"listening 
congratulations 
you truly are an artist supreme 
each vista, a masterpiece" - Carlos Santana

From Michael: It’s called “Drums of Compassion”. It took 20 years! It’s music I’m really proud of. The title is a play on words of the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji’s 1960 album “Drums of Passion”. That was a very important and influential release. At the time I was working on the record, the Dalai Lama came out and said that now we must enter into a Time of Compassion. And I thought “Drums of Compassion!

There’s a number of interesting connections here. On that album there was a song called Jin-Go-Lo-Ba. On Santana’s first album we did a song called “Jingo”, which was a remake of that song, but electrified, to say the least! Cut to 1997 and I did an album with all the original members of Santana, except for Carlos, and bass player David Brown, who had passed away. So Alphonso Johnson played bass, and Neal Schon played guitar. And on that record we re- recorded Jingo again, but this time actually with Olatunji and some members of his group. It was fantastic! And at that session he did this beautiful Incantaion in the language of Yoruba. Did you know in Nigeria alone there are over 500 languages? Anyway they recorded this beautiful and powerful vocal piece. He wrote it down on a piece of paper and I took that. They guys chose not to use it and when I started this record with Jeff Greinke, he had a piece titled, “The Call”. I later inserted Olatunji and the group doing this, and it’s very powerful. It’s like a statement of the pure intentions of the musicians. Like a prayer.

It’s coming out in April of 2024 on Trey Gunn’s label which is called 7D Media. He does interesting projects and this is definitely interesting. The front and back cover look really beautiful. The art director is a really talented designer, who’s become a friend named Christo Downs, and the cover art is by a brilliant artist named Penebranca, who Christo and I have been looking at for some time.The albumfeatures Jack DeJohnette, Zakir Hussain, Airto Moreira, Pete Lockett,Jeff Greinke, Trey Gunn, Skerik, Raul Rekow, Karl Perazzo, Tarik Banzi, Joe Doria, Danny Godinez, Farko Dosumov, Dave Hill Jr, John Fricke, BC Smith, and James Whiton, and a piece with the amazing experimental musician, Amon Tobin,and also this brilliant percussionist I’ve just discovered and really love named Stephan Maass from Germany. I just love what he does, because he makes it sound not just Latin or African or Brazilian, its more cinematic. As if I needed another great percussionist! So, I got the artwork done, got the label, and now I’ve got to get it out of my system and move on.. Why it took twenty years to complete is a whole other conversation! Suffice it to say, it was in the middle of a conversation with my shrink that I discovered the reason why. But that’s personal.

This, to me, is more than a record. It’s an Offering.

It was such a process. I initiated the album with a soundmaster named Jeff Greinke, and he does beautiful, ambient space music. It’s very delicate and beautiful, just like him, and I love that kind of place, that frequency. I’m a big Eno fan. I’d already worked with Klaus Schulze and Steve Roach and Jeff was here in Seattle.

So, I used to go out to the clubs a lot after the family went to sleep and check out all kinds of music around Seattle. A lot of experimental stuff, Jazz, funk, everything. And what happened is I came home one night at 2:00 AM, trying to wind down,and I just wanted to listen to choral music and beautiful music. AndI thought to myself, “What kind of album could I make that you would love to listen to at this hour? And you’re a drummer,

so, how is that going to work?” So,I got to thinking, I want the drums to be like the wind. I want to present them in a different environment than a groove on a drum set. So I made a set-up, which of course Ilearned from the best; Stomu Yamashta, and I had 14 toms in a semicircle. I wanted to have that feeling, to be free of the traditional drum set. One of the things about Stomu that I loved when I saw him playing classical music, was, he looked so gorgeous playing the timpani, so emotional and visual, and beautiful to watch. And I thought, “I love that because I feel the same way.” He had that kind of setup when we did the band Go. And so I copied that set-up because it allows you to be in and out of time, just free as you like,or not.

And so the basis was Jeff Greinke and myself. We recorded everything in a legendary studio in Seattle called Robert Lang Studios, an amazing studio with really high ceilings, (and a story behind it about Robert Lang that is as intense as the film “Fitzcarraldo”), which I thought would be perfect, but it was too big and boomy for the drums. So, we had to redo it all in another legendary Seattle studio called London Bridge Studio, recorded by Rik Parashar, who had recorded Pearl Jam’s first album there. And then I lived with that a little while and I thought, “It’s too New Agey,” you know, it needs something more. And there was a festival here in Seattle called Bumbershoot and Airto and Zakir were there, and so they graciously came to a studio called Glenn Sound which was close to where they were playing. I played all the tracks for them, and they each added their stuff. And so that turned into a whole other thing.Then I started adding other keyboards and it was really kind of brick by brick. But the initial performances were all live and I didn’t punch in or anything, it was all free. Then I started building on it thinking, “What kind of environment do I want these drums in?” I want them to be slightly regal, but not overdone like 70s English rock music or something that. And I wanted it to have dignity and I wanted it to be elegant. And I wanted it to be meditative or transportive, so that it takes you somewhere.You have Jack DeJohnette in there, and people would think“Jack’s going to be burning it up,” but he just played right in it, and he loved it. Zakir and Airto were both completely non judgemental, and extremely generous of Spirit. And I saw that these Master Drummer’s, felt the same way as I did, that The Drums call on a deep and ancient space. And this is what The Drums of Compassion is all about.