Andrew Drury is a percussionist, composer, improviser, bandleader, and advocate for the cause of adventurous music, musicians, and community.
Drury has worked with world-class artists, well-known and obscure, in 30 countries and on over 50 recordings. He is a pioneer in the area of extended techniques whose use of floor tom and timpani as wind instruments challenge the very notion of “percussion.”
Andrew has recorded eight cds as a bandleader and leads Content Provider, a quartet featuring Ingrid Laubrock, Briggan Krauss, and Brandon Seabrook. He also performs as a soloist, leads the Drum/Bridge 10tet, and collaborates with Stephanie Richards in the duo, Resonant Bodies. He has composed for ensembles of two to forty musicians and has done sound design for choreographers using field recordings and samples.
Drury is a member of several trios, including 1032K with Ku-umba Frank Lacy and Kevin Ray, the Deep Ecology Trio with Cristian Amigo and J. D. Parran, and Telepathic Television, with Robert Dick and 3D animator Joshue Ott. He has been a member of Jason Kao Hwang’s groups since 2004 and performs on eight of Hwang’s cds. He is a member of J. D. Parran’s all-clarinet (plus rhythm section) big band, the Dance Clarinets. Drury has also performed in duos with Jack Wright, Cooper-Moore, Kris Davis, Hank Roberts, Jessica Lurie, Yoni Kretzmer, Darius Jones, Dana Reason, and others.
Other musicians Drury has worked with in various contexts have included Christine Abdelnour, Michel Doneda, Mark Dresser, Peter Evans, Agustí Fernandez, Charles Gayle, Wayne Horvitz, Mazen Kerbaj, Joe McPhee, Myra Melford, Butch Morris, Tomeka Reid, Roswell Rudd, Wadada Leo Smith, John Tchicai, Biliana Voutchkova, Nate Wooley, and many more. He has also worked with the composers Laura Andel, Earl Howard, James Ilgenfritz, Eyvind Kang, Annea Lockwood, Miya Masaoka, Kristin Norderval, Elliott Sharp, and Lucie Vitkova.
Drury makes occasional forays into other media. In 1991 he created “Thieves Die Like This,” a solo performance art piece he that interwove poetry and percussion to explore the meanings and ramifications of U.S. involvement in El Salvador’s civil war. Inspired by visual artist, Robert Smithson, from 1989 to 1995 Drury performed and photographed 21 “Earth Solos,” drum set solos in desert, mountain, prairie, and other outdoor settings in eight States in the western U.S. He has also worked with choreographers jill sigman, Heather Kravas, Chris Ferris, Sheri Cohen, and others.
Drury is also the Founder and Artistic Director of Continuum Culture & Arts, a non-profit organization that runs the Soup & Sound House Concert Series, the Different Track Recordings label, and the Drum/Bridge education program, among other endeavors. As an educator he has led workshops and master classes at fifteen universities on three continents. He has led over 1,500 workshops in schools, prisons, museums, homeless shelters, Indian reservations, remote villages in Nicaragua and Guatemala, and with Kurdish refugees in Germany. In 2000 the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation identified him as “one of the most skilled and experienced community artists in America” when he was chosen to lead a six-month “Millennium Project” residency with the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin.
Born and raised in the Seattle area, Drury studied for several years with Ed Blackwell, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.