Big Drum Thump

Grover Pro Percussion announces that they will have no price increases for their Grover line of concert percussion products in 2009, despite rising material costs and the state of the U.S. economy.

“I know that our retail partners and customers are feeling the pinch due to economic conditions,” states Neil Grover, President and Founder of Grover Pro Percussion. “We’ve made the investment in efficiency improvements that allow us to hold 2008 pricing,” continues Grover. “As we enter 2009, I know that our customers will really appreciate our holding 2008 pricing. They will know that Grover Pro Percussion is not only sensitive to the market condition, but that we value the shared interests of our retail partners. Holding 2008 pricing is a great way to show our commitment to the percussion marketplace,” comments Grover.

“Our ability to hold pricing really shows our customers that we care about them,” states Jim Simonian, Worldwide Director of Sales. “It’s important that our customers know that we not only make the world’s finest percussion products, but that we understand the retail side of the business,” continues Simonian. “The fact is that we actually are lowering pricing on two of our products; woodblocks and chime mallets, how many companies can claim that?” Simonian queried.

[via Harmony Central]

Amid Sabian’s family feud comes news that the cymbal company has laid off 16 workers over the past few weeks, a probable sign that America’s beat-up economy is affecting drumming manufacturers in other countries. From the Bugle-Observer report:

John Teague, vice-president of operations at Sabian, confirmed last Tuesday the company has had to let 16 workers go in the past several weeks.

About one and a half months ago, eight positions were cut permanently, he said, and more recently the company laid off another eight workers.

The hope is that those eight layoffs will be temporary, Teague said, and those people will be back on the job in the coming months.

Those eight laid off workers were highly trained cymbal-makers, he said, and the company was reluctant to lose such skilled workers.

“The level of talent we laid off this last time, it was very difficult,” he said.

All of the layoffs and job cuts were in the manufacturing side of the business, Teague said.

Over the past year, through job cuts, layoffs and attrition, the employee complement on the work floor has been reduced by 20 per cent, he said.

In the wake of those cuts, Sabian now employs 105 people in Meductic.

Teague said the company is well aware that when the village’s biggest employer lays people off there’s an impact.

“It’s affected families here,” he said. “We’re awful sorry to have to do it.”

Cymbals are a luxury item for some of Sabian’s customers, Teague said, so it’s not surprising the economic slowdown is being felt in the company.

“We’ve got inventory issues,” he said, noting Sabian’s U.S. distributor has too much of its product on hand.

Sabian produced about 13,000 to 15,000 units per week this year.

Teague said the company is projecting demand for only 9,000 units per week in 2009.

The long-term future of the company is secure, he said.

“The bottom line is fine,” he said.

Remember Winger, that much derided eyeliner band from the ’80s who scored big with “Seventeen” and had the awesome Rod Morgenstein on drums? Well, Kip Winger, the band’s ballet-dancing front man, recently gave an interview to Metal Sludge in which he spoke quite candidly to a dude dressed in a banana suit. When asked the last time he threw darts at a photo of Lars Ulrich (a reference to Lars chucking pointy projectiles at a photo of Kip in a scene from A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica), the Kipster said:

I’ve never done that. I really never had anything against the guy. In fact, when I first heard Metallica’s Black Album, I thought it was a really cool record… and then they just started taking shots at me, for whatever reason. But it’s okay, Lars is not really that talented. He’s got a lot of fucking money, though, so I’m sure he’s happy. I actually felt sorry for him when I saw that Some Kind of Monster documentary. He was sitting there next to his dad, just seething with unmoved emotion over things that were still unresolved. It was really kind of sad to watch. But I do like Metallica, they’re a good band.

Old dude fight! Old dude fight!

[via Metal Sucks]

Hudson Music has posted another clip from Tommy Igoe’s latest video, Groove Essentials 2.0. Click here to see the affable Igoe rock up a shuffle.

…and George Bush a probable war criminal. The U2 drummer let loose in a recent interview with Q magazine about Bono’s association with the two former world leaders (yep, we’re using “former” to describe Bush because, hey, we never followed him in the first place):

Tony Blair is a war criminal and I think he should be tried as a war criminal. Then I see Bono and him as pals and I’m going, “I don’t like that.” Do I think George Bush is a war criminal? Probably—but the difference between him and Tony Blair is that Blair is intelligent. So he has no excuse for what he did.

Though Mullen recognizes that Bono is “prepared to use his weight as a celebrity, at great cost to himself and his family, to help other people,” the great sunglassed one might have a crossed the sacrosanct line between art and politics (….right now, there are about 8,000 postcolonial literary theorists cocking their Winchesters because of that sentence: please shoot us a contempt-riddled message). Mullen said, “[A]s an outsider looking in, I cringe.”

Bill Leikam over at All About Jazz has reviewed a recent Cindy Blackman show and coined a perfectly genius phrase to describe her playing: power-jazz. It’s a style marked by energy and passion, of course, but it’s also one in which the “drums become the lead instrument of the band and the other instruments most often support the drummer as a working unit, together.”

Awesome. Now we just need power-reggae, power-country, and (why not?) power-polka.