Welcome to the August, 2026 edition of The Art Parlor, brought to you by Friends in Art!
In this episode, our guest is Kai Owens – a gentleman you may remember from our past showcase events! We hear about his path in music as a drummer and learn how he got started, including the mentors who encouraged him and pushed him beyond the boundaries of comfort. As you will see, he is a talented young man headed for even greater heights! Included in this presentation are some music tracks for your listening pleasure.
AI-Generated Transcript
Jason • 00:00
Opinions expressed on ACB media are those of the respective program contributors and cannot be assumed to serve as endorsements of products or views by friends in art, the American Council of the Blind, their elected officials, or staff. Friends in Art welcomes you to the Art Parlor, where visually impaired artists of all types will discuss their work. Pull up a chair, bring along your beverage of choice, and listen to thoughtful, stimulating conversations with visually impaired artists in all media and from all parts of the world. And now, here’s your host, Peter Altschul.
Peter • 00:48
Greetings! My name is Peter Altschul. I am the scholarship committee chair of Friends and Art, and this is our most recent edition of Art Parlor. And our guest is a scholarship winner of five years ago, Kai Owens. Hey, Kai. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I want to spend most of our time talking about how things have changed for you in the past five years. But before we do that, talk a little bit about how you got into drumming and how it changed your life.
Kai • 01:19
Yeah, no doubt. So I got into drumming in fifth grade. I was around maybe 10 or 11 years old. And my older brother was a drummer in high school, and he was in the marching band and in the orchestra and all that kind of stuff. So I saw him kind of coming up through that program. And obviously me being the younger brother, I wanted to follow everything he was doing. And in the midst of that, I had just gotten my vision diagnosis about two years before fifth grade. So I was looking for some things that were, you know, non-visual and my parents were looking for some things to put me in and, you know, let me get out some energy and some anxiety. So I got a drum set and I started playing in the middle school band as well in the percussion section. And then before I knew it, I hit high school and I decided to not continue with the school orchestra and everything, but instead joined a school of rock sort of program from my local music store where I was taking lessons. And after a couple years of doing that, I realized, you know, just how much I love performing and how comfortable I was on stage compared to most everyone else I was around. And that kind of led me to realize that, you know, music could be a very viable career path for me. So when I started applying to colleges, I decided that I was going to go for music, and I chose music theory to be particular because at the time I thought I might want to go further into the academia music sort of world. And then in the midst of getting that degree, I realized that I instead actually kind of had always wanted to do performance and just thought academia might be safer. And then I realized that none of them are very safe career options. So if I’m going to go for one of them, I might as well just do what I’m really wanting to do. So I took as many performance based classes and was in a band all through college and just graduated from my undergrad at the University of Georgia this past December and I’ll be starting this fall for my Masters in Jazz drums at William
Peter • 03:15
Patterson University in New Jersey. And we’ll talk a lot about your college experience, but before we do that, I want to talk about how you were when you were applying for a scholarship five years ago. Let me tell you what I remember. I remember you sending these drum tracks that were amazingly complicated. I think there were meter changes and all kinds of cool stuff. What do you remember about your life at that time and as you were preparing for college?
Kai • 03:43
Yeah, it was definitely a very different time musically for me than where I’m at now. But I think a lot of it carried over nicely. So I was doing a lot of stuff with progressive metal and math rock and death metal and all these very heavy, very technical genres. And I was really enjoying the just the challenge that that brought in through that, that kind of, in a way helped me get into a lot of these programs because I had a lot of this academic technical knowledge about drumming. And then I got into my program and I showed up to my first week of lessons.
