Eric Harland&Avishai Cohen: NPR Music Field Recordings

Eric Harland is the sort of drummer who can conjure the music out of just about anything. And when you are this sort of drummer, you get asked to play with a lot of different musicians. When he joined us for this field recording, Harland was in the middle of playing three sets with three different bands in under five hours at the 2011 Newport Jazz Festival.

One of those gigs was with the trumpeter Avishai Cohen and his band Triveni. Right after they finished with their set, we absconded with both trumpeter and drummer into an abandoned quadrant of Fort Adams State Park for a little experiment. Watch as Harland squats and annexes a rusty piece of scrap metal for a makeshift ride cymbal. The following improvisation seems to just fall into place.


Producer: Mito Habe-Evans
Additional videography: Erik Jacobs
Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait
Special Thanks to: Josh Jackson/WBGO, Tim Wilkins/WBGO, Michael Downes/WBGO, David Tallacksen/WBGO, Patrick Jarenwattananon, and Newport Jazz Festival
Executive Producers: Anya Grundmann, Keith Jenkins