American super-drummer, Chris "Daddy" Dave will bring his version of cool to Wellington Jazz Festival.
It all started with the drum.
The drum and the voice.
You sing, you bang on something, and there it is - music.
"It had to be the first instrument, right?" says Chris "Daddy" Dave, a Texan percussion virtuoso who's one of the most in-demand drummers in the world right now.
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"You could be in a cave or wherever, and you can bet somebody was hitting something with a stick and making a rhythm while the others would sing."
Chris Dave has worked with the likes of Adele, Justin Bieber, and Lady Gaga.
Beyoncé. Adele. Lady Gaga. D'Angelo. Justin Bieber. Sonny Rollins. MF Doom. Erykah Badu. Wynton Marsalis. A Tribe Called Quest.
Chris Dave has made a rhythm while they sang, while they rapped, while they played.
He has drummed for all these people and hundreds more, on stage or in the studio.
Pop, hip hop, R'n'B, country, gospel, jazz: it's all the same to him.
"It ain't no thing, man. It's what I do. Been doing it since I was a little kid in the church band back home in Houston."
And now he's coming here, to Wellington, to do it for us.
Chris Dave and his band The Drumhedz appear at next week's Wellington Jazz Festival, an event that pulls over 30,000 jazz fans from all over the land.
The Drumhedz will be headlining alongside US jazz singer Gretchen Parlato, Philadelphia bass legend Christian McBride and former Miles Davis pianist John Beasley's MONK'estra big band.
"I ain't telling you who I'm bringin' along with me, neither" says Dave from his home in California, his voice all snuffly with the tail-end of a cold.
"Drumhedz is whoever I feel like playin' with at any given time. There'll be six or seven of us on stage down there, though. The best thing to do with a Drumhedz show is to turn up with an open mind and a determination to party. Believe me, you're gonna hear some things you ain't heard before."
What style of music? He's not telling us that, either.
"Man, I listen to everything, and I play everything, too. Expect nothing, then you'll be happy with what you get! It'll be a party combining all sorts of music, live on stage, and we'll be there to mingle with the people afterwards, you know."
He isn't much of a talker, as it turns out. Chris Dave is a man of high achievements and few words.
It's not that he isn't friendly; he just speaks in short sentences and they peter out quickly.
He'd far rather you listened to him play drums than talk about playing drums, and fair enough.
When Dave starts to smack and tap and tickle things, all of his limbs working and his head "somewhere way up in the clouds, man", well… that's when he's at his most articulate.
When he plays drums, whatever he's feeling flows out vivid and true, and you can feel it, without a word being said.
You would have heard Chris Dave many times, without knowing it. He's all over Adele's world-conquering 2011 album 21, for example, a pop juggernaut where the songs were still getting thrashed on radio and in TV talent shows for years after release.
Does he feel gratified, to have worked on projects that turned into such monsters?
"To be honest, I enjoy a tiny club gig as much as a big recording. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trippin'. When something becomes a huge hit, I feel satisfied. But, you know… if I had felt terrible about that song, I would have never left the studio. Your name's on something, it needs to be good."
People hire him for what he can do, and he makes sure he delivers.
"I give my best each time, you know? With Adele, she was real easy, real laid back. I remember she'd like a certain little rhythm part or whatever, then we'd run with that to see what happens."
What happened was world domination, and not just with Adele, but over and over again.
Dave's work also provided the rhythmic backbone for gigantic populist money-spinners by Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Lady Gaga and Whangarei-born country crooner, Keith Urban.
And he's been in the game for 25 years, so if you look back even further, you'll find his name in the fine print on hit records by TLC, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and Mary J. Blige back in the day.
Chris Dave is also a key player on a host of smaller, weirder releases, his rhythms the engine driving D'Angelo's bold and furious Black Messiah comeback album, the sinewy hip hop-soul of Anderson Paak, the gorgeous meandering improvisations of Texan jazz pianist Robert Glasper, his former flatmate.
And that Beyoncé connection? Turns out she jumped up on stage to join HIS show, rather than vice versa.
"We were playing in Texas and she sat in a coupla times, long time ago now. She's from Houston, same as me. She just got up on stage and did her thing, you know. It was cool."
Cool? Dude - we're talking about Beyoncé! No greater pop star walks the Earth, but when she gets up to sing at your gig, all you can say is, it was cool?
Who's your daddy? Chris Dave. The drummer started playing when he was just three years old.
Dave sounds so blasé, so calm, so unexcitable, it's as if he's just rolled out of bed, half asleep. He's an amiable bundle of shrugs and yawns and sly deflections, with a sort of "yeah, well, you know, whatever" response to any mention of his achievements.