Peter • 04:18
And let’s stop there. Because I want to talk a little about the scholarship process. So you apply for the scholarship. And I remember calling you, I think essentially talking about your scholarship. And as I remember, you had broken your foot in the hospital and you were in the hospital getting treatment for that. Do you remember that and how that sort of, what do you remember about
Kai • 04:39
that whole process? Yeah, that was an interesting time. That was the summer right before college for me and I was on a trip with a bunch of other blind skateboarders, which I was really big into skateboarding at the time. And on day two of this trip, I broke my fibula in my lower right leg, which is obviously a very important limb for playing drum set. That’s where you’re playing your bass drum. And I had to take several editions for colleges and for this scholarship, I think all of them were recorded while I couldn’t use my right leg at all. I was in a cast. So I had luckily had all this practice playing double bass drums. So I just forewent my right foot entirely and played all my auditions with only my left foot switching between the hi-hat and the That’s that’s good, I suppose, but it’s pretty funny looking back at those. And what a time that was trying to, you know, juggle all those difficulties.
Peter • 05:41
So I’m a drummer, too, as you know, and folks listening to this podcast know. Talk about sort of the complexities of playing bass drum and hi hat at the same time. Usually the bass drum is at the right foot and the hi hats with your left foot. That’s the standard procedure. What was it like having to go back and forth and using your left foot all that with all that energy?
Kai • 06:00
Yeah, I didn’t find it too bad because when playing, you know, a double pedal on the bass drum, your left foot’s kind of juggling those two roles already. So it was just kind of making that juggling a little bit more on the forefront of everything I was doing had to be that juggling. So I tried to just orient grooves and everything that I picked for my auditions kind of around, you know, not needing two of the voices at the same time on the kit. So like, if I needed to play a closed hi-hat, then I couldn’t really play my bass drum unless I used my hand or something to close the hi-hat. So I would maybe go to the ride symbol and just let the hi-hats be open while I’m playing the bass drum. And then maybe I’d close the hi-hat for a few notes to get the sound I needed there before I switch back to the bass drum. So it’s just kind of a funny one-footed juggling process.
Peter • 06:48
As a percussionist, you often have to do those kinds of weird things just in general principle, whether you’re playing in jazz or playing in orchestral or wind ensemble stuff, band stuff. That’s all kinds of weird things as a percussionist that you don’t know other instruments. So we were thrilled to give you the scholarship and you went to college and I interrupted your story. So you went to college, what did they tell you?
Kai • 07:12
I went to University of Georgia. I showed up there, I was studying with Professor Timothy Adams, who’s a great classical percussionist and was a orchestral timpaniist for years, but he also grew up playing drum set and played professionally in sessions and in jazz bands and everything like that. So I showed up on my first day of lessons and I was the first student he ever took on who was just a drum set student and not doing any sort of classical percussion. And he gave me the album “Workin'” by Miles Davis with the great Philly Joe Jones on drums. And he gave me this, or told me the record to get, And I went home and he said, “Learn this whole record.” So I go home that week after my very first lesson. And this was still kind of during COVID. So I think he actually gave me the assignment, maybe over email or I’m not even quite sure how he did it. For a while we were set up on two opposite sides of this huge room with like 50 feet between us while we’re playing drums. So he gives me this record and I go home and learn it. And I learned pretty much every song on there, at least the ones that I could pull off at the time. And I come back the next week I play along the record in my lesson. And ever since then, I pretty much haven’t looked back and have been doing jazz as my main style ever since then. I had zero exposure to jazz pretty much up until that point. And in that one week, I fell in love with it and have now committed my whole career path and journey and music to it.
Peter • 08:44
So let’s talk about that. How was it the shift from heavy metal/all the stuff you were playing, pretty intense stuff that’s not traditional jazz, whatever you wanted to find it, to playing Miles Davis? What was the shift like for you?
Kai • 09:00
It was pretty huge. It actually cracks me up to look at, because I have some videos from those early lessons during COVID that I was submitting videos. And I go back to those every now and again and just see how I was playing and sounding. it cracks me up because you can tell I just it was so new and so foreign to me. But one good thing is that a lot of the, you know, the technique and physical ability that I’d worked up over the years translated, but not not very directly kind of in tangential sort of ways. But from that complexity of metal and everything, I found the complexity in jazz music to be kind of similarly stimulating, but also more free. Because in metal, you know, you’re learning these, these particular parts and you’re trying to execute them pretty much as close to as you can to being a computer. And in jazz, there’s all this complexity. And you’re trying to constantly think of how you can change it and improve on it and make things sound different every single time you play a song. So it kind of took all the same challenges and then just made them more fresh and more creative for me, which I just found way more rewarding after some time. And I still love all those past genres I’ve studied. And I think they did great things for me, but I’ve definitely connected with jazz in a way that I hadn’t previously connected with music before.
