Matthew Kassel
Contributing Writer
matthew.kassel@mail.mcgill.ca

I started playing the drums in grade nine when my parents bought me a drum set for my birthday. I don't remember wanting a drum set, or for that matter, wanting to play music, but I started taking lessons anyway, and I began to enjoy them. In the second, and last, year of lessons, I decided to switch to practicing jazz drumming. I had been listening to jazz for about a year or so, going to the library, taking out records—among them, Coltrane Plays the Blues, Mingus Ah-Um, Speak Like a Child--and thinking there was something about jazz I liked, something about the rhythm, the openness. I felt as if I could hear the musicians thinking. I didn't know anything about harmony then. (I still don't know much.) But I could intuit when the soloist had slipped into the bridge, or when a chorus had cycled through.