Bang the Drum!

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Our latest VIFF Live presentation combines a jazz set led by drummer Kevin Romain and one of the most notorious music docs ever made, Jay Bulger’s bruising encounter with the legendary Ginger Baker, aka “the world’s greatest drummer”.

A true virtuoso, Baker was famous for his stint with Eric Clapton in Cream, but he saw himself as the heir to Max Roach, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones, and later recorded several jazz albums. Neither success nor failure brought him any peace however. Self-destructive and seething with rage, Ginger was never easy to be around, as Rolling Stone journalist and filmmaker Bulger found out to his cost…

Kevin Romain is a drummer, improviser, composer, educator, bandleader and curator based in East Vancouver. Since the early 2000s he has performed regularly across North America as well as Europe, West Africa, China and Japan. He studied jazz and contemporary music at Vancouver Community College and has studied the drums with luminaries such as Tomas Fujiwara, Marcus Gilmore, Jeff Ballard, Mark Guiliana, Dan Weiss, Bernie Arai and Dylan van der Schyff.

Romain’s current focus as a bandleader and composer is his post-bop quartet Salience Network. The debut full length record from this group was released in 2023 on The Infidels Jazz record label. Over the past decade Romain has performed extensively as a soloist on the drum
set. 2025 sees the release of his first solo record Autopoietic 1, a collection of improvisations rooted in his highly personal polyrhythmic vocabulary.

For this performance, Romain will be joined by longtime collaborators Cole Schmidt (guitar) and Olive Shakur (bass), playing repertoire from the Ginger Baker Trio, which saw the iconic drummer team up with jazz legends Bill Frisell and Charlie Haden in the mid 1990s.

Insanely enjoyable.

Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

Ginger Baker is, and was, a train wreck. Yet this film, like Baker’s onstage playing, is always riveting, and something you can’t look away from.

Charles Cross, Seattle Times

If Clapton was God, guess who was the devil?

Kyle Smith, New York Post

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