The Georgia Straight
by Steve Newtonon October 26th, 2021 at 10:11 AM
Back in 1979 Bad Company recorded a song called “Rhythm Machine” that was written by drummer Simon Kirke and bassist Boz Burrell. It wasn’t a big hit like the band’s “Can’t Get Enough” or “Feeling Like Makin’ Love”, but it’s a catchy little ditty about how rhythms can take over a person’s body and mind.
“I got time runnin’ through my head in bed,” croons legendary blues-rock vocalist (and White Rock resident) Paul Rodgers, “instead of sleep I get licks instead. I’m a rhythm machine.”
You could say that percussionist Sal Ferreras is a rhythm machine, too.
“I do that, I count all the time,” admits Ferreras on the line from his Victoria home. “I’m not sort of an obsessive-compulsive, but I count steps and sometimes I count them and try to syncopate the count to the steps. I count going upstairs and downstairs, try to play a little counter-rhythm on the bannister. And in the car I play with the turning signals or the wipers, anything that can add some sort of other groove to it. I try to find the rhythm in everything that I do and everything that I see, and I don’t have a hard time doing that, because it’s everywhere. You just have to be receptive to it.”
Ferraras first discovered his attraction to timekeeping when he was seven or eight and his parents bought him a paper drumkit for Easter.
“It lasted until maybe just a little after noon,” recalls Ferreras, “before I broke the bass-drum head. You know, the other drums hung in for another couple of days. I don’t know how my parents thought that I would like it—maybe they just saw me hitting things all the time—but I totally got into it, and from the day that we got rid of that one I started lobbying my parents for a real set. So that took about two years—we didn’t have a lotta money—but then one Christmas morning I woke up and there’s a real drum set sitting in the living room.”
Because his friends all asked for guitars and basses, Ferreras formed a band that very afternoon, on Christmas day. Then it was really time to give the skins a workout.
“As a young drummer, Buddy Rich was a big deal,” recalls Ferreras. “And Charlie Watts was a big deal—I was a Rolling Stones fan very early on. In fact that Christmas, that first song that my first band ever played was ‘Satisfaction’. So I was attracted to that, but in the ’70s I became more interested in salsa music, just observing it and listening to it, and then when I went to university I looked into the field of jazz.
“And that’s when it went way beyond Buddy Rich to, you know, Max Roach and Alex Acuña—all sorts of players who have been the mainstay of jazz. And then the great conga players that were either hanging out in Cuba or in New York and San Juan. And of course because I was an orchestral musician and I studied classical music then I had a number of favorite timpanists that played with some of the big orchestras—New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra—that I also tried to emulate. There’s no lack of idols.”
Looking back, Ferreras isn’t totally sure how he got infected with the rhythm bug, but he reckons that just being from Latin America had a lot to do with it.
“For anybody who grows up in Latin America, music is just everywhere,” he says. “People do it to celebrate, people do it at funerals. There’s song and dance tunes that are about any imaginable theme that you can think of, from very happy to very sad. And my parents were very musical—they weren’t musicians, but they loved to sing a lot—and so that was always around the house. And then in terms of drums, I was just attracted to time and rhythm, and it has been a lifelong passion that actually continues to increase—it’s not diminishing one bit.”
That still-blossoming passion will be out there for all to see when Ferreras and his Latin jazz sextet join the Vancouver Symphony for Latin Nights this weekend. The group includes saxophonist-flutist Tom Keenlyside, pianist Miles Black, bassist Jodi Proznick, percussionist Israel “Toto” Berriel, and trumpeter Miguelito Valdés.
“I’ve been playing with Tom since the early ’80s in various types of ensembles,” says Ferreras, “mostly Latin, but Tom was a member of my band called Poetic License, which played the [Vancouver] Writers Festival for 30 years. One gig a year, but the best gig of the year. I’ve known Miles Black forever, and I’ve used him a lot because he totally understands where I’m coming from both rhythmically and with what I want to do in the interpretation of Latin American music, in a non-Latin American context.
“Jodi is a fantastic bass player with a capability to feel very different types of rhythms and infuse each one of them with a really nice sense of spirit. She’s a great player, and just so positive. Toto Berriel, the conga player, I met when he first came to Canada in June of 1984 I think it was for a big festival in Banff, and we hit it off. And Miguelito is a monster trumpet player with huge, huge ears and a lyrical feel that I absolutely love. The combination of him with Tom works really, really well. So for me it’s an ideal sextet to have, and I can’t wait to show people what it is that we do.”
What they’ll do during Latin Nights is showcase music from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil. The program will include pieces by Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez and Puerto Rican sax player Miguel Zenón, some Afro-Cuban music, and a big carnival piece from the Recife region of Brazil performed in the “super hyper” frevo style, with solos for each section of the orchestra written by Ferreras. “It’s like trading eights,” he says, “but you’re trading eights with every single section of the orchestra while the ensemble is playing and keeping the rhythmic machine going.”
Ferreras’ working relationship with the VSO goes back to the early ’80s. For roughly 30 years he played numerous concerts with the orchestra, and also recorded with them and traveled to Japan with them twice.
“It’s a wonderful ensemble to play with,” he raves. “I mean everybody is at the top of their chops, and constantly working in such a variety of different musical compositions that their senses are extremely sharp, and their sense of musicality is really heightened. And then it’s just so exciting because you feel the nuance, you feel the way they play with colour, you feel how they interpret what is, you know, mostly written music that begs for interpretation, and begs for the human emotion to be brought through in that music.”
Sal Ferreras and his Latin jazz sextet perform with the Vancouver Symphony on Friday and Saturday (October 29 and 30) at 8 pm at the Orpheum Theatre.
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Steve Newton
Steve Newton started working at the Georgia Straight in the spring of 1982, shortly after graduating from UBC. Having previously worked as a stringer for his hometown paper, The Chilliwack Progress, he was originally hired as a freelancer to interview touring rock bands, which…