Ian Harland Keeps Adding to his Repertoire

Ian Harland. Photo by Daniel Luczak.

Some musicians migrate from one style to another as they grow up, or at least older. Many jazz musicians, for instance, start out playing classical or rock in elementary school and then move over to jazz once they’re exposed to it.

Ian Harland just keeps adding to his repertoire.

While he’s probably best known as the drummer (and now bassist) for the rock band The Good Vibes, he’s also quite busy playing jazz on the vibraphones. Not that he gave up the drumming or bass gigs. He simply added jazz to his already packed schedule.

“I love lots of different music. I mostly listen to jazz these days, but I grew up on Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles. More recently I’ve gotten into hip hop. I just made my first hip hop track the other day! It’s a pretty absurd, excessively dirty track. It may be one of the favorite things I’ve ever done. It was made from a bunch of voice memos on my phone.

“I’m not of the mindset that we have to keep all this stuff pure. My favorite music is from the 1950s and ’60s, but I feel Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson and Gary Burton have already put down the best stuff on the vibes, along with Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton, and I do want to put my stuff down, but that’s not the only music I want to make in my life.

“I do plan on putting a record of my own, under my own name, a semi-modern, post-bebop album. That’s on my list of things to do in the next year or so.

“In jazz, I only play vibes anymore. I decided when I was 20 or so that there are so many good cats in town playing drums, and I was getting more work and in better ensembles on vibes. So, I’ve gravitated toward that.

“I still play rock ‘n’ roll drums. I’ve played in the Good Vibes Band for a decade, although the bass player moved to Florida, so we only play a few shows a year now—and still record. We used to play three to four nights a week.”

While the 32-year-old Harland grew up in La Costa and lives in Encinitas, he said his gigs are split pretty evenly between jazz and rock, which can vary quite a bit from week to week.

Harland and Jodie Hill.

“It really oscillates—it feels like sometimes it’s only drum gigs, and then I’ll have five to six vibe gigs in a couple weeks. Sometimes it’s all bass gigs. I now play bass and we got a new drummer in the Good Vibes Band. I play in another band, the Bywater Skank, a New Orleans-Dr. John-style Cajun and zydeco band. Joe Welnick plays piano and sings.”

While a vibraphone is laid out like a piano keyboard, Harland said it might be easier to learn it as someone from a drumming background rather from keyboards.

“I think it’s easier coming from drums, but you have to learn harmony,” he cautioned. Technically, it’s definitely closer to drums. I had already stick chops from drums. I don’t know what it woud be like if I never had played drums. Because speed has never been a problem for me.

“But on drums you don’t have to be that accurate—you have big surfaces to aim for. On vibes, it takes a lot of practice to get accurate. It’s like playing trombone or something.

“I’m still figuring out the four-mallet technique. My right-hand technique is pretty decent, but the left hand still suffers a little bit. You’re supposed to rotate one mallet at a time and rotate the axis, because otherwise you use too much energy, and my left wrist sometimes still gets pretty tired.”

Harland’s journey to vibraphone started in high school, when he was introduced to the oldest of the wooden mallet instruments.

“I technically started playing xylophone in high school. I got a new drum teacher when I was 15, by the name of Morris Palter, and he was getting his Ph.D. at UCSD at the time. I studied with him for a year or two, and he had this old, 1920s xylophone that had really big bars, curved bars, a cool old xylophone. It sounded great and he was a virtuoso at ragtime! He gave me a CD of his music, and I checked it out. I wasn’t really interested, but I thought that was cool. He ended up moving to Anchorage.

“That was my introduction to mallets. He taught me a couple rags and showed me some books. I learned an A-minor Bach violin concerto, and then I learned ‘Yellow After the Rain.’ ‘Log Cabin Blues’ was the rag piece.”

Harland with Charlie Arbelaez at Queen Bee’s.

But trap drums remained the main focus of his studies, with the electric bass a close second.

“From the time I started playing drums, I played bass. My dad plays clarinet, bass, and guitar. My brother started playing guitar the same time I started playing bass, so I learned harmony through him.”

When it came time for high school, Harland said he gravitated toward Canyon Crest Academy, because it featured a semester-based school year, giving students more flexibility in what they studied. Plus, he had a foot in the door there as he had been taking advanced math at Canyon Crest as an eighth grader.

“Having that four by our schedule allowed me to have half my day music. You would basically form bands and at the end of every week we had to perform two songs. Al Padilla was my teacher, and he was definitely an interesting character. He could play anything! He was mostly a metal musician who could also play rock ‘n’ roll. The class he taught was pretty robust. He had a spiral bound book he’d made of guitar theory, including modes and chord shapes. I studied that book and that’s kind of where I learned a lot of music theory.”

During this period, he also began to explore the mallets more extensively. He was able to learn one song on a marimba, which has tuned wooden bars like a xylophone but with a resonator tube hanging below each note to amplify the sound. A vibraphone is similar to a marimba in having resonator tubes beneath each note but features metal bars instead of wood, similar to the glockenspiel. And the vibraphone is an electric instrument, having a motor that spins metal discs inside each resonator tube to give the vibes their distinctive shimmer.

“I learned one piece on marimba that Morris gave me, which was an introduction to four mallets. But I didn’t learn much.

“My parents had gotten me a student xylophone. I played it for that year, and then Morris moved, and I studied with Duncan Moore. I was also playing around on piano, but not taking lessons.”

After graduating Canyon Crest, he attended San Diego State University, where he again began exploring the mallets. When his vibes instructor, Anthony Smith, moved to New York, he sold Harland his vibraphone, which he still plays to this day.

Ian Harland Quintet with Louis Valenzuela, Ed Kornhauser, Mackenzie Leighton, and Tyler Reutel. Video by Sammy DeGuido.

“I just have the one vibraphone, but I found an old beat-up xylophone that had been left outside. Somebody was selling it for $100. I sent it to a restorer in Northern California, and he added some microtonal bars. It’s a 14-note scale. That’s kind of fun.

“I would love to have a marimba; it’s a matter of space.

“I have an upright stick bass, I have a Fender bass, and my girlfriend and I bought an Epiphone look-alike hollow body. I mostly just play the Fender.”

When pressed further on his instrument collection, he also admitted to having three drum sets.

Harland with Ed Kornhauser, Mackenzie Leighton, Matt Hall, and Justin Joyce.

One other skill Harland has picked up is reading music.

“When I started to study music I learned how to read drum notation, so it seems really natural to me. I taught myself how to read piano music in high school. I knew the basics. It was really after grad school that I spent a year and a half teaching myself to read music better. I would read music for an hour and half every day. It was taking me so long to learn stuff on jobs. I got decent at reading. Over the last seven years, I’ve continued reading. Now I feel that I’m pretty decent at reading.”

Having grown up here, and having earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in jazz studies from SDSU, does Harland feel like he needs to move to another city to continue his growth as a musician?

“I do feel like there are gigs year-round here because the weather is so good. I feel like the live music scene pays better here than it does in L.A. San Diego has a more vibrant live scene. It’s not that hard to break into here.”

Harland also offers private lessons, and said he’s been revisiting his early love of math while studing computer programming the last year.

“I’m good at math and I just decided that I could contribute to that field and be productive. I kind of want to pare down my teaching a bit.”

Not that he doesn’t enjoy teaching, but Harland has another responsibility on his plate now, too.

“There was a band at the temple I played in. Temple Solel in Cardiff. I grew up going there. We did services and rehearsed every week. It was all prayer music and we did a Teen Shabbat service once a month. It would just be for the teens; it was a really cool, spiritual experience.

“Now I’m running that program.”