Domininkas KUNČINAS / Ore.lt | Lithuanian Drummaturgy
You’re only as good as your drummer, somebody once said. Was it Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie? He used to drum for The Jesus and Mary Chain and recorded their epic Psychocandy album, so he probably knows what he’s talking about. Whoever it was, pop history can tell some stories about injured bands after their drummers checked out: Led Zeppelin and Bonzo, The Who and Keith Moon, The Clash and Topper Headon and others. Even more, some sticksmen went solo and moved into their own limelight: Ringo Starr from The Beatles, Sheila E from Prince’s band, Phil Collins from Genesis, Klaus Schulze from Tangerine Dream, Tony Allen from Fela Kuti’s band, Dave Grohl from Nirvana to name a few.
Unfortunately, in general, the majority of drummers remain nameless and hidden out of the spotlight’s reach. However, developing music technologies have allowed them to explore much wider horizons and become self-sufficient artists.
They used to say that drummers are simple people who hang out with musicians, but not anymore. In recent years, you can catch sight of an emerging drummaturgy in Lithuania too. The term was coined by creative people who happened to be drummers: Adas Gecevičius, Mantas Augustaitis and Vladas Dieninis. According to them, being the foundation, backbone and leitmotif, drummers also have plenty of unpublished stuff and observations in their drawers. There were just too many skills to abandon. The drummers influenced and boosted each other. The date was set, and there was no choice left.
Long in the shadows of other musicians, drummers have recently come onto the radar more and more. In the origins of Lithuanian percussionists, we find the legendary jazzmen Vladimir Tarasov and Arkady Gotesman, who started playing in the late 1970s and were later recognized as two of the best drummers in Europe. Dalius Naujokaitis, a percussionist distilled in New York’s avant-garde experimental scene, has rekindled the fire of free jazz in Vilnius. Gintautas Gascevicius evolved from drumming in the revolutionary band Bix to solo performances. A role of one of the most trusted session drummers in London was not enough for Marijus Aleksa, so he came back to Lithuania to pursue a solo career. Contemporary drummers like Adas Gecevičius, Vladas Dieninis, Mantas Augustaitis and others are all looking for their own unique sound.
Vladimir Tarasov
If we talk about Lithuanian drummers who came forward to be the brains, first of all we must turn back time almost 40 years. In the middle of the '80s one of the founders of Lithuanian jazz Vladimir Tarasov started to create his solo compositions, the legendary Atto series.
A world-renowned drummer, inventive percussionist, composer and creator of visual art, Tarasov masters many styles of music, but his main interests are free jazz and improvisational music. The instruments touched by a masterful percussionist sound like an orchestra, he also makes unexpected objects resound. Together with the trio GTČ, he laid the foundations for the Lithuanian jazz school, played music with the world’s improvisational music figures, and was one of the first in Europe to start playing solo programmes for percussion instruments.
“Drumming here is a dance, not involving the mysteries of sound and shade, texture and surface, but rather it’s a place where all pre-lingual expressions are heard and experienced on the musical level,” said Tom Jurek describing Tarasov’s Atto I in the “All Music Guide to Jazz” 4th edition.
For Atto, Tarasov used his well-beaten drum kit, homemade and found percussion instruments, a hunting horn and various electronic devices to control both atmosphere and tension.
Reviewing Atto IV, Jurek observed: “In places you might be reminded of Deuter or Florian Fricke or even Manuel Gottsching, with the exception of the emphasis Tarasov places on improvising against the rhythm. The hunting horn, as heavily processed as Jon Hassell's trumpet, becomes a central figure in relating the various modes in this work to one another and in keeping the various instruments separate. As the steady pulse of a keyboard loop stutters in the middle ground, drums and the horn come shimmying in and out, transporting the listener into Tarasov's sound world.”
It was still a brave move for a drummer to create abstract instrumental music back in 1986 in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev had only just announced his glasnost and perestroika reforms. The only Soviet record label, Melodyia, released the first parts of Atto. After Lithuania restored its independence in 1990 this was continued by the newly founded Lithuanian label Sonore. Later on, some Atto parts were re-released by Finland’s Jazpuu. In 2005, the Russian label Long Arms Records released an 11-CD box set of all the Atto parts.
