art-parlor
The Art Parlor for August Presents: Kai Owens!
Welcome to the August, 2026 edition of The Art Parlor , brought to you by Friends in Art ! In this episode, our guest is Kai Owens – a gentleman you may remember from our past showcase events! We hear about his path in music as a drummer and learn how he got started, including the mentors who encouraged him and pushed him beyond the boundaries of comfort. As you will see, he is a talented young man headed for even greater heights! Included in this presentation are some music tracks for your listening pleasure. AI-Generated Transcript Jason • 00:00 Opinions expressed on ACB media are those of the respective program contributors and cannot be assumed to serve as endorsements of products or views by friends in art, the American Council of the Blind, their elected officials, or staff. Friends in Art welcomes you to the Art Parlor, where visually impaired artists of all types will discuss their work. Pull up a chair, bring along your beverage of choice, and listen to thoughtful, stimulating conversations with visually impaired artists in all media and from all parts of the world. And now, here's your host, Peter Altschul. Peter • 00:48 Greetings! My name is Peter Altschul. I am the scholarship committee chair of Friends and Art, and this is our most recent edition of Art Parlor. And our guest is a scholarship winner of five years ago, Kai Owens. Hey, Kai. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. I want to spend most of our time talking about how things have changed for you in the past five years. But before we do that, talk a little bit about how you got into drumming and how it changed your life. Kai • 01:19 Yeah, no doubt. So I got into drumming in fifth grade. I was around maybe 10 or 11 years old. And my older brother was a drummer in high school, and he was in the marching band and in the orchestra and all that kind of stuff. So I saw him kind of coming up through that program. And obviously me being the younger brother, I wanted to follow everything he was doing. And in the midst of that, I had just gotten my vision diagnosis about two years before fifth grade. So I was looking for some things that were, you know, non-visual and my parents were looking for some things to put me in and, you know, let me get out some energy and some anxiety. So I got a drum set and I started playing in the middle school band as well in the percussion section. And then before I knew it, I hit high school and I decided to not continue with the school orchestra and everything, but instead joined a school of rock sort of program from my local music store where I was taking lessons. And after a couple years of doing that, I realized, you know, just how much I love performing and how comfortable I was on stage compared to most everyone else I was around. And that kind of led me to realize that, you know, music could be a very viable career path for me. So when I started applying to colleges, I decided that I was going to go for music, and I chose music theory to be particular because at the time I thought I might want to go further into the academia music sort of world. And then in the midst of getting that degree, I realized that I instead actually kind of had always wanted to do performance and just thought academia might be safer. And then I realized that none of them are very safe career options. So if I'm going to go for one of them, I might as well just do what I'm really wanting to do. So I took as many performance based classes and was in a band all through college and just graduated from my undergrad at the University of Georgia this past December and I'll be starting this fall for my Masters in Jazz drums at William Peter • 03:15 Patterson University in New Jersey. And we'll talk a lot about your college experience, but before we do that, I want to talk about how you were when you were applying for a scholarship five years ago. Let me tell you what I remember. I remember you sending these drum tracks that were amazingly complicated. I think there were meter changes and all kinds of cool stuff. What do you remember about your life at that time and as you were preparing for college? Kai • 03:43 Yeah, it was definitely a very different time musically for me than where I'm at now. But I think a lot of it carried over nicely. So I was doing a lot of stuff with progressive metal and math rock and death metal and all these very heavy, very technical genres. And I was really enjoying the just the challenge that that brought in through that, that kind of, in a way helped me get into a lot of these programs because I had a lot of this academic technical knowledge about drumming. And then I got into my program and I showed up to my first week of lessons. Peter • 04:18 And let's stop there. Because I want to talk a little about the scholarship process. So you apply for the scholarship. And I remember calling you, I think essentially talking about your scholarship. And as I remember, you had broken your foot in the hospital and you were in the hospital getting treatment for that. Do you remember that and how that sort of, what do you remember about Kai • 04:39 that whole process? Yeah, that was an interesting time. That was the summer right before college for me and I was on a trip with a bunch of other blind skateboarders, which I was really big into skateboarding at the time. And on day two of this trip, I broke my fibula in my lower right leg, which is obviously a very important limb for playing drum set. That's where you're playing your bass drum. And I had to take several editions for colleges and for this scholarship, I think all of them were recorded while I couldn't use my right leg at all. I was in a cast. So I had luckily had all this practice playing double bass drums. So I just forewent my right foot entirely and played all my auditions with only my left foot switching between the hi-hat and the That's that's good, I suppose, but it's pretty funny looking back at those. And what a time that was trying to, you know, juggle all those difficulties. Peter • 05:41 So I'm a drummer, too, as you know, and folks listening to this podcast know. Talk about sort of the complexities of playing bass drum and hi hat at the same time. Usually the bass drum is at the right foot and the hi hats with your left foot. That's the standard procedure. What was it like having to go back and forth and using your left foot all that with all that energy? Kai • 06:00 Yeah, I didn't find it too bad because when playing, you know, a double pedal on the bass drum, your left foot's kind of juggling those two roles already. So it was just kind of