Peter • 10:24
So you talked about your drum lessons and how that got you started. How did you get connected with your first jazz ensemble or jazz band or whatever it was that you got connected with?
Kai • 10:35
Yeah, I started my first year at UGA. I had auditioned for the lower level big band or the program had two jazz ensembles. One was like the main, you know, top big band. One was kind of the lower student group, which was usually less people and a lot more just like beginner levels. And then there’s also a smaller combos, a couple of those. So to start, I was in this lower jazz ensemble and I did that for a full year. And I had to audition in similarly while my leg was broken. And there’s my professor that I studied with in the jazz department still laughs at those videos every now and again and brings them up to me. ‘Cause I auditioned for this jazz band with my huge metal drum set. And I’m playing with only my left foot ’cause my right leg’s broken. But he let me in and he thought I had something there. And he could tell that I was interested. And then through that program, There was two professors in charge of that ensemble, a really renowned jazz pianist named James Wideman, who was starting teaching at UGA my very first year. And another pianist who was also hired that same year, Gregory Satterthwaite, who is a great pianist in his own right. And he’s a younger guy and he had just finished his doctorate at North Texas for jazz, which is one of the biggest jazz programs in the country. And so they alternated. We met Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and they’d both teach for about 25 minutes, and they’d, you know, each finish two or three songs for our concert at the end of the year. But in that band, a lot of it was just working on learning to sight read and learning to improvise. So it wasn’t quite as focused on final products as it was focused on just getting the students up to speed. And after a year of that, I managed to finagle my way into the top level jazz ensemble as a couple other students graduated from there. One was in their undergrad, one was in, I think their masters or maybe even their doctorate. And managed to get my way into that. And that was with our third jazz professor, David DeAngelo, who’s a alto saxophonist who used to live in New York City and his friends with so many musicians up there and has a lot of great connections. He toured in the Buddy Rich big band when he was in his early 20s, right? He dropped out of his master’s program to go tour with Buddy Rich. So, you know, some really
Peter • 13:11
great. I’m sorry. I was gonna, the Buddy Rich band has its moments, but it has its weirdnesses as as well. Sorry, I distracted you and myself too. Oh, good. Let’s talk about the whole issue of improvisation and learning your music. You of course are, as I understand, legally blind, right? Yes. So do you use print music at all? I do not. Or a large print music? Not one bit. I didn’t think so, ’cause I didn’t either when I was doing the work that you were doing. So how did you learn the music? How did you learn the various charts you were playing? How has that developed over the years?
Kai • 13:51
Yeah, early on it was more of a struggle. I definitely, it took me a while to understand, what I was trying to do. I hadn’t quite put together how form really worked in jazz and I couldn’t put together those patterns quite as easily. So I was trying to just memorize these, like they were these, just all one long song. And I was just thinking very linearly about all the hits and all the different figures with the horns, because big band music has just constant notes spattered all over the whole thing that the drummer is trying to match up with the horn sections. And that took me a while. It was just kind of, sometimes there’d be demo recordings of the arrangements where I could kind of listen to those, but inevitably our directors would change the arrangement for our specific band and we’d cut sections or extend things. So it really came down to just playing it enough times in rehearsal where I could just memorize the whole thing. Or sometimes I would, once we sort of had it together or close enough, I would take a voice memo of it so I could practice along with that. And we also had all those big bands had two drummers in each of them. So if I really couldn’t figure something out or if we were sight reading something down for the first time, the other drummer might hop on if it’s a really weird chart, I’d hear him play it once give myself a fighting chance of knowing what’s going to happen. So that’s pretty much how I ran things for that first, you know, a couple years really. But towards the end I was in the big band my very last semester as well. I went back to it after a year off to, you know, finish other classes and then I had some time my last semester. Went back into the Jazz Ensemble 1 and I definitely found it much easier than before. After four and a half years or so of working on Jazz, I’d Finally, it could understand and hear how the form worked in jazz. So instead of having to memorize this whole song, I would just remember, “Oh, in this A section, this figure gets repeated each time.” And then maybe we lop off this little section of the form before we go back to the top. So I was able to navigate those patterns a lot more easily. And then I just had to realize what was different about it each time it rolled around and not try to memorize it, note for note, what exactly is happening.
