Jason Mills on Drums + Brains + the Digisphere
Musician + Producer + Performer + Educator Jason Mills talks to The Peak about movement, meaning, the magic of music, and how a brain tumor the size of a lemon can really throw off your balance.
Jason Mills has built a career around his love of percussion and movement.
One of the lead performers in the NYC Off-Broadway show, STOMP, he has logged thousands of performances at the Orpheum Theater in NYC, and in 12 countries on 5 continents. For 20 years, he basically lived onstage, starring in the DVD version of "STOMP Live," performing at the Academy Awards and countless TV appearances worldwide. He also directed and choreographed STOMP's 2013 performance of "Cecilia" alongside Paul Simon on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” which made Fallon's "Best Of Musical Performances."
At the same time, he played in and toured with several bands: Beetroot (IMA Nominees), Mobb Deep, The Dan Band, Sasha Dobson (Norah Jones, Puss N Boots), Liminha (Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil), Ivete Sangalo, Marivaldo Dos Santos (Fugees, Vinicius Cantuaria), Daevid Allen (Gong, Soft Machine), Brinae Ali (IMA Nominee), Two Dark Birds, Katy Steele, Candice Anitra, The Love Machine Project, and many more.
In 2015, it all came to a halt. Jason was diagnosed with a brain tumor and endured emergency surgery that left him debilitated, with double vision and impaired movement. After years of recuperation, he has now rebuilt his skills. He “can’t not drum.” Still a work in progress, his recovery proves the brain can be trained to do almost anything at any time. It just “takes practice.”
During this time, the internet has helped Jason continue to do what he loves most, to reach an audience, and to make a living while doing it. He directs, shoots, edits and performs in Yummy Sounds, his Youtube video channel that has reached thousands of fans, has co-founded the VFib music label, teaches drumming (now through Zoom) and continues to play, collaborate, record, and share the love of music.
For more on Jason and his endeavors, visit thisisjasonmills.com and vfibrecordings.com.
Your professional world has been upended over the past several years — post surgery, of course, but also due to the pandemic. How has the web made it possible for you to do your work now, both creatively and professionally?
In terms of the Covid-19 situation, we’ve all had to adjust to not being person-to-person. I teach drums and I’ve had to figure out how to teach on Zoom and Skype. It’s now how I teach all of my students. If that weren’t an option, I wouldn’t be teaching right now. And it’s working. We’re all in a high state of improv at the moment, which is actually beneficial to human beings. For those of us who are creative, we just have to exercise that muscle that much more. For people who aren’t in a creative business, it might be even more beneficial to them, because they’re being forced to think, and act and do things differently.
So, in the same way that things changed for me after my surgery, the pandemic situation has also made it necessary for me to “trim the fat.” To examine what matters. What am I trying to get done? If it’s not business as usual, if I can’t go about things the same old way, then I have to figure out what is most important to me, for whatever reason. Say, my business needs this in order to happen, or it’s an important part of my process...
The internet has definitely helped in the making of the Yummy Sounds videos and getting our art in front of people via their screens. Of course, no one is gigging now. And I haven’t done any live streaming performances, although I like that other people are. But I like the recording and editing parts so much that I’m focusing on that right now, and collaborating with other musicians. I’m lucky to have my own home studio so I can make what I want to make.
How have you been collaborating with other musicians during quarantine?
We’ve all had to up our game due to the Covid-thing, no matter what kind of home recording situation we have available. So, we record tracks, send them to each other, talk about it, add our bits and send back and forth. This capability has always been there, but right now it’s the only game in town since we can’t be together in person to practice and play and record. So it’s definitely shifted priorities. We’ve embraced it and are getting pretty good at it. It works really well for a lot of situations.
Of course, there’s that thing that happens when people are in the same room together that just can’t be replicated - bouncing things off each other creatively, and, specifically when recording music, when we’re working out a part... Say, I want to put some horns on something. I have a few people in the city that I can usually call up for that. They might have a set up at home, but some don’t. There’s a guy, Jonathan Powell. He plays trumpet, flugelhorn, valve trombone, which is like a big trumpet trombone — it has the same sound and range of a trombone. He can emulate a whole brass section by himself and, if we’re in the same room together, we can go through that whole process: Where do we want to take this? Where do we want it stacked? Do we want to go lower or higher? What kinds of harmonies do we want to go for? If he’s doing all of that by himself at a different location, it’s different. It’s harder for us to go through the process together, step by step, making decisions. Some things get lost.
For other things, it doesn’t matter quite so much. You can definitely still get the job done. It just requires adjustment. But because of the internet, there is at least some game in town, rather than no game in town. At the end of the day, if you really want to get something done, the internet allows you to figure out how to do it in different ways.
What do you think of online performances that are happening now in lieu of the real thing?
It’s been long enough now that we’ve all gotten used to the lack of applause. That silence was weird at first—watching Stephen Colbert do his monologue to awkward silence. But, now I don’t even notice. When people perform online these days, I get the sense that they’re just so stoked to be doing something, anything. It’s cool. It sort of warms the heart. I’m pulling for people—that they’re going for it. I’m just glad to see people persevere.
Tell us about your most recent album. How do you leverage the internet to reach an audience?