Today, Tarasov is regarded as one of the world’s most inventive percussionists with the most expressive sound and visual subtext. For sure he is a huge inspiration for the younger generation of Lithuanian musicians as well. Last summer, the 75-year-old performed solo at a Radio Vilnius community event.
Arkady Gotesman
You simply can't miss this rhythm master, who collaborated with people such as John Zorn and Werner Herzog. One of the most resourceful and versatile Lithuanian percussionists made his jazz debut in the 80s. For many years, Gotesman has been working with the above-mentioned Vladimir Tarasov and other prominent musicians. According to him, collaborations are determined by the flow of life: “Of course, there are coincidences, but everything happens by itself. I consider Lithuania to be a very important and special place in terms of music performers. Thoughts, ideas, philosophy and poems that I hear while walking the streets of Vilnius are created by great artists who have been, are and will be here, making this country rich. The aura of this space is captivating, lingering and inspiring.”
From an early age, he had a more free approach to performance, being interested in bebop, African rhythms, Cuban music, a variety of instruments and performance. Together with various stage partners, he travelled a lot around the world and learned a great deal, especially about percussion and jazz. “Probably, what was placed in me by fate is a sort of return,” he said.
In his view, percussion is not one of the most complex groups of instruments when talking about the meaning and eloquence of a piece's narrative, because modern percussion technologies, mannerisms and new playing techniques allow for a melodic function to be performed as well.
In addition to playing jazz, Gotesman performs contemporary academic music, writes scenarios for performances and installations, and collaborates with dancers. Inspired by Joseph Brodsky’s poems, he recorded the solo album J. Brodsky in Memoriam (2003). The drummer has always been preoccupied with theatrical vocabulary. He organises literary readings with actors, and he composes, records and performs music for theatre. In 2010, Arkady staged his first one-man show, The Story of God’s Man, and in 2012 together with visual artists Linas Liandzbergis and Arturas Valiauga he presented a new project, Percussion Postcards.
Arkady Gotesman is a founder member of the Vilnius Klezmer Orchestra and he organises the Klezmer Music Festival.
“Everything is just interesting to me, I have thought about my instrument group differently for every project,” the drummer says in one of his interviews: “I think it’s important and interesting for any artist who lives a similar life and expresses himself in different genres to create unique versions of the performance. Inside I still feel the call and hunger to play, perform, be, hear, teach, see, watch, listen, and enjoy the achievements of others... This is my group of instruments, I am so excited to live.”
Gintautas Gascevičius (Ginc)
In 1988, the young drummer Gintautas Gascevičius joined the band Bix in the so-called Lithuanian Manchester city of Šiauliai. In a few years, they became one of the main acts of the emerging independent Lithuanian music scene, playing not only locally but also touring all over Europe and the USA. Gascevicius, sometimes nicknamed the Professor, was named the best Lithuanian instrumentalist by the Bravo Music Awards in 1993.
Besides Bix and other projects, Gintautas, also known as Ginc, writes soundtracks for his solo performances. He constantly surprises listeners with unexpected conceptualizations of percussion, vocals and visuals.
“I don’t only use regular instruments in my solo work. There is a certain plot line that’s difficult to verbalize,” he explains. “Live performances are created with a theatre director, so that it is a joint work. At certain moments, it is necessary to play with special pipes that have an unreal sound. They have so much musicality. I also use… beans. Sounds surreal, but you have to give them a chance.”
Ginc’s solo album FonoGrafijos, released on USB in 2017, was named one of the most conceptual albums in Lithuania. The creator of such a bright individual style is regarded as a particularly original creator and performer. In his Varava album (2018) he paid a lot of attention to the organic presence of space as a musical instrument in the interweaving of ideas, aftertastes and influences. In some places, sterility is deliberately avoided, going beyond the boundaries of professionalism while weaving a musical fabric. His music creates very visual worlds. It’s a real theatre of sounds.
In 2020, a third solo album, Oneirology, was released (Greek: oneiros - dream, logos - science). It is the third part of a trilogy – the first album was dedicated to Location, the second to Space, and the third is about the Inside. “Visibility and audibility seem to make you have no doubts about the sustainability of everything. But the shadows of the shadow and signs from the other side keep telling us about the indescribable, because it is not from the world of words,” Ginc says describing the idea of the project.
