At the foot of a hill in Chilmark, a master musician is preparing for a rare Island performance coming up this Friday at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center.
Best known for his work with Ruben Blades, Paul Simon and Kip Hanrahan’s band with Jack Bruce, drummer Robby Ameen has been coming to the Vineyard every summer of his life, but rarely plays in public here.
On Friday in Vineyard Haven, however, Mr. Ameen is set to appear twice in one show: first on screen, in a new 20-minute concert film, and then on stage to play drums and answer questions from the audience. The event is part of the film center’s Filmusic Festival, taking place June 25 to 28.
Mr. Ameen and his wife usually visit the Vineyard to relax, not to work — although he keeps a full drum kit here, in a shed that acts as a simple, unheated studio for practicing and recording.
The new film, Robby Ameen Live at the Poster Museum, captures Mr. Ameen and his Latin jazz band in the intimate setting of a New York City gallery where they played a series of concerts during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A full-length CD of the same name came out last year, one of hundreds on which Mr. Ameen has played as a sideman — but among only a handful under his name as sole leader, all recorded since 2008.
Until then, Mr. Ameen was generally too busy as a touring and session musician to establish his own band.
Growing up in New Haven, Conn. he always knew he wanted to play the drums. Lifelong friend Nelson Hume, who directed Live at the Poster Museum and also vacations in Chilmark, recalls the grade-school summer when Mr. Ameen made his first drums out of empty Bremner Wafers cracker canisters and inner tubes scavenged from the back of a West Tisbury auto shop.
“Once [he] turned me on to that, I made drums because it just seemed so cool,” said Mr. Hume, recollecting their performances for family members in Menemsha as the earliest concerts of Mr. Ameen’s long career.
His folks were not musicians, but Mr. Ameen said they always encouraged him.
“My parents were great,” he said.
While the rest of the family went to the beach, he’d stay at home in Menemsha practicing drums — sometimes to the neighbors’ consternation.
“It was hell for everybody,” Mr. Ameen said with a smile. “I was playing for like six, seven hours.”
One neighbor who lived nearby, an elderly sculptor originally from Europe, ultimately appealed to the young percussionist for a practice schedule that would work for both of them.
“I’ll never forget it. He was so respectful. I mean, I was like literally 9 or 10 years old and he said, ‘You are artist. I am artist. We must try to collaborate,” Mr. Ameen said.
By the age of 12, the young drummer already was playing in a New Haven civic orchestra, including in a performance of avant-garde French composer Edgard Varese’s percussion work Ionisation, conducted by the influential musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky.
Here, too, Mr. Ameen said he was treated as a peer by the much older Mr. Slonimsky, whose Encyclopedia of Scales was embraced by John Coltrane and who also was a mentor to Frank Zappa.
His parents also sent young Mr. Ameen to the famed Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, where he met and first played with trombonist Conrad Herwig, with whom he has played on many albums and who appears in the new film.
In his mid-teens, Mr. Ameen cold-called the acclaimed free-jazz drummer Ed Blackwell, then teaching at Wesleyan University, and became Mr. Blackwell’s student, taking an hour-long bus ride each way for lessons unlike any he’d taken before.
“He’d give me these exercises, like he’s trying to make you dance on the drums,” Mr. Ameen said.
Mr. Blackwell also taught Mr. Ameen new and unorthodox ways of using his drumsticks in order to draw different sounds from the drums.
“He was a heavy guy,” Mr. Ameen said.
The lessons served him well. Mr. Ameen began playing professionally in his teens and moved to New York as a working musician at the turn of the 1980s, while he was still finishing a literature degree at Yale.
Once in the city, Mr. Ameen went from street performances and commercial jingle recordings to becoming the first percussionist in Mr. Blades’ groundbreaking Latin group Seis del Solar in the mid-1980s, subsequently touring the world and eventually becoming co-leader of the Grammy Award-winning band.
He also fell in with Kip Hanrahan, the visionary producer behind an intriguing series of soundtrack-like albums featuring a wide cross-section of jazz, Latin, rock and soul musicians including Mr. Bruce, who then tapped Mr. Ameen for his own band.
Mr. Ameen also has recorded with Dizzy Gillespie, Steve Swallow and Latin jazz greats Eddie Palmieri, Mongo Santamaria and Hilton Ruiz, among many others. He even cut a session on the Vineyard with Carly Simon, Mr. Ameen said, for her 2008 album This Kind of Love.
Live at the Poster Museum, on the other hand, showcases Mr. Ameen as the confident leader of a blazing-hot Latin jazz quintet made of musicians he’s played with for decades: Mr. Herwig on trombone, Troy Roberts on tenor saxophone, Lincoln Goines on bass and Edsel Gomez on Fender Rhode, the distinctive-sounding electromechanical keyboard made famous by Chick Corea and Return to Forever in the 1970s.
Mr. Hume, whose other films include the Cillian Murphy comedy-drama Sunburn, used three cameras for the shoot, weaving among the tables, chairs and instruments in the tight quarters of Philip Williams Posters on Chambers street.
“You were so close, literally, and so it’s a different experience [and] it’s impossible not to just be thrilled by that music,“ he said.
Mr. Ameen said Mr. Williams himself suggested the concert series, after the pandemic’s strictest lockdowns had ended but before the city’s jazz clubs reopened.
“He said, ‘What about doing some music here, since all the clubs are closed?’” said Mr. Ameen, who lives in the same building. Charging $20 at the door and providing free wine, which didn’t require a liquor license, the gallery concerts slowly but steadily began drawing listeners.
“Everybody was starved for togetherness,” Mr. Hume said.
This was especially true for the musicians, who had been deprived not only of audiences but of peers.
“Everybody was practicing like maniacs, because that was all you could do,” Mr. Ameen recalled.
As the pandemic ebbed, the Poster Museum concerts kept going, ultimately running on a semi-regular basis for four years.
Filmed on one night at the end of the run in 2024, the new film was produced and edited by Vanessa Gould, a musician herself and the director of other jazz and classical performance films. Ms. Gould also designed the film’s poster, inspired by classic Blue Note Records album art from the 1960s.
Friday’s film center screening starts at 7:30 p.m., followed by Mr. Ameen’s live appearance and a Q and A including Mr. Hume.
For a full list of the Filmusic screenings and events, visit mvfilmsociety.com.
Comments
Comment policy »