Annie • 16:16
Hi, this is Danny, I have a question. I’m sorry, Peter, can I bun it? So how does your bandmates respond to you? Is there a comparison between how things worked out like when you first started big band versus like, at the end, your bandmates all like, oh, I wonder how he’s gonna do this or anything like that? Did you have any of those kind of attitudes that kind of, you know, were like different than, you know, how did you handle that kind of, if you felt it, you know, that questioning, how did you handle that?
Kai • 16:52
I’d say I didn’t feel it too much. It was a real small jazz program. I couldn’t even tell you the number of students, but very small, and it’s only a jazz minor at our school so far. So because of that, I was one of only maybe two or three drummers actually focusing on jazz. And I was the only one who was a music student with the primary instrument of drum set. So while I couldn’t read the charts, I usually had more focus on learning jazz drum set just in general. So what I couldn’t read as quickly as everyone else, like kind of just made up for in general knowledge about the music.
Peter • 17:36
Okay, yeah.
Kai • 17:37
And the other students, I mean, especially I got, I got the worst of my playing out of the way in that lower level ensemble. Okay, yeah.
Jason • 17:46
Where the professors were, the professors were,
Kai • 17:49
you know, obviously throwing me stuff constantly to, you know, fix this, change this. And the whole rest of the band was similarly early on in their journey. So we all just kind of sounded bad together. (laughing) My lack of reading ability was really was not even close to the the biggest deal of things going wrong in that band Guys, I mean that is no, you know, no, hey, but it’s just early on that was in you know a band meant for learning
Peter • 18:16
Right. Oh, so I want to I want to I want to add a sort of add to Annie’s question because you Not only did you play in the big jazz band? You were in a lot of small jazz ensembles talk about that process and as I understand it you sort of led, grew to lead that whole program or if I understand your story. Talk about that.
Kai • 18:35
My first experience in like a small jazz group was the UGA’s jazz combo, which at the time had quite a few musicians that I would end up playing with over the years, but I was still very much figuring out, you know, how drums are supposed to function in a small jazz ensemble and I was lacking all of the nuance that it required, but it was a great opportunity to start getting to play with other people. After that, that was just one semester for me. Then I had the opportunity to join this band that some other UGA jazz students had put together called Swing Theory. They had been inviting me to sit in at their rehearsals and it’s set up as a collective. There’s a bunch of people on every instrument and people come as they can, and gigs get doled out based on how often people are showing up and their commitment levels. So I managed to join them along with another drummer. And over a couple months, I was showing up early to every rehearsal to set up drums and always knowing the music that we were supposed to learn. And the people in charge kind of took note and noticed that. So they started putting me on more gigs. They saw how committed I was. So I ended up playing quite a bit with him and then the band leader moved away, he had graduated, put someone else in charge, that musician then, six months later had graduated and he was about to move on to different things. And he had seen how hard I had been working and through the leadership over to me pretty much. So that’s how I kind of became band leader of this group after that was maybe a year into playing with this band. And by that time, I was, you know, I was proficient at gigs. I’d been on enough of them. But then after taking charge of it, I could kind of lead it in, you know, the direction I saw it going and it started to become more serious about the music, a little higher expectations on the people involved. And a core few of us kind of ended up coming out of that and really pushing each other to just get better and better. So there’s me and two of my close friends, a saxophonist named Levi Brown and a pianist named Daniel Ashraf. And the three of us, you know, other people came and went and there’s been some other great people who have been very committed with us. But the three of us, anytime one of us will wanna learn a song or a style, we throw it over to the other ones and make them learn it too. So I pretty much ended up doing the learning of three people just to keep up with these guys. And we just did that for, now it’s been an additional two or three years after that