Within the world of veteran drummer Bill Ward, his life has taken a whirlwind of twists and turns in his life. Aside from his vast musical ventures he is involved in, he recently unveiled a different project he took part in, involving light based photography and his drumming.

He unveiled a number of his pieces he created with multimedia art company Scene Four, and captured a different side of his drumming by bringing out a visual side to his playing. He explains how the project came together.

“First of all, there’s a company called Scene Four and they’re based in Los Angeles. They were doing special camera and special things with percussionists and slash drummers. They have done things with some other artists and they were developing different ways of producing visual effects from drummers playing drums. I was invited through my publicist Liese Rugo. She said ‘look…there’s this company called Scene Four and they’re interested in having you come along and see if you’re interested in trying to play a drum kit in the dark with lots of different lights and lots of different lighted drum sticks.”

“I was encouraged by other people very close to me that said ‘look…go ahead and try it and see what develops.’ So I went in with something of an ‘I didn’t quite know what to expect’ kind of point of view. The first thing that happened when I arrived at the actual session [was] we did one session first which was like an interview and we went through the ideas of how we would perform it. I like the guys, Cory [Danziger] and Ravi [Dosaj] and the guys in Scene Four, and I like them a lot. I became interested in what they were doing. I said ‘let’s go ahead and we’ll do this.’ “

“A couple of weeks later we actually shot in a very big dark room. Pitch dark actually. We had multi cameras…I don’t really know…maybe six or seven cameras at all angles [and] different lighting effects and they said play. They said just go ahead and play.”

Ward talked about the process going into creating the visuals, which includes multiple cameras shooting him playing drums, and capturing various angles of his playing. What made the images special was the outcome from the reactions of what he was playing that made each art piece unique, and his frame of mind at the time of creating each piece.

“There was no soundtrack. I didn’t play to any music or anything. I played for about an hour and 40 minutes of rudiments, and they captured all of that. After about ten minutes of playing, they kept changing the fix out. I realized that they kept changing the fix out and the brushes, they had different colors attached to the sticks. So I noticed when I play towards my floor tom toms, in the arcs that I normally play, I noticed the different colors I was producing.”

“Then I played on high hats, there was a different effect from [high hats]. The high hats are more of a notation rather than a circular motion. So when I started getting into this, I started to realize what I could do here. I started to play multiple bass drum notes. I started playing really fast. I was in good shape at the time. I put in a lot of myself into the drums!”

“Also what’s really strange about it [was] when we looked at the end result of the sessions – I often play jazz interludes. I’m playing for an hour and 40 minutes flat. It’s a pretty good level of energy. I needed to take a couple of minutes out so I play jazz interludes and that’s when I was pacing myself getting my breath. Honestly I didn’t know how long the session would last. I had guys stop in and changing cameras. Those guys were working their asses off! I’ll give total credit to them for their work that they did.”

Ward discovered the differences in imagery within what he plays, and each visual distinctly shows up how different each one looks. He explains this plus how he named each art piece after seeing the outcome.

“I kind of put jazz into it. When you look at the pictures you can see what was jazz and what was rock. It is really quite amazing. You can see what was angry and when I would develop and doing triplets or some of the hard, aggressive things. You can see the anger that comes out. It’s more stark, and it looks completely different. To me, when I look at it…oh my god! Is this kid angry or what?”

“The best part about this entire thing for me was after we looked at the pictures that we’ve done after the sessions, Cory and Ravi suggested that I’d title them. That’s another thing for me to do. I love writing and titling it. So I came up with titles for each picture. What I did was I wrote an entire paragraph, two paragraphs, three paragraphs to what those titles meant to me. So what we had was lyrical or verbiage content that was also involved in the actual picture. It didn’t become just a picture or a piece of art. It became more than that. It became an emotion or emotions and it had depth and it had other dimensions to it, other than the dimensions of the cameras and the camera work that they did. It became a lot more than that. It’s involved into a very nice project to talk about.”

