Goldies 2000 - Simone White
RIGHT BEFORE DRUMMER Simone White was booted from Downtown Rehearsal, he drove down to the building and recorded four hours of anger-driven beats for his upcoming solo album, Simulation. "It's going to be an aggressive album," he jokes. "Downtown Rehearsal is going to have a serious effect on people's lives. If musicians are real about it, and feel it in their hearts, then letting it out while playing is a part of them. It's going to affect the dynamics of people just walking around on the streets. There will be a bunch of frustrated motherfuckers in San Francisco."
Some people know the San Francisco native as a jazz drummer who led his own trio and quartet in the early to mid '90s; others know him as the guy who constructed organic, live beats for the likes of Midnight Voices ('92-'99), Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy ('92-'94), the Omar Sosa Trio, rocker Mark Eitzel (1996), Metaphor ('97), a jazz fusion group with Liberty Ellman, Rasan Fredericks, and Vijay Ayer, and Afromystic (2000). His newest group, Fuzebox, is a live drum 'n' bass act whose phenomenal debut, A Touch in a Dream, came out late last year. After the band recovers from their collective "Downtown [Rehearsal] depression," as he puts it, they'll get to work on part two. "This time we're integrating more house than jungle," White says.
White started playing drums at age five. He's taught himself some things, but he received a lot of training from his mother, Jamie White, a musician from New Orleans who is his greatest musical inspiration and supporter. "She's been everything," he says. "She'd come to see me play with a Gothic band and love it and tell me to wear my hair bigger and put a streak in it." He's a highly sought-after session drummer who's recorded with the likes of P-Funk's lead brain, George Clinton. "He's one of the last knuckleheads around, the last crazy genius," White says. "We played from 11 a.m. to 6 a.m. My hands were ruined the next day."
White drums like it's an Olympic sport; as he sits in front of his shiny drum kit, his arms and hands spiral and pound in a breathtaking whirlwind. When he plays live with Fuzebox, the old myth that live drummers can't compete with faster programmed beats is pushed aside: the computer geeks have nothing on White's real-time skill. His rhythms are dynamic, hypnotic at times – proving, perhaps, that White doesn't simply lay down beats: he's so good he makes the music lay down around him. (Amanda Nowinski)
