People spend their whole lives instinctively coordinating the actions of their arms and legs. Just try patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.
Elliot Fine pulled the string on that human condition and co-wrote an instructional book that revolutionized how drummers performed behind the drum kit.
Fine, a lifelong drummer who spent more than 40 years with the Minnesota Orchestra, died from cancer on May 4. He grew up in north Minneapolis, lived his adult years in Bloomington and died three days shy of his 87th birthday.
Fine, along with Marv Dahlgren and with an inspirational nod to the late jazz drummer Elvin Jones, nearly 50 years ago wrote "4-Way Coordination: A Method Book for the Development of Complete Independence on the Drum Set."
The book became "a means for developing independence of the four limbs, hence four-way coordination," said Milo Fine, Elliot's son and also a drummer since his youth.
"When drumming started out, the hands did most of the drumming," Milo Fine added. Formalizing the concept of "treating all four limbs equally ... that was a breakthrough in terms of drum literature at the time."
In typical modesty, Milo Fine said, Elliot Fine shrugged off what he and Dahlgren did, saying, "We were just the first to put it on paper."
And while this drum coordination was difficult to master, Fine and Dahlgren found a simple way to write the music for it. Four lines were stacked horizontally, one for each limb and accompanied with a code for what to play, Milo Fine said.
