Thanks for checking it out! I've been fortunate to see Rashied Ali play locally and meet him. It was surreal to shake the hand of a guy who played with Coltrane. Very nice man, and he's still got all his drum chops. The gig I saw was very mainstream compared to Interstellar Space, but that's cool. He did a lot of great work with Alice Coltrane, too.

The drum machine (keyboard + drum pad, actually) worked out far better on this than I ever could have expected. Basically, I lay down the lower kit in one pass and the cymbals in another--which one I do first depends on which part of the kit I want to predominate. Since there's no fixed beat, I don't have to worry about everything syncing up, which was a problem on the previous two albums. I'm getting better at playing the drum machine in real time, but it's still better to program it for rock and funk.

Thanks for checking out the blog again! Don't be afraid to post comments over there, too--I allow general comments.

Airto's a MONSTER behind the drum kit, as well as a percussion god. If you want to hear him on the kit, I recommend the first two Return to Forever albums, "Return to Forever" and "Light As A Feather". Chick Corea originally hired a different drummer for RTF and hired Flora as the singer. But when Airto tagged along with Flora to a rehearsal and was drafted in to demonstrate to the drummer how to properly play a samba beat, Chick was so floored that he basically hired him on the spot. Airto plays both kit and overdubbed percussion on the first two RTF albums. He also does some fantastic drumming on several of Flora's solo albums, but they usually brought in other drummers for those sessions, typically Ndugu Leon Chancler, and let Airto focus on percussion.

Hey, thanks for checking out my blog! I intend to post at least daily, and I just kind of got sidetracked this weekend. Hopefully I'll be able to keep posting interesting stuff.