Drummer Nikki Glaspie is something of an icon in the funk scene. Known for her passionate playing style and emphatic drumming, Glaspie continues to amaze all those in her path. After leaving Dumpstaphunk and having settled in with her bandmates in The Nth Power, who formed out of a jam session in New Orleans, Glaspie looks onward and upward with the band’s new album Abundance and so much more.

Read on for Rex Thomson’s exclusive interview with the one and only Nikki Glaspie, and don’t miss the Nth Power TONIGHT with Dopapod at The Hall At MP in Brooklyn, NY. More information here.

L4LM:  How happy are you to finally have the album, Abundance, out?

Nikki Glaspie:  Ahhh man.  Extremely happy.  I’m really glad people have been so receptive to it.  It took a while….but we wanted to get it right y’know?  There are no short cuts to quality.  (Laughs)  I’m extremely proud.  I’ve never put out a piece of work like this before.  Super excited about it.

L4LM:  I think the smartest track on the album is the instrumental song “Intro.”  It’s a short, groovy funk piece that sets the stage for the tunes to come.  What was the inspiration for making that track?

NG:  It’s just a groove that we came up with and we recorded.  It’s a fun lil piece.  Sometimes we just wanna have fun, y’know?

L4LM:  The band walks a beautiful line between soul and funk, owing to both equally.  Was this balance something you sought purposefully, or just a happy accident?

NG:  Just a happy accident. I mean…we’re all influenced by different genres of music, and naturally that comes out in our music.  We don’t sit down and say ‘We need to do something like this,” or “We need to do something like that.”  It’s like, we start writing and wherever the music goes, we follow.  We follow it, man.  We’re not trying to direct it anywhere.  It’s like when you have a kid.  You can influence him, but you don’t ever know what your kid is gonna become.  You just breathe in, do the best job you can and hope for the best.     

L4LM:  Your sound is old school.  The production values are higher, certainly, but the album sounds as if it could have come out in the late sixties or seventies.  Did you set out to make music that was universal?

NG:  Yes.  I don’t usually listen to anything made after 1983.  Which is funny, because that was the year I was born.  The funk and the soul…that’s just my favorite kind of music.  Heavily influenced by that.  Sometimes you don’t wanna go too into that the.  You wanna be influenced…but this is our OWN thing, y’know what I mean?  

L4LM:  Nick Cassarino’s performance on “Abundance” was game changing and band defining.  He has seemed to step up every aspect of his game.  How has seeing him come into his own a band mate and a friend?

NG:  It’s just made us want to push more, to do more…to be better.  He brings that every night.  Every night he brings something I’ve never heard before.  we just inspire each other to keep going.  He’s ignighting a lot of excitement in all of us, but what he’s continued to do on a personal basis is just amazing.

L4LM:  It’s said your band was born out of a jam session in New Orleans.  

NG:  It was just a feeling we had.  There was somethin’ there you can’t really explain.  I mean, it was like home.  I was like…these are the cats I wanna make music with.  These are the people I wanna spend the rest of my life with.  It’s not just about music.  We wanna change the world and we wanna show the world that love is alive.  We wanna change the way people see other people and themselves.  Just let them know that love is still alive.  We gotta help each other.

L4LM:  Where was that jam session?

NG:  It was actually a gig.  It was Jennifer Hartswick’s gig.  Jen called me up and said “Yo…do you know a bassist?”  And I said “Of course I do! I know like the baddest dude ever!  I’m gonna call him up.” so I called Nate (Edgar) up, and he came down and obliged. The she was like “Man, maybe I should call Nigel (Hall.)  “And I said “Call him up.” That’s how it happened…we all ended up on a gig together. And we were like “Wow! Somethins’ goin on here!”

L4LM:  It seems like a lot of my favorite music is born in that city.

NG:  Same here.

L4LM:  “Abundance ” has some very strong themes and imagery in its tracks about responsibility, hope, and love.  Do you feel your band has a central message?

NG:  Yes.  Absolutely.  That is why we make music. It’s like such a simple thing…it’s cliche in a sense. People say it all the time.  I’m not really sure the message…the message is coming across, y’know what I mean?

There’s all this police brutality.  All these terrorists. We’re all here together…we’re all on this planet together.  We’re all one…just if only because we’re all together, y’know?  How the same things we share.  We all need air, we all need to breathe oxygen.  We all have blood in our veins.  We all come from a mother and a father.  We all have grand parents.  We all have families…why should anyone go and kill someone else?

Love can be salvation.  We, as musicians, and artists have this platform…and that is what we should be talking about.     

L4LM:  You’re the heart of any band you play with.  What do you see as your responsibility as a drummer?

NG:  The drums are the heart beat, y’know what I’m sayin’?  The heart is the central part of the body.  It pumps blood to every part of the body.  That’s how I view myself…moving the blood through the band.  

It’s my job to keep grooves alive.  It’s my job to give the music it’s danceability.  We want the people to dance.  We want to see people dance.  That’s how I judge the success of me doin’ my job in the band…are the people movin’?  Are the people groovin’?

