Different Drummers, or The Case of the Paranoid Percussionist

“An exploration of the inner and outer worlds of drumming.”

 Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Very few of my business trips to Europe turned out as planned; there was always an inconsistency to them.

I suppose that since I was involved with trying to transfer risk on behalf of my domestic clients to international reinsurance companies, there was always going to be an element of uncertainty in any of these transactions.

I mean when one of the executives you are dealing with has a sign on the wall behind his desk which states in large bold letters - WE DON’T ACCEPT RISK, WE ARE AN INSURANCE COMPANY! - you know that you are in for some tough negotiations and a lot of unpredictability between what you want for your client and what’s on offer by the reinsurance facility [who, as an intermediary, is also your client, but that’s another story for another day].

But whether it was tea and scones in London, café au lait and a croissant in Paris, or an espresso and biscotti in Rome, one person that I could always count on joining me for breakfast and consistently bringing pleasure to my day was Mike Zwerin.

This was because Mike, who was based in Paris until his death in 2010, wrote a regular Jazz column for the International Herald Tribune, the English language newspaper that is available on a daily basis in most of the major cities of Europe.

And Man, could Mike ever write.

For those not familiar with his work, Mike had been an expatriate for quite a while having left for Europe in 1969.

Mike was a fine trombonist who became known when he was a member of the Maynard Ferguson band in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A strange thing happened on the way to the job. His father died and Mike suddenly found himself the president of Dome Steel. Many of us found it very hard to imagine Mike as the head of a steel company; so did he, and in fact he would stash his horn in his office in New York so that he could slip away to play gigs. Eventually he gave the position up, returned to playing full time, and became jazz critic of the Village Voice [1964-1969] and then its London correspondent [1969-71]. He moved to Paris and wrote regularly for the International Herald-Tribune for 21 years while also freelancing for various European magazines and continued playing.

Along the way, Mike authored an autobiography titled Close Enough for Jazz that was published by Quartet Books in 1984. There's wonderful stuff in that book. It has a naked honesty that is very rare. 

The following essay is from Mike’s “down beat days” when he was a fairly regular contributor to the magazine.

It appeared in the December 11, 1969 edition with the subtitle - “An exploration of the inner and outer worlds of drumming.”