Chester Thompson - A Drummer's Life in Real Time - by Warren Denney

A DRUMMER’S LIFE IN REAL TIME by Warren Denney

When young Chester Thompson told his mother he would not be attending his graduation from junior college in Baltimore, she was disappointed. No one in the family had attended college, and Thompson was about to transfer to the University of Maryland to continue his pursuit of a degree in music.

Already an experienced drummer on the local scene in the early-70s, he was playing a broad range of gigs there — and throughout the South — and earning his bones in a small, but intense jazz scene in the city. Thompson was turning heads. A friend he had worked with, who managed some local groups, had moved to Los Angeles and become Frank Zappa’s tour manager — a fortuitous break for the emerging player. It was this friend who delivered a call that changed Thompson’s life forever, setting a young man who had grown up primarily in the projects, on a course that would make him a musical citizen of the world.

Chester Thompson, Arthur Barrow, Joan Baez, Frank Zappa

Photo: Hans Kumpt

“I had just heard that he was Zappa's tour manager, and out of the blue, I just heard from him, I got a call,” Thompson said recently, from his home in Nashville. “I was supposed to graduate, and my mother was pretty excited to go to this. I was going to go to the university, and get an apartment there, halfway between Baltimore and Washington, with their music scenes.

“I did a bunch of gigs that summer because I needed to save some money, and I applied for a job driving a school bus. I learned how to do that, but I was assigned to a route into a new neighborhood I’d never been in before … I had no idea where I was. I was terrified, and supposed to start the Monday morning after my graduation. I thought it would be a disaster. But, I got a phone call that Friday evening from my buddy in L.A., and he said he’d arranged an audition for me with Frank Zappa. The catch was I had to be on a plane Sunday. He already had the ticket.

“So, my mom was disappointed. I said ‘Mom, here's the deal. Why don't you go to the airport with me and call that my graduation, because I'm going to get this gig.’ I had no idea what I was in for.”

What Thompson was in for was a crash course in his trade — the trade that would take him on a lifelong trip, playing or recording with Zappa, Weather Report, Santana, Taj Mahal, Keb’ Mo,’ and a thirty-year stint with Genesis and Phil Collins. Of course, this doesn’t include the endless list of artists he’s collaborated with over the years.

But that Monday morning in September, 1973, found Thompson in Zappa’s rehearsal studio, wondering how those kids in Baltimore got to school. They did, of course, and more importantly, Zappa liked his playing. The young drummer, though having gigged for several years and basically living on his own since age eighteen, was now in Los Angeles, a heaving center for progressive living and progressive music, playing for a burgeoning, God’s-own, larger-than-life rock star. This was a long way from Buck’s Bar and the formative jazz jam sessions back home. This was an immersion in musical complexity and American popular culture — California style.

“We started rehearsing that day,” Thompson said. “Fortunately, he liked my playing. The thing that prepared me for it — I was playing in an amazing band in Boston. I lived there for six months during the five years after high school. I had heard some Zappa’s music. But, I was playing with an incredible band in Boston with a keyboard player I knew from Baltimore.

“Gunther Schuller [a former president of the New England Conservatory], who is very well known in jazz circles, and known for his lectures on the history of jazz, would bring us in to open and play a few tunes. That’s how good this band was. Pretty intense stuff, and that just made me realize I needed to go deeper and gain a broader understanding of music, not just playing drums. That’s why I had decided to go back to school.”

The Zappa experience turned out to be an intense education on its own, and though it only lasted two years, it opened the world to Thompson, both musically and culturally.

“Frank invited the singer Napoleon Murphy Brock to audition the same day,” Thompson said. “He liked us both, and so rehearsal started that day. It was the bass player, Tom Fowler, George Duke — one of the most phenomenal keyboard players I’ve ever heard — and Frank. As soon as we got through the audition, we started learning tunes. Two days later, the rest of the band came in. It scared me half to death. It was two drummers. A guy named Ralph Humphrey who was very, very skilled. And when I heard that stuff, man, it was so advanced and complicated.”

He wondered what he had wrought upon himself, and doubted his ability to succeed — if just for a moment.

“Well, you do what you got to do,” he said. “My routine — we hit a month of rehearsals before the first tour, and it was my first introduction to a forty-hour week of rehearsals. Five days, eight hours a day, and no time wasted. Basically, the music was so complicated, I would do our rehearsal, take the music back to my hotel, go to bed around eleven o’clock after dinner, wake up at three in the morning, practice a good two hours, go back to sleep, get up, get breakfast on the way and do it all over again. Every day I had to do that to make that gig.”