point that this band’s been running, where we’re just pushing each other constantly, rehearsing twice a week for two hours. We have a weekly three hour gig every Sunday, and then any other gigs that get booked on top of that. So we were playing at minimum seven hours a week together pretty much. And that starts to stack up pretty quick, you know, over the course of years. And where I saw my peers playing at one level, there was people who were better than me, maybe two, three years ago. And then this band just fast tracked me so much and was so focused in on a goal that I managed to really progress at a speed that was unlike the people around me who weren’t quite as focused on one specific thing that I was doing. And through that, you know, I managed to go from zero jazz experience at the start of my freshman year to leading a group at the end of my sophomore year to being one of the the few jazz ensembles in the city that was playing gigs we headlined at the historic 40 watt club We played the big aft fest music festival We played gigs, you know at most the venues in town who were opened up booking jazz bands I’ve sat in or played gigs with almost every jazz musician in the city now and Through these five years and managed to get me up to the skill level where I was able to compete For graduate school with people had been playing jazz music since they were you know five years old in some cases
Peter • 22:59
So I want to go back a little bit talk about How playing in a small jazz group is the same and different than playing in a jazz band You know a large jazz ensemble
Kai • 23:11
Yeah, I’d say a lot of the skills are very similar, but there’s kind of different levels of Responsibility and in different things you’re responsible for so to me in a small group setting You’re responsible for making the band swing and have a really good like feel really good sense of time the time’s not you know going up and down willy-nilly and you’re responsible for, you know, interacting a lot with the other musicians. So the way you’re playing and, and comping, which is like your embellishment sort of and accompaniment for the other musicians, all of that is interacting with everyone and it’s a lot more free flowing. So there’s usually the standard form for traditional jazz is the head, which is like the main melody of the song. And then it has chord changes underneath, like the harmony. And then that harmony repeats over and over, you know, it’s usually maybe 32 bars is very standard. And then people solo over top of those changes. And then at the end of the song, you play the melody again. So there’s a lot, a lot of freedom in the drums. And there’s basically nothing you’re 100% required to play. It’s free to the point of being incredibly difficult. In big band, you’re still responsible for that same time and feel. But on top of that, responsible for making these sections of the arrangement feel very particular and different. So the drums are often leading, you know, the dynamic shifts. If something has to get really loud, you have to kind of prepare the audience’s ears for it by setting up these big hits with all the horns and you’re, you’re memorizing these big thought out things. And there’s not nearly as much improvising while there are solos. It’s just not the main thing. And it’s kind of the same. like there can be pretty thought out arrangements for small groups as well, but it’s not generally quite as much of the focus. I think the other thing with big band too is you’re generally playing a lot simpler and a lot more in service for the rest of the band when there’s you know 14, 15 other musicians all listening to what you’re playing to stay together. You have to be very clear about what you’re playing and where the time is where when you’re with a small group you can be pretty free with things if you’re with that sort of group and everyone sticks together and everyone’s kind of keeping each other in check. In the big band you’re very much driving the train and if you do something and mess up then you could throw off an entire horn section and then the
Peter • 25:44
arrangements you know falling apart before you know it. It happens all the time. Can you talk, you said a couple pieces that for you to talk about. Going back you talked about the basic head of a piece and then it repeats as people do solos. You sent us one of those pieces and that piece is
Kai • 26:03
called? Like someone in love. I’m not sure if it’s on the file name there but yeah. So we’re going to
Peter • 26:09
play it but I want you to talk about it. So the one thing that’s interesting about this this piece is it’s played with brushes and that’s fixed. Talk about what brushes are and how cool they are.
