BBC Young Musician 2022: Percussionist Jordan Ashman
BBC Young Musician 2022
Jordan Ashman (18) is a young percussionist from Cambridge and a first-year student at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. On 9 October 2022, television and radio audiences across the UK rejoiced when he was announced the winner of the BBC Young Musician 2022 competition. The announcement came at the end of an exciting evening of performances by the five winners of the competition’s different instrumental categories (strings, woodwind, brass, percussion and keyboard). The BBC Young Musician competition is the UK’s most important platform for young classical musicians; it has launched careers of stars such as violinist Nicola Benedetti and cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Jordan is only the third percussionist to win the competition: established in 1978, percussion was only added in 1994 to the existing categories.
Beginnings
Jordan started playing the piano in first grade but practicing felt a bit like a chore: “My mom had a friend who happened to teach drums, so I thought, let’s try drums, and that was great fun. I would just come home and play away. My mom might not have liked it so much because it was very loud, but I was having the time of my life.” He enjoyed it so much that he soon realised that this was the instrument for him.
Endless Possibilities
One of the amazing things about percussion is the wide range of instruments available to play. Jordan soon expanded from the drums to a xylophone which he built with his family (xylophones are very expensive to buy). Today, the list of percussion instruments he plays is almost endless, ranging from the vibraphone, xylophone, marimba, drums, timpani, cymbals and tubular bells to the unlimited possibilities of a multi-percussion set-up, where you can include whatever you want: “That’s what I love about percussion: you can play whatever you want, really, literally whatever you want: you just find it in your house – sounds cool, whack it in the set-up and just play it. It’s brilliant. I love that.”
The Question of Noise
Any complaints by the neighbours about his percussion practice? “They can definitely hear it. When I came back home a couple of weeks ago, my neighbour three doors down send me a card to say congratulations. So, I went around to say thank you. They said: we can definitely hear you’ve gone because we can’t hear you anymore – that’s three doors down. But they don’t complain, they are really nice about it. I’ve got loads of sound insulation inside my percussion room which obviously doesn’t do enough but it does something.”
Hearing damage is an occupational hazard, so Jordan also needs to protect his own ears: “This is something that I wasn’t really big on for quite a while, but now just anything you play, especially on percussion, it’s all about ear protection because it’s so bad. My hearing is not very good now, I’m only 18, so now I try to put my ear plugs in whenever I play. It’s weird, it’s always the weird instruments that are louder. Drums, obviously they are loud, but xylophone, wood blocks, they are the top instruments that will really, really damage your hearing because they are so piercing, it’s like a bullet.”
Percussion: Challenges
What is the most challenging aspect of mastering different percussion instruments? “I think it’s different for different people. For me personally, the challenge is getting both my hands completely even. It may sound silly, but if you are just playing semi-quavers, just straight, you want it to sound exactly even, like it’s just one hand playing it, just like a robot. It’s so, so hard to do that and to get them even in time, dynamics and sound production.”
What quality makes a percussionist a good percussionist? “Listening, I think. Especially on drum kit, people go to a band, and everyone wants to look the best they can, and they are playing all this stuff, and they are shredding away, but it just sounds rubbish in context with the band. Especially on percussion, any percussion you play in an ensemble, it needs to be tight, it needs to be on the beat, it needs to really fit into the music. That is something that many drummers get wrong - they just try to show off, but it doesn’t show them as a good drummer: it shows them as someone whose hands can go fast around the kit.”
Cultural Diversity
One of the things Jordan loves most about percussion is the diversity of musical options: “That’s something I’m really interested in. You’ve got so many roots: you’ve got all the Latin tabla roots, all the Japanese, Chinese tabla roots, you’ve got all these different things which over time have just come together. I try to learn about them and to put them into my playing, so whenever there’s a piece with that influence I can really play authentically. I find that really interesting because I think that doesn’t happen as much with other instruments, it is so diverse.”