making that juggling a little bit more on the forefront of everything I was doing had to be that juggling. So I tried to just orient grooves and everything that I picked for my auditions kind of around, you know, not needing two of the voices at the same time on the kit. So like, if I needed to play a closed hi-hat, then I couldn't really play my bass drum unless I used my hand or something to close the hi-hat. So I would maybe go to the ride symbol and just let the hi-hats be open while I'm playing the bass drum. And then maybe I'd close the hi-hat for a few notes to get the sound I needed there before I switch back to the bass drum. So it's just kind of a funny one-footed juggling process. Peter • 06:48 As a percussionist, you often have to do those kinds of weird things just in general principle, whether you're playing in jazz or playing in orchestral or wind ensemble stuff, band stuff. That's all kinds of weird things as a percussionist that you don't know other instruments. So we were thrilled to give you the scholarship and you went to college and I interrupted your story. So you went to college, what did they tell you? Kai • 07:12 I went to University of Georgia. I showed up there, I was studying with Professor Timothy Adams, who's a great classical percussionist and was a orchestral timpaniist for years, but he also grew up playing drum set and played professionally in sessions and in jazz bands and everything like that. So I showed up on my first day of lessons and I was the first student he ever took on who was just a drum set student and not doing any sort of classical percussion. And he gave me the album "Workin'" by Miles Davis with the great Philly Joe Jones on drums. And he gave me this, or told me the record to get, And I went home and he said, "Learn this whole record." So I go home that week after my very first lesson. And this was still kind of during COVID. So I think he actually gave me the assignment, maybe over email or I'm not even quite sure how he did it. For a while we were set up on two opposite sides of this huge room with like 50 feet between us while we're playing drums. So he gives me this record and I go home and learn it. And I learned pretty much every song on there, at least the ones that I could pull off at the time. And I come back the next week I play along the record in my lesson. And ever since then, I pretty much haven't looked back and have been doing jazz as my main style ever since then. I had zero exposure to jazz pretty much up until that point. And in that one week, I fell in love with it and have now committed my whole career path and journey and music to it. Peter • 08:44 So let's talk about that. How was it the shift from heavy metal/all the stuff you were playing, pretty intense stuff that's not traditional jazz, whatever you wanted to find it, to playing Miles Davis? What was the shift like for you? Kai • 09:00 It was pretty huge. It actually cracks me up to look at, because I have some videos from those early lessons during COVID that I was submitting videos. And I go back to those every now and again and just see how I was playing and sounding. it cracks me up because you can tell I just it was so new and so foreign to me. But one good thing is that a lot of the, you know, the technique and physical ability that I'd worked up over the years translated, but not not very directly kind of in tangential sort of ways. But from that complexity of metal and everything, I found the complexity in jazz music to be kind of similarly stimulating, but also more free. Because in metal, you know, you're learning these, these particular parts and you're trying to execute them pretty much as close to as you can to being a computer. And in jazz, there's all this complexity. And you're trying to constantly think of how you can change it and improve on it and make things sound different every single time you play a song. So it kind of took all the same challenges and then just made them more fresh and more creative for me, which I just found way more rewarding after some time. And I still love all those past genres I've studied. And I think they did great things for me, but I've definitely connected with jazz in a way that I hadn't previously connected with music before. Peter • 10:24 So you talked about your drum lessons and how that got you started. How did you get connected with your first jazz ensemble or jazz band or whatever it was that you got connected with? Kai • 10:35 Yeah, I started my first year at UGA. I had auditioned for the lower level big band or the program had two jazz ensembles. One was like the main, you know, top big band. One was kind of the lower student group, which was usually less people and a lot more just like beginner levels. And then there's also a smaller combos, a couple of those. So to start, I was in this lower jazz ensemble and I did that for a full year. And I had to audition in similarly while my leg was broken. And there's my professor that I studied with in the jazz department still laughs at those videos every now and again and brings them up to me. 'Cause I auditioned for this jazz band with my huge metal drum set. And I'm playing with only my left foot 'cause my right leg's broken. But he let me in and he thought I had something there. And he could tell that I was interested. And then through that program, There was two professors in charge of that ensemble, a really renowned jazz pianist named James Wideman, who was starting teaching at UGA my very first year. And another pianist who was also hired that same year, Gregory Satterthwaite, who is a great pianist in his own right. And he's a younger guy and he had just finished his doctorate at North Texas for jazz, which is one of the biggest jazz programs in the country. And so they alternated. We met Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and they'd both teach for about 25 minutes, and they'd, you know, each finish two or three songs for our concert at the end of the year. But in that band, a lot of it was just working on learning to sight read and learning to improvise. So it wasn't quite as focused on final products as it was focused on just getting the students up to speed. And after a year of that, I managed to finagle my way into the top level jazz ensemble as a couple other students graduated from there. One was in their undergrad, one was in, I think their masters or maybe even their doctorate. And managed to get my way into that. And that was with our third jazz professor, David DeAngelo, who's a alto saxophonist who used to live in New York City and his friends with so many musicians up there and has a lot of great connections. He