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Grammy winner to host drum clinic
Queer Straight Alliance event to help fund East Coast trip
The Advocate
Ten-time Grammy Award-winning drummer Rodney Holmes will perform Oct. 3 on campus sponsored by the Queer and Straight Alliance. Holmes was contacted about performing at MHCC by Queer and Straight Alliance President Heather Nichelle-Peres after an instructional workshop he gave in Chennai, India.
Nichelle-Peres has known Holmes for 10 years after meeting him through her music instructor in the North Bay area near San Francisco.
“Rodney is very passionate when he’s playing and offstage (he is) really cool and mellow,” said Nichelle-Peres.
According to his website www.rodneyholmes.com, Holmes fell in love with music at an early age, listening to a “very eclectic album collection” that included bands such as Earth Wind and Fire, The Ohio Players, and Parliament-Funkadelic. Holmes was also fascinated by his mother’s album collection featuring Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, James Brown and Chuck Berry.
When Holmes was in the fourth grade, his mother bought him a drum set for Christmas and soon after he joined the junior band in his elementary school.
As he got older, Holmes was inspired to play along with music by Miles Davis, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Led Zeppelin, The Police, Rush, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Weather Report, Frank Zappa and The Mahavishnu Orchestra.
“Even as a youth, Rodney was fascinated with film scores and soundtracks, and he would also go on to discover early hip-hop pioneers such as Grand Master Flash and The Furious Five,” according to his website.
After Holmes graduated high school in Hartsdale, N.Y., his interest in learning the drums took off. Holmes’s drumming style is very diverse, ranging from jazz and rock, to African and Afro-Cuban music that he would play in clubs in New York. His website says Holmes’s style was so vast that both “rock bands that he played with didn’t know about his jazz background, and the jazz musicians didn’t know about his rock and more contemporary playing.”
Holmes has performed with musicians such as Carlos Santana, Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty and jazz musicians Wayne Shorter and Michael Brecker.
Holmes met Santana when he left his previous band The Zawinul Syndicate and as soon as Santana found out he was available, he called Holmes to join his band for the Santana-Bob Dylan Tour.
After the tour Holmes was called to record and tour with the legendary Brecker Brothers, performing on their 1994 Grammy-winning album “Out Of The Loop” and on the Grammy-winning song “African Skies,” according to his website.
Holmes “went on to perform with Steps Ahead, the incredible Wayne Shorter” and “laid down the drum tracks on the mega hit single ‘Smooth’” and recorded a Christmas single with Rob Thomas.
QSA will sponsor the Rodney Holmes’s Drum Clinic with the help of MHCC’s music department. “It’s very exciting for us that’s he’s playing here,” said Susie Jones, music instructor and director of the Jazz and Concert Band.
Peres says QSA has never sponsored an event like a Drum Clinic and said that if ticket sales are successful, QSA will able be fund their trip to Washington, D.C., to participate in the National Equality March Oct. 10 and 11.
If the event is successful, Nichelle-Peres wants to sponsor an event similar in the spring featuring Benny Rietveld, who’s performed with Santana as well.
Holmes will present a general workshop Oct. 3 from 12 to 2 p.m. in the Visual Arts Theatre at $25 per ticket and he will also offer his Advance Master Class (which includes the general workshop) for more advanced drummers starting at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. at $45 per ticket.
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