L4LM:  Onstage your percussion partner Weedie Braimah typically sits a fair distance from you, unlike a majority of bands with multiple percussionists.  Is there a need for eye contact when playing as closely together as you do, or can you just feel what he’s doing?

NG:  We connect by sound, for sure.  We also look at each other when we can.  We can actually see each other fairly well. We can talk to each other in other ways though.  I can hear where he’s going, and he can hear me.

L4LM:  I think we are all born wanting to be drummers.  Do you remember learning that you could make music by hitting things?

NG:  That’s a good question…I’m not exactly sure.  I started playing drums when I was two.  I think that I learned more..I felt music in the womb.  My mom was a keyboard player.  So I was exposed at an extremely young age.  My dad also played saxophone.  They played in church…they played in churches in North Carolina.  When I realized that playing drums…was a part of music?  I can’t say.  

I’ve always been playing drums like…my whole life.  But when I started to take it serious?  Like, I wanted to get better at it?  I think that was when I was about six. I joined a band…I tried to learn more about the instrument.  I tried to learn more about what I can do with it.  It wasn’t until high school when I started to think this could be a career.  I never even literally thought that, until then.

L4LM:  You were serious enough about you craft to play your way into studying at Berklee.  What was your experience there like?

NG:  It helped me tremendously.  It wasn’t just the school, it was everything around the school, the atmosphere surrounding it.  I’d never really studied officially.  I’d never taken lessons…I was all self taught.

And when I got to Berkely, and I met my teachers and I realized that people were practicing about eight hours a day.  I was like “Crap!”  (Laughs)  I never even thought of that.  But I knew that was what it was supposed to look like.  That these class rooms where you could go and sit and practice.  I started practicing…I met a bunch of people…they shared their knowledge.  That changed my life.  There was just a world of different kinds of teaching and ways to learn.  

That was the thing about Berkely for me.  It was like they provided the stage for us to present our ideas in, and then we all made it better through learning.  I’m grateful to the school.  I made a lot of connections, met a lot of people.  I never would havemet Nate, and Jen and Nigel and a lot of the people that I know.

L4LM:  Who would you say are your biggest influences on the drums.

NG:  Let’s see…John Bonham. He’s probably the biggest, ’cause of the way he played.  Ziggy, obviously, Zigaboo (Modeleste.)  Vince Chambers is probably the reason I play though.  When I saw him…it changed my life.  I could go on and on and on.

L4LM:  When playing as part of Beyonce’s touring band, you got a taste of the stratosphere.  The Nth Power has gotten some of that “Big Time” with your VH1 appearance earlier this year.  How gratifying was that, seeing and hearing the reaction of the crowd and new fans across the nation to your music?

NG:  Awesome.  It was extremely gratifying. There’s a lot of bands out there, as I’m sure you know, that are deserving of the spotlight but they just don’t get it, for whatever reason.  I can tell you I was extremely happy and proud, to even be invited to come on a show like that and to be able to perform on national television.  It was definitely rewarding.  We just wanna spread the word.

L4LM:  I have to ask, as there seems to be a lil confusion.  What is the status of Nigel Hall regarding The Nth Power and his possible future?

NG:  The door is open.  He just released his new album.  He’s been goin around with Lettuce and doin’ his thing.  I’m not sure how to answer the question.  We’re out here, having gigs.  And whether he’s here or not, we gotta keep movin’.  I’m sure people wanna know.  But Nigel needs to do his own thing.  

Maybe it’s cause people have seen us, hangin’ out, and that’s just what they automatically assume.  But we’re still family, y’know what I mean?

L4LM:  What’s next?  I imagine you want to tour for this album for a while.

NG:  Absolutely.  We’re pulling into Buffalo right now.  We just wanna keep it movin’ down the road.

L4LM:  This album has fans dreaming of more music from you folks.  Has the next round of song writing begun yet?

NG:  Oh yeah.  That’s the thing.  There are a lotta songs that didn’t make it on the record.  Can’t put everything on one album.  (Laughs)

L4LM:  I’ll be honest.  You guys let Live For Live Music stream the album in advance and I’ve probably listened to it twenty times already.  I just love it.

NG:  That’s great!  (Laughs)  That’s what we make this music for, and that’s what we hope will happen.  We want to connect with people.  We hope people   I’m so glad you dig it!

L4LM:  Do you have time for a couple fan questions?

NG:  Absolutely.

L4LM:  Where do you want your band to go, musically, in the future?

NG:  I just wanna keep going, I wanna keep growing.  I don’t have a destination in the future. I can’t say I wanna be less or more of anything.  I just wanna grow naturally.    

L4LM:  What’s with the fancy dress clothes you often play in?

NG:  That used to be the thing, and like everyone did it. It makes us serious.  We don’t wanna be onstage lookin’ like we don’t care that we are onstage.  We don’t wanna look like we just stepped up out of the audience.  We wanna put on good clothes sometimes…y’know…like Christmas.  I feel like a lot of that has been lost as well.  You would never see, I don’t know…Earth, Wind and Fire and think they didn’t have style.  And that’s something we wanna bring.

L4LM:  Well, thanks for this.  I hope everyone in the band is good and the music gets to the people.

MG:  Thanks!  Me too!