Drummer’s Review

In February 2023, following the sad passing of veteran drummer Alan White, progressive rock legends Yes confirmed that drummer Jay Schellen would be joining the band as a permanent member.

Jay Schellen is, in many ways, the perfect musician to fill the huge gap left in the Yes lineup by White’s sad absence. He has worked with fellow Yes musicians Billy Sherwood since the mid-1990’s, and Geoff Downes since the early 2000’s.

Schellen joined Yes for a live tour in 2016, helping to share the drums with Alan White who was recovering from back surgery, and continued in that role for some years. Following White’s death, Schellen becomes only the third permanent drummer in Yes since their formation well over fifty years ago. Drummers Review’s Andy Hughes chatted to Jay at his home in California.

Congratulations Jay, on your appointment as a full-time member of Yes, but of course, that is tinged with the sadness of the loss of Alan White.

Thank you, Andy. It is a bittersweet experience. Yes is a band I have loved since I was a teenager, and I have enjoyed every minute of my time playing alongside Alan. I will always remember the laughs and the fun we had together, and how much I learned from Alan as a musician. The last tour was so much a celebration of Alan, and everyone felt it, the band and the audience. There was a reverence and admiration in the room when we played, it was so very special.

And now Mirror To The Sky is released, album number twenty-three for Yes. How was the experience of recording the album?

It was fantastic. The music coming at me during the writing sessions was inspirational, mind-blowing in fact. It was different from The Quest album, where I played percussion, and of course we were working on this album while Alan was still with us. Although it wasn’t possible for him to contribute in terms of playing, we kept in touch very regularly.

Alan taught me so much in terms of my approach to the drum parts for this record. The plan was always for Yes to take the album out on tour, with Alan and I together again, as we had done previously. Of course, sadly that was not to happen.

I think, like a lot of drummers, Alan’s contribution to the music of Yes has not always been understood and appreciated as it should.

I very clearly remember how Alan used to put his tom parts down on songs. He had a wonderfully bouncy feel to his tom playing, and he used them like a symphonic instrument, the way he rolled around them. His drumming was such a vital part of the way Yes sounded. I remember Trevor Horn telling me that the way Alan placed his snare sound in a Yes song, was a pivotal part of how the finished song would sound.

Tommy Evans from Badfinger told me way back, that the perfect way to play drums was to find the sweet spot between the kick drum and the snare, and guide the song into it, and Alan was an absolute master of that. I have learned from Alan to take my ego out of what I am doing, lean in and listen to what the other guys are doing, and follow them along the path.

You recorded this album remotely, putting your parts down in your home studio. That seems to be an increasingly popular way for bands to work now.

I think it is, the pandemic saw everyone isolated, and of course the technology means that we don’t need to be physically together in a studio to be able to record as a band. Obviously with this album I was getting all the musical information because I was putting down all the drum parts for the songs. I am pretty comfortable working remotely; I record tracks for various producers and music projects from all over the world. The only thing I had to do differently, was stop thinking to myself, this is a Yes album! I am recording with Yes! And just let myself relax and feel the parts naturally, as I recorded them.

My longtime rhythm partner (Yes bassist) Billy Sherwood is currently splitting his time between London and California, and he was in town, so he would come and engineer for me, and he did it in a clever way. He’d give me a track through my headphones and tell me to warm up and he would go off and make some coffee. So, I’d warm up and run through a couple of times, and then he’d come back and tell me he’d been listening, and the recorders were running, was I ready for the next one! It was a great way to work. We used to get the tracks pretty much finished, but we would always leave a little bit of space, just in case we wanted to add a little extra when the rest of the guys put their parts down, and we could hear the final versions.

When I was researching for our conversation, I watched a piece of you playing on YouTube, and you had your skins tuned really tight, the toms were pinging. Is that how you like to tune, everything pretty stretched?