Kai • 26:22
Yeah, so brushes are amazing. A lot of people new to jazz drumming are scared of them, unfortunately, and think there’s some big trade-off from sticks, and you’re, you know, they’re just to play quiet or something silly like that. But brushes really aren’t designed at their base level to be a dynamic shift. They’re designed to be a timbral shift in like a choice that you would make about an arrangement. So what they are, these often their times now they’re retractable. So they have this little handle that slides down this small metal shaft. And then at the other end, there’s all these metal wire bristles that kind of stick out. And they were actually originally designed as fly swatters. Funny enough, the patent for the earliest jazz brushes were fly swatters that people realized would sound good sweeping them along the drum had kind of like swishing them. And over the years, they’ve changed and developed in some ways. But it allows you to play with the brush staying on the head and getting lateral motions from the texture of the head. or you can play them like sticks, like up and down. There’s so many things you can do because of those variables that sticks just can’t do. And this song, like someone in love, brushes with this piano tree I was playing with, fit the character of it better to what I was hearing. And this recording is one of the ones that was part of my graduate school editions for all three schools I auditioned for. This track went to all of the schools, and it helped me get into two of them, which I’m very proud of and very happy about. And it was recorded with that Professor James Wideman from my UGA program, and another professional musician from in town, Chris Enghouser, who’s an educator and basist. And they were really some of the best people in the city I could get my hands on. And I was very happy that I convinced my Professor James Wideman to play these with me, because he actually taught at both of the schools that I got into. It’s very funny having a former professor at these schools be on a student’s audition tape and obviously his playing is incredible and it elevated my own.
Peter • 28:40
So what do you think got these schools’ attention in this particular tape? What do you think said this guy is pretty cool?
Kai • 28:47
If I had to take a little bit of a guess along with one of the schools had an in-person round of auditions. So after this, so I went in and got to get some of the professors feedback in person. And one thing that I’ve heard some great professors say to me that was a huge compliment is that they took note of how much I made decisions based on kind of orchestrating the sounds and wasn’t really thinking just like a drummer. One professor at SUNY Purchase, His name is Pete Malinverney, incredible pianist, said that to me in my in-person auditions there. He was like, “You’re playing like a musician in an orchestrator and not just a drummer.” And I think a lot of people my age tend to go towards, you know, sometimes people tend towards the trends and the popular things and very flashy, modern sort of playing. And that’s just not at all what I’ve been drawn towards. And all of my favorite musicians are very much in service of the music and of their fellow musicians and are trying to make the song sound as good as they can and not make the drums sound like the focal point all the time. And there’s a time and a place for that, but this song was trying to show off that, you know, that subtlety and making the band and the pianist who was soloing sound as good as they possibly could.
Peter • 30:18
And there’s also a brushed drum solo in this piece, which is really cool. And I encourage people to note that when it comes up. So we’re gonna play that song now and then we’ll move on to something else. I’m going to
Annie • 31:31
I’m going to Cut the top of the dough into small pieces. Put the dough in the oven pan and bake for 20 minutes at 150 degrees. The dough is baked.
Peter • 34:32
Okay, thank you, Jason. So now I want to talk about the second piece that you sent us, which I think is a fragment, correct? Yes. The name of that piece is? The name of that one is
Kai • 34:44
Olio. Olio. The great Sonny Rollins who just passed a couple weeks ago. Yep. He was an amazing guy.
Peter • 34:52
So talk about what prompted you to, you sent this piece to auditions as part of your audition
Kai • 34:58
package to these schools, correct? No, this one actually was just recorded three days before this interview at a show I just played. Oh, okay. So what, what
Peter • 35:08
problems recorded live? Yep. What, what prompted you to send this to us? Because we asked you to send you some samples, send us some samples. What prompted you to send this particular
Kai • 35:18
thing to us? Yeah, so I’ve been working a lot this past six months after graduating on my ability to solo and improvise while still staying very true to the form of the song. And that is very difficult to do. Because there’s nothing that your, your place has to be linked to the melody. You know, there’s not chord changes that we’re outlining. And there’s not a physical melody, or there’s not really like notes of a melody that we can easily reference. So staying true to the song’s form is much more of an internal challenge. at least in my opinion, because you also don’t have the other musicians accompanying you in any way. The drum solo, everyone drops out entirely. So the whole time in this solo, I take two choruses of a solo, which is two sets of 32 bars. And the entire time in my head, I’m singing the melody of the song. And I wanted to kind of put this in there to demonstrate some of my, you know, soloing improvisation voice on the drums, as well as how that form can maybe come across sometimes in drums, which is it’s much more subtle. It’s going to be almost impossible for people to hear unless they know the song really well, or they’re just very good at counting to 32.