A few years ago, Ginc released the soundtrack for a performance of Goethe’s Faust.
“I consciously try to get out of my comfort zone. Sometimes the mind is a trickster and fakes that way out. It’s like you’re moving forward, but inside you don’t feel overwhelmed, and if you don’t feel a kind of horror, then you haven’t gone anywhere. I always check myself, whether I feel comfortable, whether the metabolism has already been activated and I often need to go to the toilet. If I feel horror, then I’ve succeeded in leaving. And those things happen often enough, thank God. With each such exit, you gain a new experience in life.”
2022 saw Ginc joining creative forces with Dalius Naujokaitis, a “Fluxus drummer” living in the USA. The cooperation idea was sparked during their conversation – it turned out that both of them liked Laozi’s work Tao Te Ching written in China 2,000 years ago. The main idea of the work, the concept of Dao, is described as a natural flow. The artists decided to play the piece without any Chinese musical quotes or hieroglyphic decorations. The focus here is on content that is universal rather than specific to any geographic or cultural region.
Talking about his imaginable 50th birthday, Ginc admits it can look different: “It could also be minimalism. In order to make minimalism, you have to pass so much maximalism that only nuggets remain, each of which has great power. I believe I will have enough experience to be able to afford a high level of minimalism.”
Dalius Naujokaitis-Nojo
After playing jazz in Lithuania, Dalius Naujokaitis, aka Nojo, emigrated to New York in 1995. This bright personality befriended the legendary Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas and some of his music became soundtracks to Mekas’ films. “He is abnormal! Totally obsessed with his art and there’s nothing else he cares about! Having lost his mind to the muses of music, he moves forward unpredictably and dangerously, like all poets,” Mekas said once. Nojo also collaborated with other prominent New York artists: Butch Morris, Arthur John Baron, Aaron Keane, Andrew Weiss, Doug Wieselman and others. And two days a week, he works as a gardener in various penthouses in New York. According to him, it’s like a meditation.
In recent years Nojo has been coming to Lithuania on a regular basis, playing with the younger generation of improv jazz musicians. One of his most interesting projects is the NoJo Orchestra with its constantly changing line-up. It was created during the Covid pandemic. Dalius recorded the drums and asked his friends from France, Brazil, Germany and other places to add their parts. All in all, almost 50 musicians took part in the project.
A reincarnation of the Orchestra, NoJo Airlines with Lithuanian musicians plays live at the Infinity theatre performance in Vilnius. In 2016, the Vilnius Jazz Festival awarded Nojo for his services to Lithuanian jazz.
In the fall of 2023, D. Naujokaitis organized a one-day festival “NoJo FEST” in Vilnius, where he performed with an entire orchestra of friends. It consisted of more than 30 professional musicians masterfully handling different instruments. According to the organizers, music for them is a field of unrestrained and unexpected experiments, and there is simply no insurmountable challenge on stage. Actually, you can witness that every time you go to Nojo's shows.
“I like free music where I can’t follow any stylistic restrictions,” he said in one of his interviews. “It’s neither jazz nor any other genre. We often play improvised music without focusing on any style or genre. (...) I’m not very technical, but I have my own way of playing. Everyone knows that, that’s why they invite me to some projects – calling because Dalius is needed. Another person would bring something else.”
Marijus Aleksa
Similar to the Nojo Orchestra project, Marijus Aleksa asked his fellow musicians all over the world to contribute to his As They Are music album released in 2023 – a sonic record of Marijus’ experiences as a session drummer and his transformation into a music maker. It was not the first solo adventure of this Lithuanian cross-genre drummer and producer fusing his jazz background with world and electronic music to shape his own hybrid sound. After releasing his debut album Maps in 2018, in recent years he recorded Music For a Non-Existent Movie with his long-time creative partner Paulius Kilbauskas, and Santaka’s No Rivers Here with the well-known electronic music producer Manfredas.
M.Aleksa's music is like the works by the abstract expressionist painters: rich in colour, vivid, intuitive and hypnotizing, traversing musical maps by blending the worlds of jazz, world music and electronic club music. “Hip hop, jazz, rock, Latin music and other genres have their clear roots, but electronic music has emerged not from a region but from technological progress,” Marijus explains. “Given that jazz was once very innovative and progressive, for me jazz today is electronic music as the most searching and changing music.”
