Name: Pidgins
Members: Milo Tamez, Aaron With
Interviewee: Milo Tamez
Nationalities: American (Aaron), Mexican (Milo)
Occupations: Sound artist (Aaron), drummer, percussionist (Milo)
Current release: Pidgins's Refrains of the Day, Volume 1 is out via Lexical.

[Read our Aaron With interview about Sound]
[Read our Aaron With interview about Recording and their Favourite Sound Tools]
[Read our Milo Tamez interview about Healing with Drums]
[Read our Milo Tamez interview about Drumming]

If you enjoyed this Pidgins interview and would like to find out more about the duo and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram. 



How do you experience the concepts of "groove," "swing," and "rhythmic feel" in music?

If it is natural then the music happens naturally, so it grooves, swings and feels like a natural being. It is in the body. If it is not, it is not going to happen.

In many ways they (these terms) are quite subjective and can be assimilated under diverse circumstances according to the sociocultural referent, the ethos wherein we find them in use and the cultural referent on which we have grown.

For me those terms became a fundamental historical part of the vocabularies drummers - American ones specifically - built upon the music - created in America -; the terms as we know them and understand them and refer to them, has been fundamentally expressions of specific moments in history of the so called American drumming (like many other concepts in use). But we can see that Brazilians for example, swing in their own way; Cubans groove in their own ways, Africans and Indians feel rhythm in their own unique ways.

Even more, we can differentiate between a Cuban and African CLAVE conception and evolution in their musics, for example; while it is the same rhythm pattern-structure it differs its state of motion and cognitive awareness in time and articulation, which gives to their musics different sense of groove, swing and feel.

So, the terms to me are as wide as the musicians-drummers within each era and geography wants to be or to become, and the way the concepts have been used serves a purpose for bringing in a common understanding (mostly at a language and vocabulary level) we have become participants and “rhythmatists” for the musics establishments along many decades now.

The concept of “groove” for someone like master Perre Favre may be quite different from someone like master Andrew Cyrille; the “swinging” movement for someone like Famoudou Don Moye is so different from someone like Tony Williams. The “feel” thing is a personal imprinting of our own sense of being: who we are, that's “our feel”'; how we cultivate ourselves, that's reflected in the way we cultivate music, that's the “feel” we infuse into the music.

Having my own groove (way of experiencing and living and moving in space-time-place), my own swing (sensing and manifesting time in space) and rhythmical feeling (states of motion-emotion and sense-awareness of being myself) has been some of the major “differences” and also “challenges” I have had experienced along my path.

How do time signatures and tempo affect our perception of rhythm?

They both and together create our perception of time in Time; they (time signatures and tempo) are just some of the fundamental elements of rhythm perception; our cognitive system organizes (biologically and physically) our perceptual capacities of the different levels of space-time movement flow and its dimensions in unique ways, so certain levels of understanding become clearer and more manageable when we think music and perform within these two fundamental concepts.

Music is beyond those parameters when we work within a larger scale of sensory perception and space-time cognition; in most cases, metricity and timing are always implied and tacit (as for example in many of the progressive avant-jazz of the 70's), but not always at a conscious level (as for example, we hear today many drummers playing “free style improvised musics” but still phrasing in a binary way, even though they are playing asymmetrical or discontinual time).

It is in this specific aspect of our perception of rhythm “In Rhythm” is where my appreciation of Prof. Milford Graves caught my research interest: time signatures are like frames where we can put a canvas and paint on it for then hanging it onto the wall and leave it staying there forever in the same way; while time perception is open ended, expands and contracts, breaths in and exhales out from our bodies, and only gets fixed to the canvas by the “signature” (metricity). Tempo is about acceleration/de-acceleration within a given space duration. It allows us to become aware of the state of a moment in time, so we develop our timing and rhythmic drive.

I came to some of these conclusions in my drumming early on from three different perspectives: one was that of Jazz Drumming History with non binary drummers like Jack DeJohnette, Elvin, Williams, Haynes; second one from that of African Root-Origin Drumming History, specially those from the Benninian and Sufi / Senegalese drumming; and a third one, from other physical disciplines I have done like QiGong/Tai Chi practices together with conceptions of eukinetics in modern-contemporary dance theory.

In certain musical languages, styles and ways of organizing sound, and/or sociopolitically oriented forms of expression and communication, time signatures and tempo became the dogma to be learnt; that is what and how one actually has to focus on in order to play and being understood.

But historically and at a planetary scale, the most powerful rhythmic musics are not structured under those same parameters. Indians for example uses language systems and Africans use onomatopoeic phrasing to create their “stories”; then the syllabic groupings can be expanded by displacing - permutation - cross rhythm devices, that works more like a dancer does. So you play like dancing and singing instead of counting on rhythms.

To me, metricity and “the air” are part of the whole diversity of ways we drummers and musicians learn in our early stages of growth; that is the Western way to musical thinking, then all that becomes part of your tool kit, part of your musical technique. But music flow and movement is ever changing beyond any of those concepts.

What is the relationship between harmony, rhythm and melody? How do non-percussion instruments contribute to the overall rhythmic texture of a piece?

hey work (harmony rhythm melody) all together to compose th organization of practically any traditional westernized music we know. Music in its  most primitive states had those same elements but in its more brute state, just like germs. The three elements are everywhere in nature in its purest form.

I was a fan of the conception of melodic drumming but from the perspective of “play like a trumpet” (early jazz - to modern era drumming) or “think as a pianist” (modern jazz - to free form drumming); and I believe they were part of the evolving transitioning states of  the American Drumming History. All instruments in a given context reciprocally contribute to each other; each and every instrument in an ensemble contributes to the overall rhythmic texture being created, from early New Orleans Jazz to Rock-Pop music. Each instrument in the ensemble provides a certain quality of emotion (harmonic sense) in its sound that makes the three elements, harmony-rhythm-melody work in a specific way to create the right texture in a piece of music.

A specific way of harmony voicing creates a specific way of emotional response affecting the other instrumentalist who may respond with a specific way of melodically shaping the music, and so the rhythm is always holding together the texture as a polyphony in vertical space.

For every era in music history there has been a very unique rhythmic texture; from Bach to Beethoven to Debussy to Stravinsky to Boulez to György Ligeti. And the same from West African orchestras to Jelly Roll Morton to Louis Armstrong to Charly Parker to T. Monk to C. Mingus to Wayne Shorter to Ornette Coleman to Michael Mantler to Wadada Leo Smith. And so on and on. Rhythm texture is the root of music!

[Read our Wada Leo Smith interview]

How has technology, such as drum machines and sequencers, impacted the way rhythm is created and perceived? Has it been a concrete influence on your own approach?

I do believe it is one of those elements (tech) that widened the scope of understanding and forth-seeing the way we perceive our world today (not just musically), both ways, on observation to the past and speculating about it into the future.

Tough I went into electronics for some time (PureData, CSound), my nature is more orientated on the exploration of the more natural fundamental elements. Tech and even more now the digital devices we are immersed in have not been a concrete influence on my approaches to percussion performance, but have had an influence on the understanding of states of percussive creation, mostly at a scientifically and theoretical level.

I do keep close and updated on tech innovation today, but it does not influence my approach to drumming, rhythm nor musical imagination in any way.