Drummers from near and far treat music legend like rock star
HAWTHORNE - Civil War-style drumming enthusiasts threw a surprise party Saturday afternoon for percussion icon John S. Pratt at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church.
“He’s the Mick Jagger of rudimental drumming!” someone shouted after Pratt, who turned 75 Friday, entered the room, in a pink jacket and slicked-back hair.
Pratt’s eyes welled up with tears as he registered the 50-odd drumming enthusiasts who had come to pay tribute to the man who has popularized the traditional style of drumming. These drummers came from nearby and from as far away as Arizona and Canada. Pratt had been fooled to believe that the church needed to photograph him that day for its records.
Pratt’s 1959 music book “14 Modern Contest Solos for Snare Drum” is still the bible for high school and college drumming instructors, said Mark Reilly, a drummer with the U.S. military band that plays for the White House and at presidential inaugurations.
Many at the party gushed over Pratt’s role in popularizing the old style of drumming with his easy-to-read music books, as well as his virtuoso status as a drummer.
“He’s about the best marching drummer I ever heard,” said Frank Bourke, who rat-tat-tatted alongside Pratt with the Drum and Bugle Corps of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, known as the “Hellcats,” from 1950 to 1966. Bourke said he hadn’t seen Pratt in four decades.
Pratt, a 37-year Hawthorne resident, took a position onstage, alongside a dozen drummers beating replicas of Civil War-style drums, and began calling the shots.
“Crazy Army?” he queried, with a sly smile, to the other drummers on the stage, in reference to a rhythm he invented that injects syncopation into a classic snare drum beat known as “The Army 2-4.”
Although his hands are now arthritic, he executed the percussive rhythms with ease. You can tell he’s a legendary “rudimentary drummer,” or Civil War-style drummer, just from the way he picks his sticks up, Reilly said.
Pratt is most famous for his music books and for leading West Point’s drum corps for more than a decade. But the musical groundbreaker also made his mark at Hackensack High School, where he taught English for more than two decades. Pratt retired in 1995.
“You warmed the cockles of my heart. I’m perspiring, and it isn’t from the drumming,” he told the crowd.
