For all its vigor, there is also subtlety in Hall's playing....

Recent Listening: Dana Hall

Dana Hall, Into The Light (Origin). Drummers who flaunt their technique can be enemies of music when their busyness becomes the center-ring distraction in a band. Dana Hall is a busy drummer, but in his case that's a compliment.

He accompanies with waves of rhythmic patterns surging and swelling behind, under and around soloists. This 40-year-old Chicagoan—debuting here as a leader—manages to amalgamate his virtuosity so that he melds into the flow of the soloists' improvisations. That places him in a line of aggressive but accommodating drummers that goes back at least as far Sid Catlett and includes Max Roach, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones and, more recently, Jeff "Tain" Watts.

From the beginning of the album's first piece, Herbie Hancock's "I Have a Dream," Hall dramatically demonstrates his mastery of what might be called integrational drumming. The dynamics of his pops, snaps, cymbal splashes and ingenious divisions of time rise and fall with the intensity of the performance as trumpeter Terell Stafford, saxophonist Tim Warfield, Jr. and pianist Bruce Barth solo.

For all its vigor, there is also subtlety in Hall's playing, and in the concepts in the album. Hall's drumming transition from "Conversion Song" into "Orchids" is a case in point. It creates the effect of a two-part suite and sets up bassist Rodney Whitaker's superb solo. The title tune is the shortest in the album and, with the exhilaration of its collective chance-taking, the freest. The longest, "Jabali," combines harmonic freedom, in the Ornette Coleman sense, with traditional swing and a rare instance of silence from Hall while the horns sing his closing melody.

Complete on  >>  http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2010/08/recent_listening_dana_hall.html


Mr. Dana Hall,Professional drummer and Professor at the University of Illinois- Urbana, jams a little with the High School Jazz Band on A Duke Ellington tune called Main Stem. Definitely an opportunity of a lifetime!