Greg Fox sipped his own mix of green tea, honey and nettles as he spoke from his shared loft in Gowanus in what he describes as being “as professional a situation as a bedroom studio could be.” The large, sunny room is filled with drums and other instruments, recording equipment and the ephemera of the working musician and percussion instructor. Recently, the room has taken on another function, as a counseling room for his recent venture into personal coaching.
He has also made a home for himself on stage, touring with a diverse array of bands—from the on-point black metal of Liturgy to the sprawling psychedelia of Guardian Alien to the hyper-powered “post-everything” band Ex Eye to the hypnotic experimental rock of Zs (to name a few). He also playing solo sets on drums or, more recently, electronics and synthesizer. Whatever the setting, his playing is stunning. If “machinelike” is meant to be a compliment for a drummer, Greg Fox is like an organic entity that came out the other side: a precision engine brought back into very human expression.
He had his synth on hand for a solo set at Ridgewood’s Trans-Pecos last month, Armed with an analog synth and prerecorded samples of his own voice, he pushed layered chants through bits of digital distortion before dropping a deep bass beat below it. The looped and glitched vocals against jungle breakbeats came off like a Maori ceremony transmuting into a cyborg prayer meeting.
Overlapping ideologies are par for the course with Fox. When he got his personal coaching certification from the Open Center last year, he didn’t hide it as an isolated venture or separate income stream. “Transformational coaching” is listed alongside his availability for bookings, session work and drum lessons on his website. And in fact, the coaching came out of his music instruction.
“A lot of my students kept coming back and getting into territory of talking about what’s going on with them,” he said. “It felt like the drum lessons wanted to be something else.” He now has coaching clients, music students, and a couple of people doing both.
Fox found a model for his holistic approach to music and wellness in fellow drummer Milford Graves who, at age 78, spends at least as much of his time in cardiology and herbalist studies as he does playing music. Fox first heard the free jazz legend on records from the 1960s and, with a little asking around, was able to come up with an email address. He started making regular visits to Graves’ house in Queens in 2013. During one of those visits, Graves made the audio recordings of Fox’s heart that became the skeletons for Fox’s 2014 album Mitral Transmission.
A new solo record set for release later this year follows up on the mind-body unity of Mitral Transmission. The new album combines acoustic and digitally triggered drums with electronics into what Fox called “everything I do all in one place.” And if a new age album seems to be in order for Fox in 2020, this might be it, although it’s far from audio mayonnaise. The album manages to be meditative and propulsive at the same time.
“I kind of used to separate things I do, I tried to put that wall down,” he said. But the new album is “very vulnerable. I’ve never done something like this, alone with a drum set really well mic’d.” His live solo sets, he said, are “fast and heavy and a bit of an endurance. This is different. This is quiet.
“Solo is interesting and fun and a cool way to explore new ideas,” he added, “but I think I enjoy more playing music with other people.”
To that point Fox plans to record with a new trio and a new septet this year while continuing work with the brilliantly named Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsal, which is just what it sounds like. The tribute to the grand-daddies of metal includes Mick Barr of Krallice (interviewed in the January issue of the RHSR), Angel Deradoorian of the Dirty Projectors, Chris Egan of Blood Orange, Brad Truax of Interpol and Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They debuted at the People Festival in Berlin in 2018 and have played a handful of gigs at St. Vitus (and will hit that Greenpoint stage again this month). This summer, they’ll return to Germany for the Monheim Triennale, where Fox will also play solo and with his jazz-leaning group Quadrinity.
“That might be my favorite band,” he said of the Black Sabbath project, then paused for half a beat. “That’s my favorite band right now. That’s the kind of thing you don’t have to be clever about. Just play the songs real good.
“Over the past couple of years, I disbanded everything I was doing,” he explained. “A lot’s changed. What hasn’t changed is, playing music is my favorite thing to do in the whole world. I think I care more about playing music with people I really love than any kind of commercial success.”
Black Sabbath Cover Band Rehearsal plays at St. Vitus Feb. 21.
Author
Kurt Gottschalk is a writer, journalist and broadcaster based in New York City.
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