Meet David Wayne

By AAJ STAFF, Published: April 18, 2013

I currently live in: Santa Fe, NM

I joined All About Jazz in: 2004

What made you decide to contribute to All About Jazz?
I am a music fanatic. I play the drums. I was involved in college radio for years and I'd love to do a show again. Maybe when I retire!

I like to write. It's not easy or natural for me, in fact it's quite painstaking, but I like it. Music is important, and writing about it helps me determine what it is that I value in music; and in all of the arts, really. It's a form of mental / emotional processing for me.

I had written reviews for Jazz Weekly that went out of business after a few years. Somehow, I got cosmically re-routed to AAJ and submitted a few CD reviews back in 2004. Then I quit reviewing altogether. Then I started up again a few years later at another website called JazzReview.com. I wrote reviews for them until they went out of business a year or two ago. Now I am submitting to AAJ whom I sincerely hope remain solvent in perpetuity. :-)

How do you contribute to All About Jazz?
I reviews CDs mostly. My philosophy of writing a review is to place whatever music I am discussing in a sort of continuum with other artists' work. Reviewing is about all that I am capable of, journalistically. I have done a couple of interviews for AAJ, but I don't feel that interviewing is my particular strong suit. I am still too in awe of pretty much all musicians. Which is weird because I am also a musician and I am definitely not in awe of myself.

What is your musical background?
I have had no formal music studies. Just a year or so of drum lessons. Otherwise, I am an autodidact.

I started listening when I was really young—5 or 6 or even earlier. My older brother played a lot of music for me. I remember hearing lots of Jimi Hendrix, Muddy Waters' Electric Mud, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica and Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free and all sorts of weird hippie music when I was maybe 8 or 9 and I just loved it all from the git-go. Especially Hendrix and Beefheart. My mother also used to play Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring really loud on the stereo when she was cleaning the house. I just went on from there and quickly discovered jazz. I grew up musically in the '70s and remain fond of the sounds from that time—Mahavishnu, Tony Williams' Lifetime, Soft Machine, Earth, Wind & Fire, Gong, all of the CTI stuff, Gentle Giant, Mandrill, Fela Kuti, anything on the ECM label.

I have a lot of LPs and CDs.

My brother also had a garage band; he's a real rock 'n' roll guitarist and still gigs to this day down in Florida, where he lives. I was about 7 when he started on guitar, and I gravitated towards the drums. I basically just sat down on his friend's kit and started playing with my brother. It was fun, and he basically taught me about dynamics and how to put a song across. I might have had a little talent and decent time, but I also had no discipline whatsoever and after about 6 months of struggling with drum lessons and drum rudiments, I quit and the drums were sold.

After hearing Billy Cobham and Tony Williams a few years later, I became re-enthralled with drumming and joined the school marching band. I played drums on and off until I was about 25 when I decided to really do it right. So I bought a kit, practiced a bit and started pestering my musician friends to play. I haven't stopped since. So, I've been playing in local jazz and rock bands in my home town (Santa Fe, NM) for the last 20 years. Nothing too popular or money-making.

Read more: http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=44372#.UXJv27_hEhR