Perhaps it's just the understated self-confidence of someone who knows he's extremely good at what he does. Certainly, Dave inspires awe in his contemporaries.
Fellow drum demon Questlove of The Roots called him "my worst nightmare" and "the most dangerous drummer alive", saying that he had "totally reinvented what you can do on drums".
"Is Chris Dave the world's most wanted drumming superweapon?" queried the cover of beat-keepers' bible Modern Drummer Magazine recently, with the feature story inside concluding that, well, yes. Yes, he was.
Writer Ken Micallef called Dave "a game changer", testifying to his ability to play "truly demented rhythm patterns" that would be out of the question for lesser tub-thumpers.
Micallef noted that Dave's style is closer to that of revolutionary hip hop producers such as J Dilla than it is to most flesh-and-blood drummers, his sense of time elastic, his rhythms characterised by a rubbery funk shot through with all manner of thrilling stutters and hiccups, the beat dropping either side of where you might expect it to fall.
Dave's Drumhedz project is signed to esteemed American jazz label Blue Note Records, with head honcho Don Was declaring himself a huge fan.
"He totally f…ed me up," said Was - himself a veteran bass player and producer - to one recent interviewer.
"There's an incredible originality and sophistication to where he chooses to play and where he chooses to leave space. It's like a fingerprint – there's no one who approaches drums like he does. The way he is able to emulate those jagged J Dilla beats – humans aren't supposed to play that stuff!"
"I still feel like a kid in a candy store" says US super-drummer, Chris Dave.
How did Chris "Daddy" Dave get so damn good? The usual way.
He played endlessly, starting at the age of three. When other kids were outside having fun in the sun, he was in the garage, a polyrhythmic Nigel No-Mates, his hands holding two sticks, his mind fixated on some complex beat he was determined to not only master but improve.
"I always had a thing for rhythm," he says with his usual understatement. "So I just worked to harness that, really. I played and played and played."
I imagine a serious ruckus emanating from the family garage. Must have been rough for whoever lived next door.
"Oh, yeah. No doubt. Playing drums is annoying for the neighbours, right? Specially if you got thin walls, or you live in a neighbourhood with a lot of old people. That never works, man."
Dave listened to the usual jazz heroes for inspiration: Roy Haynes, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette. He became obsessed with Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen, and a host of Afro-Cuban and Brazilian drummers.
He also studied the best drummers playing funk, soul, Motown, pop and rock, and analysed the beat experiments of the most inventive hip hop producers.
"Drums are all about feel, and it's a never-ending journey. It's all about practicing endlessly so you have the technical skills to play whatever you hear in your head. That's the aim. To be able to think of any rhythm, no matter how complex or unpredictable, and be able to play it."
Dave tries to carry this sense of rhythmic unpredictability into the Drumhedz live shows, drawing his accomplices from a rotating roster of astonishing players and vocalists; The Drumhedz collective has featured upwards of 50 musicians to date. and it's anyone's guess who he'll bring with him on this trip to Wellington.
"I started Drumhedz because I wanted to show that you can be a drummer but also write, produce and arrange music, and determine how the whole sound affects the crowd. You don't have to just sit in the background keepin' time."
The band has made two studio albums to date. The idea was to offer the listener "an outer space journey turned radio station", he says, with Dave's drums centre-stage, fusing hip hop, jazz, Latin and Afrobeat styles into a muscular freak-beat hybrid while his favourite singers, rappers and jazz players rounded out the sound.
"When we play live, it's the same deal, and I always like to switch things up. What my kit looks like depends on what day you catch me. I might have five snare drums, all tuned different. I might be playing a whole mess of tom toms. It might be all kick drums and percussion."
I know what you're wondering. Me, too. All this blather about drums is all very well, but there are more pressing matters to discuss.
Most notably: where did he get that "daddy" nickname? Was it some sort of sly nod to the "blow, daddy-O" hep-cat jazz lingo of the 1950s?
"Nah, man. I was the youngest of all my friends in college, and always hangin' out with people who wanted to do wild stuff. I'd be the responsible one, you know. I'd always be acting all sensible, like a parent, so my friends started to call me daddy."
Daddy is now 44, but still just as excited by what he's doing as when he first picked up the sticks as a nipper.
"When I play, I still feel like a kid in a candy store. All those possibilities, you know? If you can physically do what you're thinking, there's no limit, right? You're just experimenting and having fun, turning thought into sound, getting creative with the rest of your band. There's nothing like it. That's why I play so many styles, man. If someone asks me to play on something, whatever the style, I know I can bring something good to it, so I don't hesitate. I always think- Why not?"
Chris Dave and The Drumhedz play Wellington Opera House on Sunday June 10 as part of the Wellington Jazz Festival. Full programme details at www.jazzfestival.co.nz .
- Stuff
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