Was I playing a red kit? Yeah, that was my tribute to my good friend (Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue drummer) Randy Castillo. We grew up together in New Mexico, and had a lot in common. That was a DW set that was put together for him, and I was asked to play it for a tribute when he passed. That has toms tuned higher than I would play, and I have more of them on my kit.

I learned to tune toms from Keith Olsen the producer. When I first moved to California, when I was twenty, I was working on a project with (original Yes keyboard player) Tony Kaye, and we were working next door to Keith’s studio. I went in for a chat, and we got talking about the tom sound he had got on Santana’s Marathon album, I love that tom sound on the record. He showed me how to start with the bottom heads. He liked Diplomats, very thin heads, and he taught me to tune up to the pitch, like guitarists do.

Like a lot of drummers who are moving into working with previously recorded drum parts, how are you finding working with Alan’s recordings?

Well, I have to say I’m not finding it too much of a problem. Mainly because I have been a huge Yes fan since I first started playing drums, and I played along with all their albums. That’s including the Bill Bruford albums, I love his playing as well. He always sounded like he had something completely new, and was searching for a place in the music to put it.

When Alan first called me to support him on tour, it was for the tour covering the material from the Tales From Topographic Oceans, and Drama albums. I knew I would be okay with Tales, I’d been playing along to it since I was thirteen, but I equally knew I would have to work really really hard to get the parts down for the Drama sections of the show. I managed to get there, but it wasn’t easy!

One of the trickiest songs I have had to learn for playing on stage is The Gates Of Delerium because it has really complex time structures, even by Yes’s standards. There are parts where everyone is playing counter-time signatures to everyone else, and as the drummer, it’s very hard for me to find my own signature, and fit it in with everyone else playing.

Photo by Gottlieb Bros

Do you find you want to do what a lot of incoming drummers do, putting your own stamp, your own identity on existing drum parts?

No, because it is about playing to serve the music, and not about putting myself into it. I know that if I follow what is happening, enough of my identity will surface without me having to work to put it in there. We have spontaneous moments on stage where someone will just take off on something, and everyone else will carry on along as well. Sometimes, that can be me. I used to do it when Alan was sitting with me, and then I’d look over and he would just push his hat down a little further and smile, and then backstage afterwards, he’d tell me I’d found something ‘special’ which I always loved to hear.

So, is the next project the delayed Relayer tour?

No, sadly not. The pandemic took the wind out of our sails with that. We were two weeks away from full production rehearsals and we were really looking forward to it. Since then, we’ve tried to get it going two more times, and been stymied by things like insurance companies writing caveats in to contracts that are not reachable for us. We are looking forward to the Classic Tales Of Yes tour which has UK dates in May next year. It’s pretty much the same set of venues, just a different set of songs for us to perform.

When you do come to take the Mirror To The Sky album out on tour, what’s going to be the trickiest track to play live for you?

I think it will be the title track, if we play that song in the set. Obviously as we are talking, we are nowhere near deciding which songs are going to make the live set, but if that’s in there, it will be a challenge because it comes out of a moody section into something more energetic, and it has lots of atmospheric ebbs and flows in it.

I am really looking forward to Cut From The Stars, and again, it’s if it makes the set list. We have got some really serious pieces that we want to take out on tour with us, and I can’t go into any details now, but we do have some very big plans for our future live shows, and the fans will be really excited when the news is out there.

Is another album in preparation? Yes usually have the next project in the works when the current one is going out to the shops.

I think Yes is a band that is in perpetual motion in terms of its creativity. All the band members are really inspired by our latest album, and that is pushing people into looking at new ideas, and sending them around the band members to see what develops. It’s a wonderful continual process.

How far ahead are you planning?

Well, we have the next twelve months entirely planned and ready to go. We are looking positively at the twelve months after that, and there are tentative discussions about the year after that as well. We have some significant anniversaries coming up that we want to celebrate with our fans. The Relayer tour may still happen, we haven’t dropped the idea on that. There is just so much to work with, so much optimism, so much excitement. There really is no end in sight.

ANDY HUGHES

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