Advice from New Orleans’s Great Drummer Johnny Vidacovich

“The crooked tree lives its life, while the straight tree often ends up in planks.”

– Chinese proverb

Improvisation is the art of imperfection. Created in the moment, improv ignores any rulebook you might present except the one that begins and ends, “Yes, and…”

Which is to say that the rulebook that improv follows is not to follow a rulebook. Improv is riddled with such paradoxes.

The central paradox comes from the king of paradox, Oscar Wilde, that “spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.”

There’s a story in the New Orleans music world about one of our great drummers, Johnny Vidacovich. Johnny has played with everyone: Bobby McFerrin, Willy DeVille, Mose Allison, Johnny Adams, Professor Longhair, James Booker, and Alvin Tyler, among other musical giants. In New Orleans music—a tradition as saturated in great drummers as it is great trumpet players—he’s the real deal.

Johnny V. © Skip Bolen

So, the story goes, a student comes for his first lesson. Johnny listens. He says, hey man, you’re a very proficient drummer. My job is going to be to slop you up …

To slop you up. That verb captures improvisation’s appeal: while much of the world values craft and virtuosity, there is also a value in apparent artlessness. As Adam Gopnik writes in The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, “We never really love an artist’s virtuosity, or if we do, it feels empty,” Gopnik writes. “We love their vibrato, their … way of entangling their learned virtuosity within their unique vulnerability.” Vibrato—pulsating changes in pitch—slops up pure pitch. Slopping up—in Gopnik’s exquisite words, “entangling their learned virtuosity within their unique vulnerability”—adds expressiveness.

Seeming free from the mediation of artifice lends charm and naturalness. Naturalness lends authenticity, and hence authority. That’s a lot of freight for spontaneity to carry, but that’s what it does.

But in seeming natural lies the paradox of “spontaneity[’s] meticulously prepared art.” Vibrato in voice or instrument can occur naturally or be reproduced mechanically or electronically. The challenge is to achieve the artifice of seeming to be without artifice. The Roman poet Horace said it long ago: “True art conceals art” (summa ars celare artem, Ars Poetica).

To achieve effortlessness is the oxymoron at the heart of improv. This charm and its promise of authenticity is the power behind the rhetoric of spontaneity.

Stanton Moore, Shannon Powell, and Johnny V. at Improv Conference NOLA, 2019
© Carrie DeMay

If Vidacovich’s student exemplified a virtuosic attention to drumming’s received rulebook, slopping him up aspires to something else. That something else is suggested by Johnny’s comments during the 2019 Improv Conference New Orleans drum panel (“Drum Improv: Organized Chaos?”). Speaking with local drum greats Stanton Moore, founding member of the funk band Galactic, and Shannon Powell, known as “The King of Treme,” Vidacovich was the last to address the question, what does improv in drumming mean to you? He explained:

VIDACOVICH: When you’re improvising, you’re constantly coming up to forks in the road … So, improvising is making a quick decision, or trusting your spirit, or trusting the Holy Ghost to tell you what to do next …

SHANNON POWELL: [appreciatively] come on now!

VIDACOVICH: … to tell you what to do. And that’s your best bet, because if you try to think about it and control it, you’re going to get too academic, or too technical or too cold, or you’re just not going to have the depth of prayer that you would have if the Holy Ghost is telling you, go on, swing hard right now …

SHANNON POWELL: You know, that’s what I want to see, John. Thank you.

VIDACOVICH: So opening your heart and your soul, surrendering yourself to the music, the spirit will guide you. Later in the panel, Vidacovich explains that he seeks to bypass my brain. I’m trying to achieve it in my stomach, and in my throat and in mouth. I’m going to try to make that come out on the drums … I’m not going to ask my brain to put any restrictions or any, “this is good and that’s bad.” I’m going to ask my brain to have nothing to do with it so the Holy Spirit can come to me easy.

Coming from New Orleans—a Catholic city but with an infamous commitment to embodied experience—Vidacovich seeks both the incarnate (The Holy Ghost) and the carnal, “whatever is in my stomach, and in my throat and in my mouth.” From whatever source, Johnny seeks a kind of naturalness, free of artifice, in sum, embodied emotion delivered directly to the drumskins.

Johnny seeks to be the crooked tree that lives its life, rather than the straight tree that ends up in planks.