toured in the Buddy Rich big band when he was in his early 20s, right? He dropped out of his master's program to go tour with Buddy Rich. So, you know, some really Peter • 13:11 great. I'm sorry. I was gonna, the Buddy Rich band has its moments, but it has its weirdnesses as as well. Sorry, I distracted you and myself too. Oh, good. Let's talk about the whole issue of improvisation and learning your music. You of course are, as I understand, legally blind, right? Yes. So do you use print music at all? I do not. Or a large print music? Not one bit. I didn't think so, 'cause I didn't either when I was doing the work that you were doing. So how did you learn the music? How did you learn the various charts you were playing? How has that developed over the years? Kai • 13:51 Yeah, early on it was more of a struggle. I definitely, it took me a while to understand, what I was trying to do. I hadn't quite put together how form really worked in jazz and I couldn't put together those patterns quite as easily. So I was trying to just memorize these, like they were these, just all one long song. And I was just thinking very linearly about all the hits and all the different figures with the horns, because big band music has just constant notes spattered all over the whole thing that the drummer is trying to match up with the horn sections. And that took me a while. It was just kind of, sometimes there'd be demo recordings of the arrangements where I could kind of listen to those, but inevitably our directors would change the arrangement for our specific band and we'd cut sections or extend things. So it really came down to just playing it enough times in rehearsal where I could just memorize the whole thing. Or sometimes I would, once we sort of had it together or close enough, I would take a voice memo of it so I could practice along with that. And we also had all those big bands had two drummers in each of them. So if I really couldn't figure something out or if we were sight reading something down for the first time, the other drummer might hop on if it's a really weird chart, I'd hear him play it once give myself a fighting chance of knowing what's going to happen. So that's pretty much how I ran things for that first, you know, a couple years really. But towards the end I was in the big band my very last semester as well. I went back to it after a year off to, you know, finish other classes and then I had some time my last semester. Went back into the Jazz Ensemble 1 and I definitely found it much easier than before. After four and a half years or so of working on Jazz, I'd Finally, it could understand and hear how the form worked in jazz. So instead of having to memorize this whole song, I would just remember, "Oh, in this A section, this figure gets repeated each time." And then maybe we lop off this little section of the form before we go back to the top. So I was able to navigate those patterns a lot more easily. And then I just had to realize what was different about it each time it rolled around and not try to memorize it, note for note, what exactly is happening. Annie • 16:16 Hi, this is Danny, I have a question. I'm sorry, Peter, can I bun it? So how does your bandmates respond to you? Is there a comparison between how things worked out like when you first started big band versus like, at the end, your bandmates all like, oh, I wonder how he's gonna do this or anything like that? Did you have any of those kind of attitudes that kind of, you know, were like different than, you know, how did you handle that kind of, if you felt it, you know, that questioning, how did you handle that? Kai • 16:52 I'd say I didn't feel it too much. It was a real small jazz program. I couldn't even tell you the number of students, but very small, and it's only a jazz minor at our school so far. So because of that, I was one of only maybe two or three drummers actually focusing on jazz. And I was the only one who was a music student with the primary instrument of drum set. So while I couldn't read the charts, I usually had more focus on learning jazz drum set just in general. So what I couldn't read as quickly as everyone else, like kind of just made up for in general knowledge about the music. Peter • 17:36 Okay, yeah. Kai • 17:37 And the other students, I mean, especially I got, I got the worst of my playing out of the way in that lower level ensemble. Okay, yeah. Jason • 17:46 Where the professors were, the professors were, Kai • 17:49 you know, obviously throwing me stuff constantly to, you know, fix this, change this. And the whole rest of the band was similarly early on in their journey. So we all just kind of sounded bad together. (laughing) My lack of reading ability was really was not even close to the the biggest deal of things going wrong in that band Guys, I mean that is no, you know, no, hey, but it's just early on that was in you know a band meant for learning Peter • 18:16 Right. Oh, so I want to I want to I want to add a sort of add to Annie's question because you Not only did you play in the big jazz band? You were in a lot of small jazz ensembles talk about that process and as I understand it you sort of led, grew to lead that whole program or if I understand your story. Talk about that. Kai • 18:35 My first experience in like a small jazz group was the UGA's jazz combo, which at the time had quite a few musicians that I would end up playing with over the years, but I was still very much figuring out, you know, how drums are supposed to function in a small jazz ensemble and I was lacking all of the nuance that it required, but it was a great opportunity to start getting to play with other people. After that, that was just one semester for me. Then I had the opportunity to join this band that some other UGA jazz students had put together called Swing Theory. They had been inviting me to sit in at their rehearsals and it's set up as a collective. There's a bunch of people on every instrument and people come as they can, and gigs get doled out based on how often people are showing up and their commitment levels. So I managed to join them along with another drummer. And over a couple months, I was showing up early to every rehearsal to set up drums and always knowing the music that we were supposed to learn. And the people in charge kind of took note and noticed that. So they started putting me on more gigs. They saw how committed I was. So I ended up playing quite a bit with him and then the band leader moved away, he had graduated, put someone else in charge, that musician then, six months later had graduated and he was about to move on to different things. And he had seen h
