Drum fest brings together players with wide variety of styles

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Who has a better Rolodex for putting on a drum festival?

John Wackerman comes from a family of drummers, and drummers are sort of one big family anyway.

"It’s kind of a small community. Drummers feel more like a family," he says. "The nice thing is everyone’s real open. Maybe it’s because we were always in drum line or some kind of team drum effort. It seems like we got to be more of a family that way.

"Guitar players, not so much," he adds with a laugh.

When Wackerman stepped out from his role as Terry Fator’s bandleader to organize the Las Vegas Drum Festival, the phone calls were the easiest part. Last year’s top-billed guest, cult guitarist Allan Holdsworth, used to hang out at the family house with Wackerman’s older brother Chad.

Wackerman also goes way back with Danny Seraphine, the featured artist for the festival’s second year this Sunday. The original drummer for the band Chicago will helm an outfit called CTA (remember, Chicago was originally "Chicago Transit Authority"), reviving the group’s pre-pop catalog of jazz-rock fusion.

"Danny really changed what they call jazz-rock drumming," Wackerman says. "He really created that whole genre of infusing elements of jazz technique with the rock."

The four-hour festival at the South Point follows performances with question-and-answer sessions (master classes are a future goal). The featured players run the wide umbrella of drumming styles, from the snare-drum minimalism of Scott Johnson to the electronics of Johnny Rabb and prog-rock virtuosity of Marco Minnemann.

A trio of Blue Man Group drummers kicks off the fest, and recording engineer Mark Grey will share stories about the Palms’ studio. Amid all this, Wackerman will reunite for a trio performance with Chad and younger brother Brooks, who drums for veteran rockers Bad Religion.

Their father, Chuck, now 81, is a jazz education legend in Orange County, Calif., after decades of teaching at Los Alamitos High.

"It was a crazy childhood," John says, and we never really realized it was unusual until we became older and realized, nobody grows up with four drum sets in the house."

He was well into piano and drum theory by the time he was in grade school. Chad, six years older, joined Frank Zappa’s band at age 21, and John did stints on the bus with veteran bandleaders Bill Watrous and Maynard Ferguson while still in his teens.

"One cool thing my dad always said was, ‘It’s 95 percent work and 1 percent talent,’ " John says.

But unlike his rocking younger brother, "I think I like so many different genres, I never committed to one thing."

Which makes him uniquely suited for his current work with Fator. Dividing music director duties with Bill Zappia, Wackerman paces the band through decades of pop history every night.

"Our job is, like Terry’s trying to do, make it as close an impersonation as possible," he says. "It does keep my interest because I do like so many kinds of music, and Terry does too."

Wackerman and his wife, Linda, already had settled in Las Vegas when Fator won "America’s Got Talent" in 2007. They had watched him compete on television, but never met him before the offer to back the ventriloquist at the Las Vegas Hilton.

Wackerman also works as a drummer-for-hire for ad jingles and soundtracks, sending in his parts by Internet from a studio in part of the couple’s spacious, ’70s-retro ranch house near Wayne Newton’s. "I don’t have to get out of my ‘jamas," he jokes.

The Wackermans figure the drum festival has a chance to become a Las Vegas institution. "You just have to keep doing them," he says. "We’re not going to make money unless we get to the point where enough drummers count on it each year."

But with so many musicians in town, he saw a chance to bring back "a really important part of when I was growing up, to go and see your idols and be able to talk to them, to be inspired and see how they got to where they’re at."

The festival, like his career, may go back to what his dad says about the 95 percent part.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.