{"id":16713,"date":"2019-09-22T11:40:21","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T18:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.drumeo.com\/beat\/?p=16713"},"modified":"2022-08-19T12:23:55","modified_gmt":"2022-08-19T19:23:55","slug":"broadway-drummers-warren-odze-king-kong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.drumeo.com\/beat\/broadway-drummers-warren-odze-king-kong\/","title":{"rendered":"Warren Odze, King Kong"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the best things about Broadway is that any idea can become a musical. King Kong fits this perfectly. It takes a whole team to operate the giant puppet, which is the perfect analogy to how many musical styles are used to make his (its?) show.<\/p>\n

Warren Odze is the drummer who plays a slew of genres and navigates all sorts of challenges to put out a consistent nightly product, lest he face the Wrath of Kong.<\/p>\n

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You\u2019ve been doing this a long time. How have you adapted to the changing roles of the pit drummer?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

There’s not that much adapting for me because this stuff all reflects what’s going on out there in the world. It\u2019s slowly getting away from the old school conducting. More and more of these shows are on a click system, as more of it becomes pop music away from My Fair Lady kind of shows. And I’ve done a bunch of them. But the more modern shows seem to be click-driven, with more pop music, and more isolation-driven.<\/p>\n

King Kong is using an orchestra, a click, and tracks. Could you explain?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

So the tracks came first with the show when it was done originally. Grammy winner Marius de Vries (Score composer\/producer) did these tracks and they’re very ambitious.<\/p>\n

If it’s just a conductor with no click, we play together as a group with our frailties, and that makes for music, right? Then you add the next element, which is the click. It’s just a tempo guide. So even inside the *tick tick* there\u2019s feel. But now we have tracks, which have all the subdivisions. So the name of the game here is precision. So to me it’s almost like data input.<\/p>\n

There’s no wiggle room for about 95 percent of the show. It’s kind of like going back a million years to those records that John Robinson played on, like Stevie Winwood’s \u201cHigher Love\u201d and all that stuff. I mean, he was famous and still is famous for his precision.<\/p>\n

So how do you get \u201cfeel\u201d when playing with all of that precision?<\/strong><\/h5>\n

When you put the show together it’s really a fast process. A lot of the parts were kind of wacky and hard because they’re just transcriptions of the tracks, which are sort of unplayable because it was a guy on a keyboard – you know, like five voices at once. So I had to find a way to put a little more John Bonham in the mess.<\/p>\n

I spent a lot of time with the metronome making sure I could play the part and relax, and then going back to the (music) styles a little bit.<\/p>\n

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