By Dan Lehner
You won't find photos of any current or previous performances of drummer/composer John Hollenbeck's "The Drum Major Instinct", mostly because each performance is deliberately played in complete darkness (or as complete as possible). Hollenbeck states that he finds it easier for the audience to focus on the audio text if visual distraction are removed and it's easy to see why; the sprawling ode to Martin Luther King Jr. features four instrumentalists, but the fifth and most important voice to be heard is the impassioned, musically meticulous voice of the civil rights leader. The piece is scored for tape loop, drum set and three trombones, this time around using three prominent bone players from the Undead wheelhouse (Jacob Garchik, Brian Drye and Curtis Hasselbring) and it can easily be ranked up there withthe tape-loop-and-instrument masterworks of composers like Steve Reich.
The pieces lasted approximately 28 minutes and incorporated the entirety of King's lesser-known speech (a B-Side to an LP recording of "I Have a Dream" Hollenbeck owned in college). Beginning with a trombone choir of gradually shifting chords punctuated by dissonance, the piece preludes a sense of turbulence, agonizing passion and thoughtful optimism before the voice even starts. Hollenbeck and the horns chop up the speech into segments, keeping the literal timbre in line with King's emotional timbre. When King recalled the bible passage he used for his example of responsible use of the ego in leadership, the piece was jagged and oblique, but gained speed and texture as King made his case for thoughtful leadership in the era of post-Freud analysis of the ego. Garchik, Drye and Hasselbring took turns in making complex and energetic solos not too far removed from church goers shouting affirmations, while Hollenbeck took a decisively Reich-ian approach at literally accented King's words on the drums.
The piece traversed and travailed through sorrow and uplifted spirit, Hollenbeck creating a heavy and intentioned combination of beats and what sounded like a synth loop (it was hard to tell in the dark) to mark the most important part. The piece faded long after King had finished, signifying an epilogue of hope and admiration in keeping with King's own words and intentions. Everybody wants to be important, as King recalled, but as the four musicians showed we don't have bow, submit or prostrate ourselves in favor of one person in order to be great.