Sands.
“I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” begins with a cascading flourish from bass, drums, and guitar, and then is off like a skittering shot, the three instruments spiraling around one another at breakneck, and breathtaking, speed. Then “Faith” sinks into a lazy, easy swing, all sweet, smoky atmosphere. They’re two sides of the same coin, but also part of drummer Ryan Sands’s larger mission: to make music in which the technical accomplishment is apparent, but the emotional content is what really matters — expressions of joy, or wistfulness, that everyone can feel.
The tracks are from Sands’s upcoming album Standing on the Edge of Tomorrow — out April 8 — and their directness makes lots of sense from the New Haven-area musician, for whom music and family are intertwined. Sands started playing drums at the age of 3 or 4, beginning with the first time he laid eyes on a drum kit up close at a cousin’s place. “I remember being a young child and going up to it. Something about the magic and energy I felt off the drums — it felt like it was calling my name,” he said. “Grabbing the sticks, I felt like the most powerful person at the time, like I could conquer anything.”
His parents got him a set of drums and he played for hours in the basement of their home in Orange. (He still has that first set.) His parents “tried to take me off the drums to eat. They had to bring down food to me,” Sands said. The drums provided their own kind of nourishment. “The way they make me feel — it’s a beautiful experience,” he said. “The same thing happens to this day, especially during the pandemic.” The drums “gave me a stronger sense of purpose.… They’re a vessel for creating great memories, certain moods and certain feelings in people.”
Part of that early deep connection was filial; growing up, he and his brother — Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Christian Sands — played together “all the time,” Sands said. “Our version of playing together wasn’t just going out and playing basketball. We’d always be in the house scheming, coming up with new stuff to play together. It’s still like that.” Today Ryan and Christian, as working jazz musicians, play with plenty of other people, but when Christian isn’t there, Ryan can hear, in his head, what Christian might play.
The brothers’ parents “made sure we had a close-knit bond. Our bond outside of music made our music tighter,” Sands said. “Seeing us really want to do it, they said, ‘OK, let’s nurture the gift.’” His father had gone to Educational Center of the Arts as a high-school student, playing vibraphone and saxophone. “My dad would be a professional musician,” Sands said, if his own nuclear family had been able to support him. Now, in Sands’s eyes, his father had the chance to pay it forward. As budding musicians, the Sands brothers had their needs met, from equipment, to lessons, to going out and hearing established musicians play. “The whole nine,” Sands said, with deep gratitude.
Both brothers were shaped early in the jazz programs at Neighborhood Music School and ECA, where Sands attended from 2009 to the fall of 2010, before getting into Manhattan School of Music’s pre-college division. Even as a teenager, Sands had a drive to challenge himself while also remembering where he came from. “If you want more, you got to seek more. Don’t get complacent. If you get complacent, you will be stuck. Then take what you’ve learned out there and bring it back over here.”
After high school came New England Conservatory in Boston, where Sands enrolled for jazz performance. Without his family around, he found himself reaching deeper within himself to find the self-discipline he needed. NEC “reshaped how I looked at self-responsibility and self accountability,” Sands said. “NEC gets you in shape that way,” to be “self-motivated and just go for it.”
He then enrolled in a masters program at Manhattan School of Music; where NEC “gave me the creative palette,” MSM “showed me how to put it all together.… how to play an arc” across an entire song, “a mature way of looking at things, how to really perform on the instrument, tell a story in your playing.” New York itself was a training ground. “There’s 30 – 40 places where you can work and play at,” and “literally almost every club is a listening room. So NYC got you prepared that way. You got to be impactful from the beginning.”
In 2018, while still at the Manhattan School of Music, he played at the Lincoln Center in Shanghai with Christian for three weeks. “Just being around the city, being around the culture, being a jazz musician in China, was incredible,” Sands said. When he graduated the same year, he saw a job opportunity to teach there, applied for it, and got it.
He was in Shanghai for eight months and played a lot, “to my employer’s dismay,” he said with a laugh — 12 to 15 gigs a month, “just playing and traveling around,” to cities including Shenzhen, “the Florida of China,” he said. “The culture over there, jazz music, is beautiful. They play with such heart and the audiences respond. What we went through for jazz music over here, they’re just starting to do over there.”
Sands returned in 2019 deciding what to do next. Then, as a working musician and teacher, he found the pandemic had lessened the loads of both. He made other plans.
“I always wanted to do a record,” he said, and “it was the right time to do a record. Musically I’m in such a great spot right now.” In deciding what kind of record he wanted to make, he thought of a couple gigs he’d played at Yale and at the Buttonwood Tree in Middletown with a guitar trio. “It just felt great. I love the way the guitar feels playing with drums. I felt like I could do so much with a guitar.” He also thought of guitar trios he loved — Julian Lage, Bill Frisell, and John Mayer. “I wanted to pay homage to that, and find my voice there as well.”
He knew already who he wanted to record with. He knew guitarist Max Light and vocalist Katie Martucci from his days at NEC. Alex Claffy, meanwhile, “is one of the hardest working bassists in NYC right now. I came to him hearing him play.” He knew that Claffy would play well with Light. And, of course, he had brother Christian play piano; Christian also produced the album.
Sands saved up money and recorded the album in June 2021 at Big Orange Sheep, a studio in Brooklyn. “It was hot! I am never wearing black denim jeans in June again,” Sands said. The recording was also hot in the musical sense; it came together quickly, as Sands expected it to, and he is utterly pleased with the results.
In his approach to jazz, Sands is hoping to be among those musician connecting the genre to the broadest possible audience. “In the jazz world, we’ve gotten too far away from the people aspect of it,” he said. “We’ve gotten so deeply internalized that we’ve left everybody behind sometimes. I was thinking back to the old tradition of jazz, where it was inclusive of everybody.” But that didn’t mean re-creating an old sound; it meant crafting an accessible, contemporary one.
“I want to make music that everybody can relate to and thoroughly enjoy,” he said. “The emotional aspect of it — I just want to bring people in, and take my time.”
He also looks to jazz musicians past and present who have a similar mission, whether it’s the Marsalis family making themselves jazz ambassadors, Ron Carter working with A Tribe Called Quest in the past, Kamasi Washington working with Kendrick Lamar more recently, or Noname’s jazz-infused approach to hip hop, and Jon Batiste’s time in the spotlight, now. “It’s coming back in the mainstream,” he said. Of jazz musicians, he said, “we should be on Colbert. We should be on SNL. We can push jazz where it needs to be. What can we do to get back in those spaces?”
Part of that is about marketing, he reasoned, but another part is about “being with the people more, and learning from our top genre brothers and sisters. We’re not that different. We can learn and grow together.”
But meanwhile, there are gigs to play and an album to release. “Not many musicians are fully back to work, and here I am able to do that. I’m very fortunate. I’ve treated every gig and practice session with the utmost importance,” Sands said. “I want to be moving forward, thinking forward, about the next thing. That’s what the album means to me.”
Ryan Sands appears at Cafe Nine tonight, March 22, and at the Side Door in Old Lyme as part of the Christian Sands Trio on April 1 and 2. Standing on the Edge of Tomorrow will be released on April 8; preorder and sample it at his Bandcamp page, and check out his drumming in the New York City-based collective Altus.