He admitted that playing anything resembling music from Black Sabbath or his other works was not what he worked around, and stuck to simpler drumming patterns he plays when he is not playing for any specific artist.

“They were basic rudiments, which I would do if I were practicing. If I were playing with Black Sabbath, a lot of the riffs that I would play through some of the older songs, I was playing some of those things. The basic things that I would play on drums, the things I was inventing. It was actually writing music while I was playing as well and jamming or writing parts as I was going along. There were probably things that I was also practicing from things that I had written with BWB (Bill Ward Band), with my own bands. I think it was a collection of everything that was coming out of me. They’re just grooves and stuff you’re time tested and things that come out,” he said.

He admitted that prior to committing towards doing this, he was familiar with some of the other people who also participated with Scene Four. Ward also discovered the cross section of interested parties who viewed his work, and it transcended music and Black Sabbath fans who followed what he did.

“I knew a couple of the guys. I was a little skeptic. Of course Dave Lombardo, he did his performance after I did mine. We did our first workshop, or our first art exhibit, I think it was in the spring of 2014 in Annapolis in Washington, DC. So we’ve already had one showing. It was a phenomenal show. It was great.”

“What’s great about it is all of the community that shows up to look at the art, and the community a lot of them are a cross section of interested parties for art and a cross section of music lovers, Sabbath fans, Ward fans and whatever it would be or metal fans period. So we had this huge cross section of people and it was very intimate structure. I like to be as vulnerable as I can for everybody so I can be strictly honest.”

“It’s taken off and some other artists that have also done this with Scene Four. I missed Dave’s show. I wanted to go but I didn’t see it. I could only imagine as a drummer I’ve seen him very often. The last time I saw Dave play was three or four weeks ago! I know what he is capable of so I can only imagine his artwork. He’s probably brilliant.”

Lastly, he shared some of the pieces he created and talked about what each piece meant to him. He shared how specific moments in his life at the time factored into how he played each piece and the outcomes even shocked him at times.

“There’s one picture, it’s called ‘Grief’ and it scared the heck out of me. If I had to, ‘Grief’ captures the pain that I was feeling at that time in 2012-2013. I was going through a very painful period of my life. A tremendous loss…there had been some problems with Black Sabbath and I was feeling that. I really loved the band and there were some disagreements and there were some things that didn’t fall into place.”

“It’s quite strange actually because we were back at the workshop…back at the art shop and I was trying some of the pictures and the canvases…I felt something behind my back and I didn’t know what it was. The guys hadn’t told me about ‘Grief.’ They hadn’t told me about this picture. They just stood it up behind me. I could feel its presence in my back. I turned around and looked at it. I took two steps back and went ‘oh my god! What the fuck is that?’ They went ‘you created that Bill…’ I named it immediately and called it ‘Grief.’ That’s so profound. It’s such a profound piece of work, but it capsulizes how really the essence of really where I was most of the time at that point in 2012-2013. I was in a very heartbreaking and enduring place in my life. I was grieving. That capsulizes it very well. I’m actually still afraid of that picture. I haven’t fully embraced it.”

“There are some other ones that I really like. This was during a jazz episode and we have this one thing called ‘Making Flowers From My Heart,’ which I really like. I like solidarity. I can see what I was doing there. There’s a lot of movement on the cymbals, and I was probably doing a lot of crescendo work at that point.”

“There’s another one that I…this was kind of a reminder for myself because as a drummer, I did feel some ostracized at the time when I was making these pictures. So in terms of validating myself, drummers, and drum students, there is a track in doing a jazz interlude I wrote called ‘We Focus Because Of Air.’ That has become a very, very popular picture. That has become a favorite, especially with drummers. I’ve given it to some of my friends in the drum industry. It’s a very powerful, poignant…it’s at the point of a significant historic time in music so to me, it’s very poignant.”

By Rei Nishimoto