Thompson was coming of age musically, and within a snapshot in time like no other in America.

“A lot of it was very reflective of the times,” he said. “I mean, the mid- to late ‘60s were very formative years. My gigs then involved doing all the cover tunes — Curtis Mayfield was writing stuff that was really reflective. James Brown was starting to write things that were very race-conscious. So, I was playing all that music and it made me slightly militant, nothing heavy, but it's hard to grow up and see what you see in those years. I have strong memories of our little black and white TV — and on the news you got fire hoses and police setting dogs on the protesters and stuff, on the freedom marches, and all of that.”

Los Angeles was a scene like no other Thompson had experienced. His brain was switched on to music, and the times.

“When I get to California, things are quieting down a little bit in 1973,” he said. “But, I still remembered 1968 after Martin Luther King was killed, the city [Baltimore] erupted like so many others in the country. I mean, crazy times, riots and stuff. So, I get out there and it's like I show up for rehearsal and there's all these hippies, in my mind. It was a whole different scene.

“I mean, it was great. There’s people who didn't quite know what to make of him [Zappa]. They thought he was some drugged-out hippie or something, but the quickest way out of that band was to get caught doing drugs. He was completely anti-drugs. And, basically his biggest influences were Stravinsky and another classical composer named Edgar Varése. Those were his biggest influences, and he merged that world with rock. He was brilliant.”

A drummer is made of many things, mostly determination and leather. And, Thompson, though inspired and illuminated by his time in the Mothers of Invention, sensed a time to move to the next world.

“Weather Report goes back to Baltimore in a sense,” Thompson said. “I had crossed paths so many times with the bass player before Jaco [Pastorius] Alphonso Johnson. My friend who had gotten me the Zappa gig had put us together before he left Baltimore with a couple of groups … and we were all in Boston together. I got a call from him one night from a club in New York, and he said he was moving to L.A., that he’d gotten the gig with Weather Report.

“So, he's out doing that. I get the gig with Zappa so we're all in L.A., and he called me to come down and jam with the guys in Weather Report. Frank had canceled a tour, and he was honest about it — he wanted a month to learn how to use a film editing machine. He’s so methodical. We’d been on the road so much, and I didn’t really know anybody, so I couldn’t just fall into other gigs … I didn’t want an audition, though. But, I took my drums and jammed with them.”

Weather Report had a drummer at the time, Woody Theus, a great player also known as Sonship. But, in that particular jam session, Thompson moved through the spontaneity in a way that Theus did not.

“My time in Boston allowed me to play,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal. They were basically composing on the spot, and I kind of knew where to go with it. That seemed to trigger a decision. They wanted to be able to do anything they wanted to do. I did that one tour with them, and after playing that music, I knew I didn’t want to leave. Frank knew me well, and he was fine with it, so there was never any issue between us — he knew that was more in my wheelhouse.”

(l-r) Wayne Shorter, Alex Acuna, Jaco Pastorius, Joe Zawinul, Chester Thompson

Thompson toured with Weather Report for a year, and was the drummer on the Black Market album. Then, through a series of miscommunications, as he calls it, the band moved on without him. The other members thought he and Johnson both were wanting to go their own way, and those assumptions got in the way of the future.

“Yeah — it’s crazy,” he said. “A little communication would’ve fixed it. It was probably time to change, though. Fences have been mended over the years. Not an issue. I’ve been in touch with Wayne [Shorter], and I’ve run into Joe [Zawinul] on several occasions.”

Fortunately, the session work opened up for Thompson. He toured Japan with the Pointer Sisters. The Wiz came through town, and he latched on briefly — long enough to meet his wife, Rosalind, who replaced the lead singer Dee Dee Bridgewater as Dorothy when Bridgewater left the production. And, just a couple of weeks before Thompson would leave as The Wiz headed to Chicago, he received another phone call that would send him into yet another stratosphere of modern rock. The call came from Phil Collins of Genesis.

“He had called Alphonso Johnson, who he had met in L.A., and tracked me down,” Thompson said. “I got the call, and it’s this little English voice ‘Hey, this is Phil Collins. Would you like to join Genesis?’ I helped the production find a drummer in Chicago, and I flew to London to start rehearsals right away.”

