JOJO MAYER IN CONCERT

TUESDAY, JUNE 20

THE FLOREAT HOTEL

The Floreat Hotel band room is a cauldron of activity. People move around the room greeting old friends or finding the best vantage points. Most are musicians, some are parents with excited children and the remainder seem to be Floreat staff, working furiously to keep up with the extra workload placed on them on an unusually busy Tuesday evening. Drummers discuss the features they see on the Sonor drumkit displays lining the back wall of the venue. It’s a great turnout – around 200 payers – and of those, around ninety-percent have no prior knowledge of the performer they are about to see.

At the front of the room, nestled in amongst the crowd, a quietly confident Jojo Mayer warms up on a knee-pad. The next two hours are going to be a real eye-opener for those in the crowd who think they’ve seen it all…

Jojo is introduced and takes the stage immediately. He’s wearing a ‘Prohibited Beatz’ T-shirt in support of one of his bands and its obvious from the get-go that he’s not like other drummers - he’s also talking a strange language that few people understand - Beat culture…Beat deconstruction… Electronic music? What does it all mean? The crowd listens intently and tries to comprehend his opening words. Jojo then cues up the first song on his laptop and rips into his performance.

 Jojo’s playing can most simply (and unfairly) be described as electronic music played on an acoustic kit but in reality its so much more. For drummers at least, the electronic side of the music scene has sometimes been seen as the enemy – Players fearing they could eventually lose work to drum machines, beat samples and computer programming. However, nobody in the room could doubt Jojo’s playing was a perfect marriage of the acoustic and electronic worlds. After the first two songs, everyone was behind him and the new approach he brought to playing drums.

After his first few songs Jojo gets up from the set and begins discussing his philosophies on playing. He recalls a moment in his life a few years back where he was invited to a check out a rave party…

“There were 1200 people in this room and a few DJs were mixing beats onstage. The beats were all programmed, quite technical ‘break beats’ and very different to what a drummer would play. Looking around the crowd I could see people really moving to this stuff. I realized that, as a drummer, I could not afford to ignore what was happening here.”

Since then Jojo’s motivations have seen him pioneer a completely new style of playing, to which he thanks the likes of producers and sound engineers – not drummers.

“Like everyone else, I love seeing a great drummer play, but you know, I really don’t listen to drummers anymore.” Jojo explains. “Producers tend to approach beats very differently to drummers. They use samples and they can cue sections of these samples to start or loop at any point. They can speed rhythms up and slow them down and when they do, the pitch changes with the tempo. I started to think about how I could recreate these effects on my drums.”

Jojo is quick to point out that It’s very much about playing what is appropriate. Although Jojo’s technique is beyond the comprehension of most of the people in the audience he stresses that it’s what you do with the technique that is most important - Far more important than the skills you possess or the sizes of the drums you use.

“If you look at drummers these days, they are doing some amazing things on the drums, but not a lot of it is new. If you look back at guys like John Bonham, he used almost the exact same setup as Buddy Rich was using years before him but John’s playing really brought a different sound to rock music. As such, Bonham pioneered a new style of playing. It wasn’t the drums he used or the technical ability he had - It was the attitude he brought to the music when he played and that’s what took drumming to new levels.”

With such a focus on the electronic side of music, someone in the crowd questioned Jojo’s use of an acoustic set. Why not use electronic drums instead?

“Im not trying to be a drum machine. If I tried to do that I can guarantee you I’d fail! When you hit an electronic drum, what you get is 24-bit sound. When you hit an acoustic drum it’s more like 1 million-bit. As good as electronic drums have become they simply cannot match the level of expression you can create with an acoustic drum set.”

Apparently, Nerve CD’s and a possible instructional DVD could be available by December 2006.

Jojo then jumps back behind the set and plays one last ‘Nerve’ track. Upon finishing there is rapturous applause from the audience.

One of the best things about Jojo Mayer is his willingness to mix with the people that support him. For a good half-hour afterwards, Jojo shook hands, signed items and discussed drumming openly with fans around him.

The crowd summed up the success of the night up best. You could hear “Oh my God”, “Awesome” and “wow” (amongst other expletives) in just about every corner of the room.

Many had no prior knowledge of Jojo Mayer before tonight but guaranteed they won’t forget this performance in a hurry. Its just as well, too – They may have just witnessed a pioneer for the future of drumming.

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