on jim white’s drumming.
Writer Jon Carroll once wrote that the Band’s Levon Helm was “the only drummer who can make you cry.” One could add Jim White to the list. Across many different ensembles, the Australian drummer does not so much keep the beat as rattle and hum along its surfaces, cresting and bobbing, as if his kit were a rickety vessel tossed along the foam of the sea. There is something oceanic below, to be sure, in his playing, but it is as if we observe it all from across the surface of his snare as his sticks, like needles on a compass, jab, spinning out the navigation, pointing the way.
When White plays, where are we headed? Toward dawn or dusk? When one is in constant motion, moving slow among continents, across hemispheres, what’s really the difference? It is perpetual twilight. In the blueness, the world feels epic yet also like a sprinkle of teardrops too, a scattering of rain clouds, a pin prick of star points. We dip and soar between small and large. All is rumble, not arrival. The world becomes gravitational and celestial all at once. We are on top of minerals and ores, crust and salt, valley beds and cliffhangers, back channels and, above us, endless space punctuated by glimpses of dramatic constellations.
One might not at first notice White’s presence. It is spectral until you start to pay attention to it at the margins. Then the percussion starts to creep across consciousness, limbs akimbo, bending and motoring underneath, reaching out overhead with a shake and a nod.
On the recordings of one of his core groups, the instrumental ensemble the Dirty Three, his drums even take the lead at times. In the band’s holy dirges, we are placed in a conversation as White, along with Warren Ellis on violin and Mick Turner on guitar, blend and diverge. They sometimes almost fall apart, but then they move together, like three men rowing a boat, mostly in tandem, sometimes in disagreement. Ellis and Turner’s instruments can at times almost become the rhythmic elements and White’s skittering variations direct the journey. Other times, Turner or especially Ellis take a turn at the helm. Then White’s drums become like wind through the planks, creaking oars, a gurgling wake, rustling leaves in the trees on distant banks, pebbles and rocks tossed across the water, waves lapping up to the shoreline. Here are three men thrown together, generating soaring swells of sound that fade into quiet places.
White is an ensemble player of the finest sort. Alongside his work with the Dirty Three, a conversational quality defines his support for other musicians. One could say that his percussion is, in some sense, all about accompaniment. In songs on which he drums, he is the listener’s avatar, listening. He is interested in lending a hand, giving a push, pillowing a fall, guiding a dream, enjoying a quip, absorbing a pain, commending wisdom, questioning possibilities, acknowledging dilemmas, making sure that a healthy clatter props up the songs.
The quality of White’s drumming slyly aids, for instance, the searching, searing, husky sadness and yearning of Cat Power’s classic Moon Pix, keeping pace with Chan Marshall’s puzzled inquisitions pace for pace, stroke for stroke, bringing new textures out of the depths of her remarkable lower register, sinking and rising again with her, cymbals crackling and burbling, snare drum snapping an urgent response when needed.
One hears the same qualities surface again on Anna and Elizabeth’s The Invisible Comes to Us, where once more the drums do not keep the beat so much as grace the pulse with accents, brimming with ideas, emerging and submerging again, asking the singers to say more, then receding into the background to listen and carry on.
One might understand Jim White as a kind of avant-grade Bernard Purdie, the “hitmaker” with his distinctive shuffle. Like Purdie, you might not notice White at first. His drumming is all for the song. He’s in the background, never intrusive. But the more you pay attention, the more the backbeat foregrounds, the more one appreciates the support, until you realize that he’s been dragging ghost notes across the collective consciousness all along, ringing in your ears.
In Jim White’s drumming is, perhaps most of all, the evocation of a certain sense of time, a kind of endlessness, a sustained looseness, a restlessness that is not worried about agitation but embraces its possibilities. This playing is full of oxygen. There is a spaciousness that also contains a haunting graciousness. The sticks kiss, click, tap, strike, pat, patter, nudge, touch, and simmer. We escape in hiss, riding along into what is, ultimately, a fundamental gesture to the power of silence: the grace notes, the echo, the reverberation, the thoughts that float.