Manu Katche is one of the first drummers whose phrasing stood out to me when I first started playing. I really enjoy his new solo albums "Neighborhood" and "Playground," which are very jazzy and feature some of my favorite musicians Tomasz Stanko (trumpet) and Jan Garbarek (sax). Indeed, Katche's older work with Sting and Peter Gabriel is also outstanding.
However, as a drummer, nothing excites me more than Katche's first solo album "It's About Time." I immediately fell in love with the whole thing, yet one track stood out to me as very special: "Silence." It really embodies everything I love about music from the late 70's to the mid 90's: The spacey, geeky guitar and keyboard tones over a a steady, heavy bass line are complimented perfectly by that 80's style drum sound we all love.
In this video, Katche does a few takes for a part of the song in a video he did for Zildjian cymbals. If Zildjian was using Katche to sell cymbals, they may have succeeded, because we're using identical A-Customs in the recording studio at my school (though I didn't choose the cymbals personally). They are a great pleasure to play on!
I find it very peculiar that the French drummer plays French grip . . . extremely well.
