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Photograph by Jeff Kearns
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Melody Maker
The South Bay's premier drummer/ composer/bandleader plays his own tunes
By Steve Enders
Midway through drummer Wally Schnalle's solo, audience members begin looking at each other, as if looking for some sort of answer to a question that was never asked. Then they just shake their heads in amazement and continue to watch, open-mouthed. The completion of the solo is noted with loud applause and hoots from the gallery.
The pace of the Wally Schnalle Quartet's show is fast and the jazz is most often furious and frenetic. Many tunes nearly drift into free-form improvisation, and even the occasional ballad crescendoes loudly as the pace quickens. From the back of the stage, behind the other musicians and his own instrument, Schnalle runs the show. He sets the pace, both musically and emotionally, putting feeling into the music.
In his black jeans and black T-shirt, Schnalle, 42, exudes cool. With tricked out spectacles, shaved head and wide goatee, he looks like he could have just stepped out of City Lights Books after a reading of "Howl." But this is not a retro-hipster stuck in the past. As one of the Bay Area's hottest jazz musicians, Schnalle is helping to bring the South Bay up to speed with the jazz capital of the Left Coast, our way-hip cousin to the north.
The guys who form Schnalle's band have been playing music long enough on their own and together so that they seem to just know what to do and when to do it. But on his throne, Schnalle directs, calling out to his three bandmates what's coming next--is it going to be a standard or an original piece? Fast or slow? Hard or soft?
Schnalle's heroes, including great jazz drummers Max Roach and Elvin Jones, were two of the most successful drummer/composer/bandleaders in history, completing a rather small field. "It's challenging to be a drummer and a leader," Schnalle says. "In college I led and co-led bands, and started to develop as a composer, and got musicians together to play. Drummers are always sidemen and don't get to choose where the music goes, so I had to create the space for myself to do it."
Schnalle realizes that in a music form in which all recordings combined only sell 2 million copies a year, success is going to be limited. Two million copies sold is a flop to many pop groups--and to profit-driven record labels.
But to Schnalle, playing music for a living is worth it.
"I'm just happier doing what I want to do. How many people can do that?" he asks.
As he sheepishly hawks his CDs at intermission during a gig, newfound fans and long-adoring followers approach him and his band as if they were friends from long ago. Schnalle always makes time to chat, and not just to make a sales pitch. The audience appreciates it.
On one of the warmest days of the spring, a green minivan weaves through the back streets of Santa Clara and crosses the border into San Jose. The van has a crumpled sticker on its rear window--what used to say "No Fear" now says "No ear." A D'Amico Drums sticker clings to the window's opposite corner.
Inside, Schnalle rattles on his cell phone while spinning the van around carefully through a crowded intersection full of school kids and onto a side street near the campus of Lincoln High School. The school bell rings. Wally's just in time to teach his drumming class. He just returned from booking a gig at Gordon Biersch, and will have only a few minutes after class to race over to Willow Glen for yet another class. Then, sometime today, he's got to get ready for an upcoming show for the weekend, find out how many CDs he's sold in the past two weeks and spend some time with his wife of 15 years, Karen Kleiner.
Clapping shut his cell phone, Schnalle slams shut the van door and heaves a sigh of relief. His schedule can be daunting.
"Welcome to my life," he says with a grin.
In grade school, Schnalle's music teacher wouldn't let him play drums because the school already had a full percussion section.
He was like any other kid growing up in the golden age of rock & roll--always wanting to make noise and play something loud. Instead, he had a clarinet stuck in his mouth. But from a young age, he was determined to hit skins, and his mother bought him drum lessons while he was also learning clarinet at school. It may have been these two different ways of learning music that made Schnalle who he is today: a powerful drummer who composes all the music he and his band play.
Bone Shaker: Wally Schnalle, educated on the clarinet at his mother's behest, couldn't keep himself from hitting the skins.
Photograph by Jeff Kearns
For a musician who is helping build a local jazz scene, Schnalle is a surprisingly regular guy. A married guy with no kids who lived 10 years in Campbell before moving to Fremont in 1996.
Because of their busy schedules, Schnalle and Kleiner have to struggle to see each other, so they have had to come to an understanding. "I admire what he's able to do, to follow his heart," she says, "but I'm amazed that he's able to do it."
Kleiner puts in an overloaded schedule as well. She works as a clerk at the main post office in Campbell. Sometimes, she says, when her first alarm rings at 4:30 a.m. to go to work Wally's only been home for about an hour or less.
"It's action-packed," Kleiner says. "Sometimes we're too tired to do anything together. Your social life certainly suffers."
Kleiner is also tolerant of her husband's habit of inviting musicians over to record CDs inside the family home. When the band made its most recent disc, That Place, each band member played in a separate room of the house, wires connecting each musician to the mixing board. Players were in two bedrooms, one was in the living room and another in the kitchen.
Schnalle has been living the jazz lifestyle full time since he was 28, when he decided he'd had enough of the 9-to-5 grind. Realizing his heart was in music, he quit his job and enrolled at San Jose State University. That same year, he married Karen.
"I wanted music to be a bigger part of my life," Schnalle says, adding that if he failed, at least he had a fairly good résumé as a machine parts buyer to fall back on.
For the next four years, he played gigs at downtown clubs like Eulipia while going to school and earning a degree in jazz composition. Schnalle immersed himself in the local jazz scene early on, making contacts and playing everywhere with whomever he could play with. Some bands grew out of classes at SJSU with other students.
As he has honed his skills and made a name for himself, Schnalle has resisted the urge to fly east to New York, the capital of the small but passionate U.S. jazz scene. Nevertheless, he's just secured national distribution for That Place. "It'll help, but the distribution doesn't guarantee success either," he says. "The potential for buying M.C. Hammer's house is limited."
Schnalle helps pay the bills by taking on other projects besides playing and teaching. Schnalle runs his own record company, Retlaw Records, which publishes his discs. And he writes for Drum! magazine, interviewing other drummers, transposing drum lines and writing product reviews.
Despite his fiery style, Schnalle doesn't stick out much when his band performs. That job is performed by the screaming melodies and solos of saxophonist Charles McNeal. McNeal--at 35, the youngest member of the group--came to the Bay Area from Denver four years ago in search of bigger and better things musically. He says Wally Schnalle is the best drummer he's ever played with. The quartet is rounded out by Jeff Pitson on keys and Don Fisher on bass.
Andy Doerschuk, editor of Drum! , says Schnalle is "a linchpin of the local jazz scene," listing the number of projects Schnalle helps organize, including the San Jose Jazz Festival. He also raves about his colleague's musical abilities.
"In the jazz idiom, he's got the ability to immediately apply whatever comes to mind," Doerschuk says. "There's no hesitation between the realization of an idea and playing it. He's spontaneous, a great improviser, creative. He's a trained musician and a great composer."
Schnalle's first recording, It Rhymes, consisted of mostly avant-garde, fusion-inspired tracks, with wispy horn sounds and inventive keyboards. The second, Why Do They Call You That?, as well as the newest, That Place, bring the band more into mainstream, bebop-styled jazz. The two latest albums' heavy saxophone influence can't be ignored, either.
And it all comes together, almost every weekend, in the local clubs, with growing audiences coming to see the band.
"The chemistry is really nice," he says of his band. "It's a rare thing and I don't want to lose hold of that. I just want to gain credibility and grow as a musician. If I can do that with some integrity, then I want to go there."
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Campbell, California
