Fall 2023 - Salience Network

Quick update - For anyone interested in more frequent knowing what's up with me please follow me on instagram at @kromaindrums or come over and we can have a coffee on the porch and say like "oh yeah man so what are you working on these days" and "oh you know same stuff just tryna keep it going, you got anything cool coming up?" and then we keep going like that for a bit, you know the drill. Finally released a collection of my own music, with my group Salience Network. Whole thing was recorded to tape in two days at Afterlife Studios in Vancouver with engineer John Raham. Jeff Gammon on Bass, John Nicholson on Tenor and Soprano saxophones, Feven Kidane on trumpet. It was released in November 2023 on Tim Reinert's jazz label "The Infidels." You can hear it on streaming services, or here on bandcamp: https://kevinromain.bandcamp.com/album/salience-network

Here's a couple vids of us playing at the disc release:

Also have released new discs in the past couple years with Itamar Erez 4tet and Only A Visitor. Here's some stuff from them:

Hope to see youse around sometime soon!

Fall 2021 / still alive / hope you are too

Quick updates: 1. Recorded new discs w Itamar Erez Trio and Only A Visitor over the summer. You can hear those someday in the future. They sound fantastic and neat. 2. Premiered a suite of music in June with my trio (Jeff Gammon on bass, John Nicholson on tenor saxophone) at Frankie's as part of the Vancouver Intl' Jazz Festival. This music was commissioned by the good people of the Coastal Jazz Society more than a year ago and it was lovely to finally share it. A few of these pieces were recorded at the Chan Centre in July with the truly brilliant engineer Will Howie and you can hear some of those below. I'm hoping to record the entire suite this winter. 3. I opened a secret takeout coffee shop and microroastery in an east vancouver alley in March. Next to music, specialty coffee has been a major obsession of mine for years. This project was a sort of proof-of-concept that DIY is not dead, that poor and working-class people can and should have nice things like really good coffee, and that working-class people don't need venture capital or intergenerational wealth transfer to create fuctional spaces. I believe I've been mildly successful in supporting those assertions, and as music begins to take up more of my time again, I hope to continue running the shop whenever I get a minute. You can find info about that on instagram at @coffeebuscoffeebuscoffeebus or send me a massage or telephone call or whatever. 4. I've scaled back my teaching work to a very significant degree and currently I'm no longer taking on beginner students. I'm happy to pass on contacts for great teachers to anyone looking to get into drums for the first time. Advanced students feel free to get at me and I'm sure we can find some time to get together regularly, semi-regularly or sporadically. 5. Hope everyone is well and very much looking forward to seeing everyone around.

long time

What's been up? 2019 - Spent much of the year working on a theatre performance called Double Happiness: Detour This Way, a multimedia collaboration between Only A Visitor and sound designer/composer/director/musician Nancy Tam. We were able to do about 10 shows of the run in March 2020 before deciding to cancel the last week when the covid situation started to get real. 2020 - Everything got cancelled. Spent a lot of time in the shed. Received some commission work, and a couple grants from Canada Council For The Arts (thanks buds / eternally grateful), one to study composition with the great Itamar Erez (played a bit too, see below) and one to further develop my solo drumset practice (more on that to come in the months ahead). Played some shows to empty rooms (empty on purpose, a novelty). Had a lot of time to think about life. Came to some conclusions. Early 2021 - Participated in the Banff Musicians In Residence "at home/online residency" - originally slated to be actually at the Banff Centre but Alberta shut everything down at the last min. This was a surprisingly great experience and despite the distance and the zoom calls it felt wonderful to remember that musicians everywhere are still doing their work in whatever way they can, and are still excited about it. While a lot of my colleagues have been investigating other avenues, I've never been more certain that when I'm engaged in exploration of musical sound, musical traditions, and musical futures, I'm on the right path. Looking forward!