Starting from banging empty peanut butter jars in a suburb of Vilnius, he crafted his skills in bands like Dublicate and ended up being one of the most wanted session drummers in London. Keyon Harold, Bill Laurance, Joe Armon Jones, Ashley Henry, Dennis Rollins, China Moses, Ben Marc, Anthony Joseph, Femi Temowo, Oscar Jerome and others have proclaimed Marijus’ talent.
After playing with the pianist and Grammy award winner Bill Laurance this year, Marijus may even close down his session drummer activities, or change the angle at least. “I would like to finally be invited not to perform someone else’s music professionally, but my own style and music. This is how I would like to project my future career.”
“As a session musician, I have been in a musical compromise for a long time – the further you go, the less you want it,” he says. “Over time, I started to realize how much I’d like to compose myself. I felt like a kind of tourist on other people’s journeys. Some people go on being session musicians all their lives, and I realized I didn’t want to anymore because I feel kind of fake.”
You can hear real M.Aleksa on his Solo Live In Vilnius (2023) recorded at the Improdimensija concert series for improvised music. The record is a gourmet dessert of incredible technical prowess and visionary virtuosity with spice range from Jaki Liebezeit & Milford Graves through to Japanese Gagaku music & West African percussion, classical minimalist (and of course electronic music). Marijus Aleksa won the Annual Vilnius Jazz Festival Prize for his contributions to Lithuanian jazz.
Adas Gecevičius
In 2011, the Lithuanian alternative music scene was stormed by the inventive experimental post-jazz trio Sheep Got Waxed. Though the band returned with their third studio take More Chews last year, all three members are sharing their creativity in a range of different projects as well. Drummer and producer Adas Gecevičius, or just Adas, is one more gem founded in fertile Lithuanian music soil. Born in 1990 right after Lithuania restored its independence, Adas represents the first generation to grow up completely without Soviet leaven.
“My first creation for myself was ambient, although at the time I was playing drums in a metal band,” he recalls. “Sea sounds, piano and a string quartet. After the rhythm of the day, you want to do nothing but meditate. Creating melodies and harmonies is just as interesting to me as the drums. When I started learning to play drums, I only listened to drummers. Today it doesn't matter anymore: if there's a good drum part, I pay attention, but if there's a good piece, then I don't even hear the drums, I listen to the overall whole. I want to know as much as possible about music.”
Coming from the quiet resort town of Druskininkai, today Adas is a wanted composer and producer in various fields: the post-rap project Vilniaus Energija, the urban dance theatre Low Air, producing different artists or nurturing his own solo project – check out his experimental electronics album Mikroritmika (2020) or the neo-folk take Dėl Žalio Žolyno with singer Viltė (2021) or minimal lo-fi sketches with Šarukas from Garbanotas band on their Tavo Žmogus EP.
“I have been convinced many times in practice – it all depends on the presentation,” Adas assures. “You have to overcome all your fears on stage and present your ideas boldly, even if you are not sure. As one of the jazz classics said, there are no bad notes, only poorly played ones. This is also a psychological thing. It seems to me that a musician or an artist must be as brave as possible in this life. You must look at everything the way you want and not make any compromises that lead to fear and despair.”
Vladas Dieninis
Adas’ colleague in the drummaturgy project is Vladas Dieninis, a concertmaster at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre and composer and performer who emerged from being the drummer in various music acts like AVaspo, fusedMarc, Luumm, cutthroats, or Darbo Džiaugsmai. As it later turned out, he was always interested in more adventurous sounds. This versatile artist can one day be found playing in a dark and sweaty rave and be talking about sound philosophy the next.
In 2013, Vladas became a lecturer of the travelling educational sound art project Architecture of Sound, which was dedicated to folks interested in sound and living in the Lithuanian provinces. A few years later saw him curating sound art and experimental music performances in a series called Intersections.
At almost the same time, Dieninis started to compose sounds for contemporary dance performances and perform live becoming a member of the Isla to Isla collective.