Peter • 36:44
But one of the things that I found fascinating about this drum solo, I didn’t catch it, of course, that you were using the head as it’s, you know, following it. But you have the hi-hat. Now the hi-hat sounds like “chchch” right on two and four and that’s consistent through the entire solo. And so you hear this thing on two and four and the and you are playing things often counter to it. And which I thought I thought was very, very cool. The other thing I kind of liked about this solo is you sort of start with this snare drum and then you gradually feel add other drums to it. you know, but it just starts with the snare and I thought that was really cool. You gradually end up adding stuff to it as the solo goes along. And then the recording you send us, you play the head one more time with the band and is that correct? Do I have that more or less? Yeah, yeah, you got that. Cool. So we’re going to play that now, Jason. Let’s play that. [drums] Okay, thank you. Where are you going to school beginning this fall? I will be at William Patterson University in New Jersey. And my understanding is that’s a really good jazz program. What do you anticipate happening there when you go there? What do you think you’re gonna be working on?
Kai • 39:50
I’m very excited for it overall. It’s still a little bit of a, you know, up in the air. I don’t quite know how it’ll all go, but I’m very excited because one of my living drum heroes, by the name of Joe Farnsworth, is one of the jazz drum professors there, who I will hopefully be studying with. And he was actually the kind of the final straw that made me decide to move to New York City eventually and really pursue this performance career. So I was in New York City on this jazz musical theater Maymaster program that UGA did. And one of our off nights, I found that Joe Farnsworth was playing at a club near where we were staying. And I made it out there to see him. And I got to sit about six inches away from his high hats, just sitting right next to him and got to interact with him. And I smiled for about two and a half hours straight watching him play with this piano trio. And I was just mind-blown. It was the best drumming I had heard in my entire life in person. And I realized in that moment that I had to be a part of what was going on there. And what was going on in New York City and with his teaching and his personality. I knew that I wanted to study under someone like that who was so kind and was approaching this music from a place of love and not just discipline in following rules. And by wanting to study with him, I reached out to him and was like, where are you teaching? Like, where can I study with you? What school should I apply to if I wanna come to New York City? And William Patterson is actually where he got his undergraduate degree from, and now he’s teaching there. And I knew that, you know, that was on my list for places to go. And when I got in, they only accept, you know, a couple of master’s students in their drum set program each year, managed to get one of those spots. And to me, that’s kind of a stepping stone of all the professors there are big names in the New York City scene. A lot of the musicians are trying to move to New York City after studying here. So it’s kind of my like jumping off point into that world and that scene of New York City, as well as getting to study with some of my heroes, Joe Farnsworth, and one of my favorite pianists of all time is one of the directors of that program named Bill Charlop. And there’s just so many names in that program that I’ve listened to on records now for years and getting to get that information and that time studying from the people that I’ve been hearing now for years is really, as close as it can get to studying from the greats who developed this music in the 1900s.
Peter • 42:36
So I wanna ask you an offbeat question. We were talking at another time and you talked about your reading habits. And you talked about, I want you to share the story, but I wanna show you, I know what I’m talking about. You talked about how you used to read books really, really fast and now you’re reading, you come back to reading and are reading books at normal speed. A, you have the story right. Talk about that and talk about how that influenced, how do you think that influenced the way you play drums?
