DVD Review – Rockabilly Rocking Swing with Slim Jim Phantom
October 10, 2009 in Music/DVDs, Opinion, Reviews by JABB
Slim Jim Phantom is awesome… more awesomely awesome then you will ever be, and this video proves it! Woe unto you he who knowith not how awesome he is for he is just that awesome. Is what I would proclaim smugly if I weren’t above such things. Which I’m apparently not but seriously that is how smug this video comes across to me. Almost to the point of making the thing too comical to watch. I’m gonna keep this review short because the less I say the less likely I’ll say something I’ll regret. Read the rest of this entry →
I’m gonna be totally honest and say I had never heard of Randy Van Patten before I rented this DVD and I have a feeling you might not know who he is either. He’s a working drummer with a lots of years under his belt and has drummed for lots of people in his time. In other words he’s the kind of drummer we aspire to be like but didn’t realize it when we started. When people say they want to be a studio or a session drummer they often have guys like Steve Gadd in mind, but not everyone can achieve Steve’s level of standing in the music industry. Most studio and session drummers are more like Randy. One of many working drummers who’ve landed some big gigs but never achieved the notoriety of the drum gods. Not glamorous but if they went missing it would put the music industry into cardiac arrest. You can get the specifics on everything Randy at www.vanzdrumming.com. 
Russ Miller, studio drummer, inventor of drumming gadgets, and former drummer-talk interviewee has entered the world of instructional DVDs with his offering Arrival: Behind the Glass. Arrival is the name of the album that he recently released and Arrival: Behind the Glass is a tour of what it was like recording with tons and tons of famous and well respected drummers. Oh, right. I didn’t mention the all star cast, did I? This is definitely an album for drummers incase you hadn’t guessed. Every other track on the album is a rhythmic conversation (a.k.a drum duet) with some incredible drummer. Among those included in the project were: Steve Smith, Jeff Hamilton, Zoro, Akira Jimbo, and Johnny Rabb. 
I should note that for this review that I have neither Advanced Funk Studies nor the Contemporary Drum-Set Techniques books themselves but given the information in this DVD I will soon. Rick Latham wrote those two books over twenty-five years ago and they’ve become favorites of the drumming community over that time. At some point along the way Rick decided to supplement the books with a video for each book respectively. Fast forward to today, for the 25th anniversary of Advanced Funk Studies Rick rereleased both of the DVDs together in a single disk with a bunch of extras and it made its way to my house via Netflix… and that’s the story so far.
Benny Greb’s new DVD is somewhere between Big Time and the Thomas Lang DVDs. To me this makes sense because I tend to think of Benny Greb’s drumming style as a blend of those two drummers. Thomas Langesq chops with a Billy Ward like sense of creativity. In this DVD Benny Greb teaches you how to “speak drum” There isn’t anything revolutionary in terms of what he’s teaching, it’s how he’s teaching it that is the real selling point. This isn’t one huge system it’s actually 3 or 4 smaller ones that he’s teaching you by relating them to something very intuitive to humans, language.
Maybe I’m all alone in this but before I picked up this DVD I had no idea who Chris Layton was. Maybe that’s a forgivable offense but I also didn’t know who Stevie Ray Vaughan was either. So if you do know who Stevie Ray Vaughan was then placing Chris Layton in your mind will be easy. He was Stevie’s drummer in Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Double Trouble band, making him either the double or the trouble. I’m not sure which.
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