1985 Mel Lewis clinic

Surprised I haven't already shared this Mel Lewis clinic, given in the Netherlands in 1985. He talks about his familiar opinionated subjects: playing the bass drum, drum sounds, fighting with recording engineers. Somewhere in there he addresses handling fast tempos not as an exercise in pure chops, which relates to some things I've written about that. After about the 1 hour mark he gets into talking about cymbals, which is always interesting with him. Everything he says about Istanbul cymbals holds for the Cymbal & Gong cymbals I sell through my Cymbalistic site.

After 1:35 he fields questions and gets into talking about playing the ride cymbal, playing shuffles, brushes. After 1:50 he talks about the very important concept of thinking and phrasing like a horn, and at the end are a few good words about spontaneity vs. working things out.