Kai • 43:08
Oh, interesting. When I was younger, I was very into reading. I mean, we’re talking middle school, 10 to 14 or so. I got very into audio books. And a lot of the times I would just have them, the text to speech type of audio books, not an actual voice actor. And at the time I was trying to learn all of my accessibility tools and my assistive technology. And I, for some reason, felt it very important to just listen to things as fast as possible, to consume enough information and keep up with my class. And that kind of bled into my daily, you know, reading just for the fun of it. And before I knew it, I was in sometime in middle school. And my words per minute listening to these books was up to 640 words a minute. And it was to the point where, you know, if you zone out for a couple of seconds and you’re already through a page. So it became kind of an exercise in focus more than any sort of enjoyment out of it. So once I got to high school and I had to read a lot from my classes, I kind of fell out of love with reading because I had turned into this challenge almost. And as I was nearing the end of college, my mom was trying to get me back into reading. she had been using this app called Libby, which is through the library services. You can read as many audio books as you want. You just have to put a hold on them through your library card, like a library system, but it’s all audio books on your app. So I finally figured I’d give it a try, and I started reading them at a normal speed, and actually done by voice actors instead of text-to-speech. And I found so much more enjoyment not trying to, you know, essentially rush through my leisure activities, ’cause the faster you go through a leisure activity, the less leisure you have in a way. So I started listening to things at normal speed and now I’ve read, that was, you know, last March or so. So now in June, I’ve read around about 110, 120 novels since then. Ooh, you beat me.
Annie • 45:20
That’s too… (laughing)
Kai • 45:23
I read about 80. Yeah, so I’ve been putting some good work. I’m already… My goodness. Yeah, I think that’s right at least. Somewhere in there, I’ve been reading a lot for sure. I’m averaging a novel every three or so days right now.
Jason • 45:40
Oh, Lord. And that’s just at normal speed.
Kai • 45:41
So that’s maybe 10, 12 hours of listening per book. As far as how that influenced my approach to drumming, I think the patience, maybe that it took me, finding the patience to take the leisure activity for what it was and reading and enjoying the story at the pace that it was designed at and not trying to rush through it as fast as possible for a challenge kind of plays into my listening and playing habits in a way probably, because jazz music is very much an oral tradition where listening to the records and listening to the greats is emphasized.
Jason • 46:23
And you have to be able to sit down
Kai • 46:25
and listen to this music for hours and listen to entire records straight through to really understand what was going on musically and chronologically. And you have to kind of approach it with that source, that sense of study and patience. And that kind of comes through in playing as well. if you’re listening, or let’s say as a drummer, I’m accompanying soloists 90% of the time. And if someone’s soloing and I don’t have the patience to listen to what they’re presenting and just feel the need to constantly kind of butt in with my own ideas if I get bored or something, then I’m not really serving the song or the other players very well. So you kind of have to be okay taking that slower kind backseat to actually, you know, make everyone else’s experience better and make your own better as well. You just have to have enough patience to realize that it’s actually better when you’re doing it slower and at a good pace.
Peter • 47:25
I think it’s absolutely fascinating. And it shows in your, because when I heard you play a couple of years ago, you sent you sent us a track to add to one of our showcases. You’re playing was so different from what I remember you playing for audition. Your audition was great, but you were in a very different place, clearly even, you know, two or three years ago. And I think, you know, I think a better place. And I think their reading is reflected as well. Come on, thank you so much for joining us and doing this on short notice. And we wish you well as you head to New York City. I live there for a while. For many years, it’s a great place, but very chaotic. I’m sure you’ve figured that out already. Have a great time and we’ll check in with you in another two or three years.
Annie • 48:08
It will be well, Kai. Amazing. Thank you all so much. Great things are going to happen for you, my friend. I can just tell. I can feel it.
Kai • 48:14
Oh, well, thank you. You’re welcome. It’s been great being on the podcast and I appreciate you all having me.
Peter • 48:19
All right. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.
Jason • 48:25
Art Parlor is brought to you by Friends in Art and ACB Media. It airs several times a week on ACB Media One. To listen and for a full schedule, go to acbmedia.org/one. Art Parlor is also available as a podcast. Just search for Art Parlor in your favorite podcast app. We’d love to hear from you. You can email us at artparlor@friendsinart.org. And please feel free to check out our website, www.friendsinart.org. Thank you so much for listening and for your support. We’ll be back next month.