Brandon Draper: Doing what comes naturally



LAWRENCE — Musician Brandon Draper is at the top of his game, completely self-actualized.

Draper is a lecturer in the University of Kansas Department of Music, where he teaches jazz drums, world percussion, steel band and leads the Music Enterprise Certificate, which combines music business, management and entrepreneurship. He's toured with live-tronica pioneers Particle and played with some of the biggest names in jazz.

He has two albums of original music coming out this spring, a thriving summer educational program for kids called Drum Safari and a trip to Europe with KU’s Jazz Ensemble I. There’s more, but you get the idea.

He’s excited about the new album Meditation Music, Vol. 1, released on BandCamp and his own draperama.com website April 20. It will eventually make its way to other digital distribution platforms like iTunes and Spotify, Draper said. And, as the title implies, it’s the first of what Draper plans as a series of recordings on this theme.

It’s the result of performing as an accompanist for various yoga and meditative practice classes in recent years, he said.

“After I played these classes, people asked did I have any recordings of that type of music,” Draper said.

And while he has recorded albums of jazz, electronica and even a collection of original lullabies, he had yet to put out an album designed for contemplation.

So Draper’s friend Bryan Nicholas, a recording engineer and owner of Tone Dimension Studio in Peculiar, Missouri, set up the studio with mood lighting and binaural recording equipment and let Draper improvise on tabla, tongue drums and frame drums.

Draper is at a point in his career where such a thing doesn’t scare him. Rather, it inspires him. He described his preparation for the session:

“How I conceived it was I’m going to play these instruments – the same ones I use for all the meditation and yoga classes I accompany – and I’m going to let the music take me somewhere, and around the 45- or 50-minute mark I’m going to wind down. So like anything, it starts with some rhythmic activity and then it goes into a heartbeat pulse and it stays there for quite a while I wait for the next section to emerge.

“It’s all improvisation. I’m a jazz musician. I am 100 percent comfortable completely improvising for hours on end. So in this particular situation, the process was to clear my mind and meditate and be calm and pray.

“I wanted to make the record something that could be used for people to get away from social media, get away from the news, get away from whatever things in their life may be creating anxiety or apprehension,” Draper said.

“You can take the album and go somewhere for 45 minutes and reset. Or you can take the album and listen to the individual tracks. … It’s a mood album.”

The experience of recording was so positive that he wants to repeat it with further volumes of meditative music. The next one will feature all stringed instruments and a more widescreen sound, said Draper, who also plays guitar.

And since Nicholas lives and works in a rural setting, Draper said, they plan another album that will be recorded outdoors and incorporate nature sounds.

“We figured out where to let something live, and now we can just keep feeding it,” Draper said.

Draper’s next project after Meditation Music, Vol. 1 is an album of electronic music created primarily on a Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer (i.e., a drum machine), an electronic instrument produced from 1980 to 1983 that was heard on – and emblematic of — many pop hits of its day. Draper said his father, who is a keyboard player, had many different analog instruments and synthesizers in the house when he was growing up in Salina. Draper’s dad also bequeathed him a four-track cassette recorder in 1989, which he used to make the recording he has titled “808 Beat Tape.”

It will be released in a physical cassette tape version by Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Cult Love Sound Tapes as well as digitally, Draper said. In that way, it fits in with the “lo-fi” trend that’s currently popular among DJs.

“The past few years ’80s nostalgia has come back to the mainstream,” Draper said.

And while he did overdub some analog synthesizer tracks onto the 808 rhythmic patterns, Draper said the core of the record springs from his unconscious.

“It’s similar to the meditation record in that I am improvising the whole time for a lot of those things,” he said. “I guess I am just in this season of wanting to present the most authentic music possible in a world full of super-produced music. Just whatever comes naturally.”

Photo: Brandon Draper photo by Suzy Perler, courtesy of the artist.

Mon, 04/23/2018

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Rick Hellman

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Rick Hellman

KU News Service

785-864-8852