tg0030
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Nov 01, 2012
1:31 AM
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Tommy Cappel was born in Fairfax, VA, in 1973. Both his parents were music teachers, so he grew up surrounded by music. His brother played drums to heavy metal records. Cappel was driven by the beat and eventually took over his brother's drum kit. By http://www.monsterbeatsfrance.eu/
age six he was playing in a rock band with his friends, and in high school he picked up piano, percussion, marimba, and timpani. He added his father's jazz records to the collection of prog rock LPs he borrowed from his brother to expand his musical vocabulary. When he discovered the funky New Orleans rhythms of the Meters, he knew he was going to be a musician for the rest of his life.
In the '90s, Cappel attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, aiming for a degree in studio drumming. He studied New Orleans jazz, bebop, modern Monster Beats
jazz, and world music. One of his teachers was transcribing African and Arab drumming patterns to drum kit and Cappel lent a hand and learned much about non-jazz rhythm patterns. He started digging into hip-hop, Balkan music, Arab music, and Latin rhythms. After graduation he moved to New York and played in rock, jazz, reggae, and jam bands. He attended the free music jams at the Bell, a café in downtown Manhattan frequented by people like Karsh Kale and the members of Bill Laswell's gang. This led to experiments in combining live music with hip-hop and dub reggae effects. When a group of musicians he knew moved out to San Francisco, he joined them. In Beats By Dre Pas Cher
San Francisco he began producing hip-hop artists and electronic dance music. He joined the the Yard Dogs Road Show and hit it off with Jakes, who invited him to join Beats Antique.
Tribal Derivations was produced to complement Jakes' unique dance style, an innovative blend of traditional and tribal belly dance with tango, break dance, and Indian dance. On Collide, the trio stretched out in other directions. The San Francisco scene is a hotbed of cross-pollinating multicultural ensembles and the band ranged far and wide across North Africa and the Middle East for inspiration. Musicians from the Balkan punk band Brass Menazeri added delirious horn parts to complement a mélange of French Gypsy jazz violin, flamenco http://www.linkoflondoncharmonline.co.uk/
handclapping, Romanian wedding music, hip-hop, jazz, dub reggae, and more. They started laying down tracks for their next album in early 2009, and with a name like Beats Antique they're only limited by their imaginations. The band says that ragtime, Hawaiian, blues, and other archaic musics are all liable to find their way into future releases. ~ j. poet, Rovi
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