I approached each collaboration on its own terms,” he says. “I said to people, ‘Hi, I want to do a duet with you. What does that look like?’”
Consider the second track, called “Who Will I Be Today,” featuring his friend Ryan Patrick McLaughlin, which includes Smith pattering on the drums while McLaughlin delivers a rapid-fire boho rap over brooding piano chords. It’s probably not like anything you’ve heard before.
“He [McLaughlin] lives across the road from me [in East Stroudsburg, Pa.], and he’s a theology professor and a wicked musician,” Smith says, starting to laugh. “We were going to write a comedy song together about how difficult it is to get a tenure-track job in higher ed. And I waited for, like, 18 months, and then he sends me this six-minute epic [voice and keyboards] about mental health, and it blew my mind. I said, ‘Well, how can I speak to that as a drummer?’”
Beside Smith and Lee, the album is rife with CFA connections, with duet partners from the BU School of Music: Ruth Debrot, a senior lecturer in music education, Fabian Lim (CFA’25), Kyle Sousa (CFA’23), Aixa Burgos (CFA’24), and Bryan Powell (CFA’11). Kingston, N.Y.based Anthrophonic Records is run by Max Liebman (CFA’23), whose master’s in music education is from the School of Music. The album cover was designed by Annika Pyo (CFA’25), with art drawn by Saoirse Killion (CAS’25, CFA’25), both School of Visual Arts undergrads. Grants from CFA and the BU Center for the Humanities helped with production costs.
A drummer’s moment in the spotlight
Smith will celebrate the release of Permission Granted with a 7 pm performance at Sweet Vinyl Cafe in Denville Township, N.J., on June 27, convenient to both his home and several of his collaborators.
It’s still a big shift of gears for the musician, one he says has opened up his creativity.
“I’ve always played drums for people. And I’m very good at that. I thrive in that situation, playing drums for songs,” he says. “But this is me. This is the first time I’d thought, well, what happens if I decide to lead a project? It doesn’t have to be the rock band format that I always end up finding myself in.”
That means listeners will have to shift their expectations of a drummer’s moment in the spotlight. This isn’t Keith Moon hitting everything in sight for six minutes while the rest of the band takes a break.
“There’s hardly any of the drum-solo thing. It’s complementary or whatever you want to say,” Smith says. “I grew up on the Buddy Rich, drum battle stuff. But that’s not who I am, and it took me a really long time to realize that. Where I’m most at home is laying down a fat backbeat behind a rock band or doing these kinds of [musical] conversations.”
Since “a professor has to write about everything,” he says, he plans to write a book about his musical method, called Conversations of the Drums, because “that’s essentially what this is. It’s an album of conversations at the drums, so it’s dialogue, it’s listening. It’s listening to the rhythm, the pattern of someone’s speech, to the silences in the violin solo, to the ebb and flow of a poem and seeing how I can fit in on the drums.”
It’s not 4/4, it’s not playing loud and keeping the beat, he says: “I’m not keeping time for anybody. We find the time between us and that’s a beautiful thing.”
It’s an album of conversations at the drums, so it’s dialogue, it’s listening. It’s listening to the rhythm, the pattern of someone’s speech, to the silences in the violin solo, to the ebb and flow of a poem and seeing how I can fit in on the drums.