His first gig with them was New Year’s Day, 1977, and he performed on every tour until 1992, when he stepped away to spend more time with his family. He toured a final time with the band again in 2007, accounting for a thirty-year association. Thompson moved to Nashville in 1993 during a hiatus, and Collins quit Genesis in 1994.

He would do two major tours in 2004 and 2005 with him, and a few one-offs in between. Thompson had come to Nashville because of the death of fellow drummer and close friend Larrie Londin, who had toured with Elvis and played with both Motown and country stars. The two had played clinics together for Pearl Drum Company, and though by Thompson’s account, they were polar opposites, they became very close. Londin had tried to convince Thompson earlier to move to Music City, but it hadn’t panned out. He was leery of the scene, and the thought of breaking into a new one lacked appeal.

Tragically, Londin suffered a heart attack, and ultimately died in 1992 at age forty-eight. Thompson came to Nashville for the funeral, and found himself attracted to the landscape first, then the city itself.

“I drove around, and you got to remember, L.A. might say there’s a river, but there’s no water in it,” he said. “And, I was missing seasons big time, and fall colors are my favorite thing in the world. That never happened there. I got back to L.A. and told my wife and son that I was thinking we could live here. They said they would come visit me if I wanted to move here. But, I actually wound up getting booked in a session for the first time, and we bought tickets.

“It turned out the session was postponed. It got rebooked, but we had all this time together, and there was snow on the ground, it was March, and some other friends were getting ready to move here. They turned us on to their realtor, and we thought we’d just go out one day and ride around with him, which turned into several days …

We were here for one week, and by the time we left, we’d bought a house, and registered our son in school. We returned to L.A. and started packing. We all knew this was going to be home.” It was Nashville’s gain. Thompson taught drums at Belmont for twenty years, stepping away only recently, and has been a fixture at the Nashville Jazz Workshop teaching classes. He was awarded the Sabian Lifetime Achievement Award at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention in 2008, in recognition of the contributions of the most highly regarded leaders in percussion education.

The Chester Thompson Trio has released two records in his time here, Approved (2013) and Simpler Times (2015), the former on Joyful Noise charting at No. 6 on the JazzWeek Charts, and the latter self-released charting at No. 4. Most recently, he released Steppin’ from Sweetwater Music as part of their Recording Workshop Series. Steppin’ features Thompson, Alphonso Johnson on bass, Joe Davidian on piano and keys, Rod McGaha on trumpet and flugelhorn, and Tony Carpenter on percussion.

From the Baltimore kid on the West Side who learned to play from a family friend, James Harris, to his first gig at thirteen, to his early jazz education at Buck’s Bar, the Uptown, and standout Colts’ wide receiver Lenny Moore’s club the Sportsmen’s Lounge, to the surreal experience of touring and playing with some of rock & roll’s biggest bands, Thompson has provided a backbone for countless musicians around the world, going on six decades.

He understands sacrifice and inspiration because he was once given a break.

“Our family friend way back then [Harris] played gigs and in between he drove a taxi,” Thompson said. “I had no idea he was out late driving a cab at night. But, he would get up and make us breakfast and we’d go at it. And, basically he taught me by teaching me how to play along with jazz albums. The stuff on the radio, I just knew what to do. I mean, I could hear it and I just knew. But, man, he taught me some things that I’ve carried to this day.

RIG RUNDOWN

DRUMS

• DW Exotic Twisted Rainbow Wood, VLT (Vertical Low Timbre) Shells

• (2) 18″ x 22″ FAST Bass Drums

• 9×10″ 8 ply with 3 ply hoops

• 8×8″ 8 ply with 3 ply hoops

• 10×12″ 8 ply with 3 ply hoops

• 12×14″ 10 ply with 3 ply hoops

• 11×13″ 10 ply with 3 ply hoops

• 12×15″ Standard Toms

• 16×16″, 16×18″ Floor Toms

• 9000 Series Hardware (Gold)

HARDWARE

• Gibraltar Rack (Gold)

SNARE – CRAVIOTTO

• 5 1/2″ x 14″ Snare

Cymbals – Sabian

• 21″ Prototype Ride

• 18″ Prototype Crash

• 18″ O-Ring China

• 18″ HH Extra-thin Crash

• 16″ Prototype Crash

• 15″ HH Sound Control Crash

• 12″ HHX Splash

• 14″ AA Rock Hats

Bongos – Meinl

• Meinl

RECORDING – PRESONUS

• StudioLive 32: 40-input digital console/recorder with motorized faders