For close to 30 years, drummer Jefferson Voorhees has built a reputation as an earnest, reliably quirky, and much appreciated fixture on Albuquerque’s music scene. His list of credits runs the gamut from world music (with Wagogo and others) to avant-garde jazz (with TG3 and others) to several unclassifiable varieties of miscegenational music (with Pray for Brain, The Dogbone Trio, and others). He is as much at home onstage playing the most unconventional music you might ever encounter, as he is playing standards in nursing homes and senior centers with Red Roosters, or any number of danceable genres with Jasper. Along the way, he has studied West African and East Indian drumming, played with world beat pioneers such as O.J. Ekemode and the Nigerian Allstars, and is currently collaborating with the trio Engine. This coming Thursday at the Outpost, he will draw from his vast storehouse of rhythm to present a solo concert—just him and his idiosyncratic drum kit—on a bill with the Glass Key Trio.

Cheese it, the cops
Voorhees’s drum kit reflects his persistent search for an instrument that can match his own offbeat demands for multigenre flexibility and exceptional tonality. The first incarnation of the kit came into existence back in the ’80s in Oakland, California, where he was busking. He needed a kit that could be carried in one or, at most, two loads from the car to the street corner. “It was particularly important because the rules were very loose in those days, not quite clear. We would be chased away by police for blocking commerce, which we weren’t,” he says, “so we would have to leave in a hurry.”

Voorhees created a “tiny drum kit” that he could pack in a large reinforced case that doubled as a drum stool. A 16-inch tom-tom from an old Ludwig kit got turned on its side, and the rim on one side was reinforced so it could accept a foot pedal. Voilà: tiny kick drum. To that, he added a piccolo snare drum and a high hat, and he was in business.

His landlord and neighbor, Mr. Parker, contributed a 1913 marching snare drum made of bird’s-eye maple, which he sold Voorhees for five bucks. That’s been the bass drum for the tiny kit ever since.

An evolving assemblage
Voorhees has also been building a big kit over the last 40 years or so, adding and subtracting elements to fit his needs. About a year ago, he acquired a child’s set online for $149 and is now using that kick drum in his big kit, which features a total of eight drums, a high hat, and a couple of Sabian cymbals. A snare sits between his knees. Two conga drums, cut down so that they sit at an accessible height, sit to his left. Four tom-toms, including a tiny homemade piece that looks like a sawed-off bongo, sit beyond the snare, curving to his right.

“I just love tones,” he says. “I love having all these different things available.”

Each of the drums has been modified in one way or another to maximize its musicality and tone. For example, he has used mounting putty to place a gub, a feature of Indian tablas, under the center of each tom-tom drumhead. “It centers the tone,” he says. To give himself a more flexible melodic palette, he tunes the drums in half-steps, rather than the more common intervals.

Liberated from narrative
With this articulate, sui generis kit, Voorhees has created solo performances with a strong narrative, or theme, in the past. The current solo also came together, at least initially, around a theme sparked by a chance encounter with a native Rastafarian on Trinidad. Their conversation put Voorhees in mind of his earliest days, literally, when, as a newborn in Harlem, he required a blood transfusion to survive. Given the neighborhood, he figures that the blood he received had been donated by a variety of races and ethnicities.

“I started thinking about that, and I wanted the solo to be a thank-you to all the people who had given me their blood,” he says. “All these voices came to me.” So for two months, Voorhees worked on creating a narrative around that idea, incorporating rhythms and vocals that reflected the multiplicity.

Then, he considered that this was the same sort of approach he’d taken before. What’s more, the sense of cultural appropriation was “scary.” The narrative, as he envisioned it, required him to mimic the voices and accents of the various races and ethnicities, and that seemed inappropriate.

“I sort of reached an impasse, and I just realized, Wait a minute. I just want to play,” he says. “I want to risk just going out there improvising and see what happens.”

Voorhees decided to focus on his—and his kit’s—musicality and his broad rhythmic palette. He warns that he’s not a razzmatazz drummer with mind-blowing chops, but what he does bring to the stage is 50 years of rhythmic sophistication and intelligence. “A lot of it will be improvised,” he says.

If his previous solo efforts are any indication, a lot of it will also be captivating.

Jefferson Voorhees Solo
and the Glass Key Trio
Thursday, November 15, 7:30 p.m.
Weil Hall at the Outpost Performance Space
210 Yale SE, Albuquerque
Tickets: $15 (member/student); $20 (general)
For tickets or more information, click here, or call 505-268-0044.

© 2018 Mel Minter