I just recently put out a 3 song EP called “The Beat Sox Sessions.” It’s instrumental, probably the most pure version of what I like to do—of the things that I’ve made. I’ve been a part of many other records, as a drummer, back-up vocalist, co-writer or producer, but I’m most comfortable making this instrumental, beat-driven stuff. It’s my happy place. The EP was recorded while we were still able to get together in the same room. Derek Nievergelt (bass), Wes Mingus (guitars), and Jonathan Powell (horns) also played on it, and I played drums, percussion, samples, and did production. I finished the EP during the pandemic.
My personal leveraging of the internet is largely based on Instagram, connected to the online drumming community. I have two IGs (personal: @jasonbmills and @yummysoundsmusic), which includes all of my videos and also any music I make in my music studio, Little House, and anything else related to my community—people who nerd out on drumming and vintage mics and whatever.
My IG following has grown a lot over the last several years.
I started doing Yummy Sounds about 6 years ago, in 2015. I made the first episode and shot the 2nd episode before my surgery. I had this interest in online content related to drumming and music. And I’d crafted an idea about what I thought would be cool to make. A lot of the online drum porn is athletic. Drummers can be some of the most athletic players (Look at how fast and hard I can play!) We just wanted to make cool tunes and utilize the studio to stack ideas up. There are 3 of us who make Yummy Sounds—John Sawicki from STOMP, my 13-year-old son, Aubrey Mills, and me. But, we can be more than 3 people because we stack ideas and make a whole thing in the studio. So, we play together and shoot it as we go. I wanted to edit it visually so that the parts we’re playing are represented as they happen. They each have their own space.
Few are better at this kind of thing than the Pomplamoose duo. They do these, kind of, Brady Bunch split screen collaborative videos. Each records a part and we watch it happen at the same time, on split screen.
But I wanted to do a more linear type thing. In drumming, linear means there aren’t two beats happening at the same time. I’m not hitting both of my hands on two different beats at once. Right hand cymbal. Left hand snare. Foot on bass drum. Linear means that doesn’t happen. I wanted to edit something visually that was represented linearly. The Pomplamoose people inspired me, made me wonder how we could do it differently.
Yummy Sounds, part for part, with space for each sound, stacking each moment. Edited in a linear way so that when a part gets introduced you see it being played. But it’s not all represented like a Zoom meeting on the screen at the same time as it’s happening. The editing makes it more like storytelling.
The second YS episode was an "Official Selection" of the INDIE SHORTS AWARDS at CANNES, which is very cool. Right after filming that one, I had brain surgery. It took a long time afterward to do more because I had double vision and my tracking was off. My eyes were “broken.” Their movement, their depth of field, my vestibular ocular reflex—nothing worked right. Remember the Blair Witch Project? That’s what looking through your own eyes is like when your vestibular ocular reflex is broken. It took a long time to get used to it, but over time it’s gotten better.
The Yummy Sounds vids are 4 minutes long and live on Youtube and IG. We haven’t done one in a while — Covid put a wrench in it. There are 5 total right now. We shot the 5th one live before Covid put us on hold.
Tell us about your record label?
I put the “The Beat Sox Sessions” EP out on VFib Recordings, a label that Steve Koester and I co-founded. It’s what I call a ‘2020s label’. Even label-labels don’t have a lot of resources. And we don’t have tons of money to promote what we’re doing. But I like the idea of curating a community of work by musicians and bands that are all cool, with a wide range of talent and genre, and a throughline of spirit holding us all together. Of course, we could all just throw our own stuff up on Spotify ourselves, but we’re in this position because of the internet. We have the opportunity to self-release music and form a collective. We all know that streaming screws the artist. But it isn’t like the artist wasn’t already getting screwed.
What else do you do with your music?
Steve (Koester) and I have made music together for Nike ads and I had a tune on the Moth podcast. I’ve done a lot of sound design for theatre, including Giant's Are Small's production of "Peter And The Wolf In Hollywood," for which I traveled the world along with the conductor and orchestra and provided live sound effects.
How does creativity inform your professional life?
I find myself explaining it this way: one day you decide you’re going to swim to that island out there and check it out. At some point during your swim, you look back at the shore and it’s so far away, that at this point, you just have to commit. Keep swimming to that island. At 48, I’ve swum too far out to do anything else. But, practically, as far as the workforce is concerned, I don’t know that I have many other opportunities outside of creative endeavors, at this point. Does that paint a nice, bleak picture of the artists’ life?
[Insert: laughing face emoji / crying face emoji.]
But, I think everyone can basically call whatever they do creative. Pretty much everything is a creative process—troubleshooting, trying to solve problems. It’s all creative.
Do you have any frustrations, worries, or paranoia about conducting business - or life - online?
Well, I think we can all see, in this particular moment, the dangers of social media and the internet, in the way that we are so divided politically, etc. The insular nature of things. It’s great that like-minded people can find each other so easily, but it’s spooky too. If we only find people just like us, then shit gets weird. If we don’t have dialogue about other ways to see things, and if we lose the ability to function on that level, that’s not good. But, if everyone just watched some cool drum vids, then maybe we’d all just get along….
What are your goals, aspirations, or hopes for your online world?
My personal hope… I’d love to do more music placement work, to find more sync licensing opportunities — i.e. beats for a snowboarding ad, music for a video game, tension building ambient stuff for film. I’d like my online presence to reach more people. The character of the sounds I make and the way they make people feel—I just want people to experience it. And I want to make more.
For more on Jason and his endeavors, visit thisisjasonmills.com and vfibrecordings.com.