Interview by Stewart Voegtlin
(Dec. 2004)
When you're privy to what a drummer like Chris Corsano stuffs into – and pulls out of – his stick-bag, much is revealed. One can make innumerable clichéd analogies to the implements of physician/sculptor/chef, yet, when you really think about it, any overheated analysis dies on the page.
"Implements?" Corsano's bag stocks mix-and-matched sticks of wood, chewed to pieces, worn down to their last bit of borrowed solidity. His mallets look as though they've struck concrete, not cymbals and drumheads. His tools whirr and blur and wrap around rhythms as if he's beating them out of the air.
Corsano is a discursive drummer: he moves quickly and easily from topic to topic, amplifying, extrapolating, and most often paying extraordinary attention to any partner musician's in vivo insta-comp. While this quality primes us for more quasi-philosophical spew, talking with the man himself disarms most heady analysis.
Perfect Sound Forever: When, or why, did you pick up drumming?
CC: I started more or less when I was 13, 'cos my older brother Tony played drums (and still does).
PSF: Are Tony's drum calisthenics similar to yours? When's the Corsano Family Duo coming out?
CC: Make that a trio – my mom's a drummer, too, though Tony and I are half-brothers, so, she's not his mother. Tony was drumming before I was born; my mom started about five or six years ago. Tony does all kinds of stuff. He was in the Contortions for a while, about ten years back. Then he drummed for the Harlem Gospel Choir. Now he's playing with different people, but mainly focusing on going into schools, showing kids how to make drums out of household items, and then teaching them some beats. He gets everybody rocking. My mom's getting a soul band together now.
PSF: Lots of drummers wax nostalgic about their first kits – do you? Was it the old plastic and tin Service Merchandise, or ad hoc pots and pans?
read the rest here
www.myspace.com/chriscorsano
