Omar Hakim, who is widely renowned for his work with Weather Report, Sting, David Bowie, and Daft Punk, among many other artists, has released a video for the track “Walk the Walk” from his recent solo album, We Are One. Hakim spoke at length about the track in his July 2014 Modern Drummer cover story. “I keep a V-Drums set in my control room,” Hakim told MD, “and one time I sat down and kind of stumbled onto this rhythm. I was like, Wow, this is fun, and I don’t have anything like this on the record. It’s fast, up around 150 bpm, and it’s kind of a wacky pattern. I recorded it first on V-Drums and then started improvising the bass line.

“Within a couple of hours I had come up with a form that included this very simple drum solo,” Omar went on. “My idea was to make a solo that a little kid could play. When I was a kid there were a few drum solos on pop records that kids would learn. In the 1960s there was ‘Wipe Out.’ Somebody’d be, ‘Dude, can you play “Wipe Out”?’ Another one might have been ‘Frankenstein’ by Edgar Winter. That was one of those drum solos—it wasn’t really like a Buddy Rich solo or a Billy Cobham solo, but it was an iconic drum solo that everybody could sort of play. So when I thought of ‘Walk the Walk,’ I thought, What if I had this drum solo that’s not so much chops oriented as much as it’s sound oriented, with more open space, and it’s like you kind of get into the sound of the drum inside this room.”

To purchase a copy of the July 2014 issue of Modern Drummer with Omar Hakim, go to www.musicdispatch.com/

Photo by Rahav.