“The first step out of the comfort zone was an offer to compose music for a modern dance performance. It was weird making music and not performing it live. A mental breakdown occurred. I have been working in this field for 11 or 12 years already. The arsenal of actions and tools changed, and I started to think in slightly different categories. It’s liberating. It seems to me that it is very important for musicians to get out of their usual field – in another sphere, the same things open up from a different angle. It gave me freedom of action that I would never have had playing in a band. But there are a lot of steps to take before you can take the stage alone,” he explains.
One of his first live encounters was described as 'écriture automatique' or 'automatic writing'. “It’s a rhythmic collage controlled by mental impulses. The narrative of the composition is based on the irrational and associative language of dreamers, trying to suppress the coercion of logical discourse, and so preserving the production model of surreal aesthetics. The subconscious mind has a limited time to map and express itself before mind control begins. The resources of sensitivity and emotionality can counterbalance logical cognition, and unconsciously created sequences of sound images and chains of associations can provide a field of unexpected analogies and new connections, expand the logo-centrically perceived reality, and push it into a different world of events.”
In 2021 Vladas released the concept album HAJAT. Here he tries to replicate his past self, conveying the creative logic and sentiment of the time.
His most recent cooperation has seen him creating a performance with sound engineer and creator of synchronic noises (follies) Dominyka Adomaitytė. Together they presented the sound spectacle Eiti į Pat Vidurį (Going to the Middle) in complete darkness accompanied by Jonas Mekas’ poetry. That was the culmination of a three-year-long sound art and music education project, Sight Background, dedicated to visually impaired people.
“The creative environment influenced me to start my own thing,” he says. “The bands I played in consisted of open creative people and we were all integrated into the creative process. And I myself felt that the drum parts were just one of the elements. I was interested enough to participate in other processes as well: creating a composition, searching for a sound, and so on. Little by little, the fields of interest expanded. I listened to a lot of music, I began to understand that percussion sounds one way in one style and another in another. I started asking myself why, how, what? All this helped to unlock and unleash creativity. If the environment supports you and does not put you in a strict framework, it’s the best medium for development. You become self-sufficient as a creator. The career element was not important to me, I’d tried elements of the music industry, but I was drawn elsewhere.”
Mantas Augustaitis
One more drummaturgy participant, Mantas Augustaitis, also crafted his skills in different bands, like Umiko, In Search, No Dog Barking, Keymono and others. It was obvious that the drum set was too narrow for this creative person, so 2015 saw him releasing the album It’s All Bananas Folks under the moniker Chung Kran. Mantas grew up in the small town of Vilkaviskis, but his elder brother had a music record distribution business, so the youngster got a chance to discover a whole variety of music. Later, he started to study drums after his first dream of becoming a fashion designer was left behind.
“I had a wide range of practice, which helped me to understand how percussion instruments should be handled in different areas, and my attitude to music changed completely,” he revealed in one of his interviews. “Somehow, bands and projects appeared by themselves, in which they offered to participate. Some ended really quickly, others lasted longer, but little by little I began to move towards understanding how I could hear music on my own without anyone else’s suggestions and what I wanted to do with it.”
“When I started creating, I didn’t focus on anything in particular, I just stayed alone at night and recorded my ideas on the computer – that’s how my music creativity happens. It was difficult because I didn’t feel like I’d done everything, but I couldn’t seem to find a better solution to get rid of all this ballast. So I gathered the material, released my first album, and it was a relief.”
Mantas uses voice, vinyl records, samples, guitar and electronics to make an original lo-fi sound. Having fun creating, he doesn’t think at all, he likes to engage in games that finally lead him to the final projection of the work and its development process. All this is a journey of self-discovery for him.
Mantas started year 2023 at the legendary Cafe OTO in London, where he performed with the above mentioned "ideologist" of drummaturgy Adas and experimental sound artists from Lithuania.
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In the post-post-post everything merging collage era, music genres don’t matter anymore. Nor do the usual roles of musicians. Sometimes the drummer is a frontman, sometimes you don’t understand who’s the drummer at all, and sometimes the drummer is a guy pummelling some pads full of samples or just singing along to the beats made at home. So the joke What’s the last thing a drummer says in a band? “Hey, how about we try one of my songs?” isn’t funny anymore.