Percussion Practice
Training to become a musician can be tough on the body. Jordan carefully stretches his hands before playing to avoid injury. Loosening up this way before starting his practice routine also helps the quality of his playing. Given that there are so many different percussion instruments, his practice routine depends on his schedule: “If you did everything every day, you wouldn’t have much time for anything else and you’d probably be absolutely knackered, so it just really depends. But one of the main things I’m trying to do a lot more off is just really, really, boring, slow exercises to get my hands really, really fixed and really, really secure.” He also does scales and arpeggios on the marimba and xylophone every day. There are also different rhythm exercises that work on different muscles in your arms: “But what I start off with every day is just one hand playing simple strokes on a drum and making sure that my hand, that every muscle in my hand, in my arm is doing what they need to be doing. I watch the stick, just making sure it hits the drum and comes back up in a straight line and bounces, that’s just the free fall bounce, that’s not got anything to do with my hand control on the stick. I get myself into the mindset. And then you got all these different rudiments that you do because whatever you play on drums, a lot of it comes down to these rudiments, so I just play through these rudiments to get them really well. It’s really tedious sometimes, but it feels good when you can just do them when they come up in a sigh-reading exercise.”
How to Handle Frustration
It's hard work, and it can be frustrating. Does Jordan ever have moments of doubt? “Yes, everyone gets them. You think to yourself: look, these people are so much better than me, I need to be that good, but I’m not. It happens quite a lot - but I find you always have to take a step back and have a breather, and if someone is better than you, that’s cool: work hard at it and fix it. You’ve always just got to take a step back and look at what you can do to make yourself better.” His family and friends help him get through these tough moments: “I just take a step back and take a breather and just go and have a chat. When I’m here at the conservatoire and I’m having a bit of a rough phase, I go to the café, I have a drink, a toastie or something and I just chat with some people - it makes you feel so much better. I think the key is to just take a break because it’s really hard work.”
Solo Percussion
Even though drums are among the oldest instruments in the world, the history of percussion as a classical solo instrument is fairly recent, and probably started only about fifty years ago. Dame Evelyn Glennie (born 1965) is considered the first musician to maintain a full-time career as a solo percussionist. Glennie has been deaf since the age of twelve but has taught herself to feel the vibrations with different parts of her body. But even many classical music lovers still need to be more exposed to the possibilities of percussion. According to Jordan, many people shy away because a lot of the solo percussion repertoire is very modern, but there are also transcriptions of Baroque pieces, of Mozart. In the end, it all boils down to exposing people more to percussion music: “One of the things I was really trying to show at the BBC is that what percussion can do is really cool.” Jordan also loves some of the lyrical music written for percussion: “I’m also a bit of a sucker for cheesy marimba music. I’m known around here as the cheesy marimba player.” He can’t get enough of Robert Oetomo’s arrangement of “Over the Rainbow”
BBC Young Musician 2022
So, what made Jordan decide to take part in the BBC Young Musician competition? This year was the third time he participated in the biannual competition. He had watched the competition with his parents for many years: “I just thought it was cool that these guys were going out there, and I thought it was brave. And I started to realize: if I’m trying to go into the music industry, these are the people I’m going to grow up with, these are the people I’ll be asking for gigs, or they’ll be asking me for gigs.” In this year’s competition, he already knew a lot of the people and really enjoyed himself. He also wanted to inspire young people about percussion and present percussion to the public. In the initial rounds, he had to perform one tuned and one untuned piece of his choice. For the final, he had a free choice. Jordan chose Jennifer Higdon’s percussion concerto. He really liked that the concerto used so many instruments and that it had an improvised section on drums. His performance brought him the title – and it shone the spotlight on the instruments he loves so much.
Advice for Young Musicians
Jordan has the following advice for those starting out on an instrument: “I really feel you’ve got to find an instrument that you can sit down and practice and feel like you want to do it. Once you found your instrument, you just got to focus on the basics. That will make everything so much quicker and so much easier. It’ll make you stand out against everyone else in the little things. Instead of playing something really stupidly hard and fast, if your technique is perfect, you will get the job. That it something you should really focus on.”