EVERY THING all at once
G. Calvin Weston laughs a lot when he talks.
Or maybe he just talks a lot when he laughs.
If you spend any time around the drummer and composer—watching him play, chilling in his company—you’d know that his easy chortle (fondly remembered by old bandmate John Lurie in his recent memoir The History of Bones) comes as part of the entire package of propulsive paradiddles, complex polyrhythms, and ferocious four-on-the-floors. Even when he’s at his quietest, you sense his giddiness, a muffled chuckle rather than his and his drums’ thundering guffaw.
“I used to beat on my neighbors’ car,” Weston says—laughing, of course—from his Soundscape Recording Lab home studio about the loud, frenetic feel that has always been part of his style and that he honors still on a handful of releases in 2021, which has been, remarkably, his busiest professional year ever. His career, it’s worth remembering, includes stints with Ornette Coleman, James Blood Ulmer, John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, and a lifetime friendship/collaboration with bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma.
Ask Tacuma about Weston and he’ll say this: “With all humility, we will go down in history as one of the most important drum and bass sections in avant-garde, improvised, creative music of the early 21st century. How can we not after cutting our musical baby teeth with the master himself, Ornette Coleman?”
FOR WESTON, EVERYTHING started with North Philly and R&B.
“I became interested in playing drums when my uncle used to take me to a theater called the Uptown, where all the Motown acts used to come through,” he says of the famed North Broad Street palace where great R&B, jazz, doo-wop,
