Video games can teach kids a lot of things, and sometimes they can launch young people on the path their life takes as an adult. This is what happened when Zachary Williams discovered the Xbox game Rock Band while he was a student at Randy Smith Middle School.
“I used to play that with my brother all the time as a kid. I would play on the drums and I found it really fun,” Williams recalled. “I realized that the mechanism of playing it was very similar to actual drums. So I was like, why don’t I just try playing the real drums?”
Now a music major at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Williams will give his student recital on percussion Thursday on the Davis Concert Hall stage in the Fine Arts Complex on campus. It’s the culmination of a long fascination with percussion that came partially through heredity.
“My dad was a drummer. He played in the army band,” he said. “So I had an in there already. I asked him to show me some stuff on the drums. They bought me a drum set. And there it is. I took off from there.”
The video game skills, he said, provided the foundation he needed. “I feel like playing the Rock Band game gave me a really good basis. Because it gave me an idea of rhythm and time keeping. You basically play the drums on the pads. So I feel like I had a bit of a head start there and I just listened to music and tried to play along.”
Initially, Williams was inspired by hard rock and metal drummers like Rush percussionist Neil Peart, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and The Rev among others, but by high school he had begun listening to jazz, and his influences expanded to include Max Roach and Tony “Pee Wee” Williams. It was around this time that he discovered the instrument that would come to dominate his playing.
“I explored a lot of music,” he said. “And on YouTube, I found a video of people playing the marimba.” It immediately captured his ears, and when he found that his high school had one, he began teaching himself to play it. “I fell in love with the instrument,” he continued. “Just the beautiful sounds it can make. It wasn’t like anything else in percussion that I had learned before. It opened a world in percussion that I didn’t know was there.”
After high school, Williams took a gap year and held a few odd jobs, including one as a janitor at UAF. That’s where he met Sean Dowgray, the percussion instructor in the Music Department. “I asked him if I could take lessons because I played music in high school and I wanted to keep playing music, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with that,” he recalled. “He told me about the music program and convinced me to look into getting a degree.”
Williams enrolled, and began classes in the fall of 2023. “I just kind of delved completely into music, learning as much as I could,” he explained. And at the Music Department, he found in Dowgray the person who could help bring his nascent, self-taught skills to a professional level. “The way he teaches resonates with me, and I’m able to learn a lot from him,” Williams said of Dowgray, whose skills as an instructor he frequently cites. “He’s taken my playing to the next level.”
This talent will be onstage Thursday night when he performs his recital, titled “In the Sky.” It will include four pieces, beginning with “Voyager” by Richard McCandless. The work celebrates the Voyager I spacecraft that was launched in 1977. “It’s going to be for a bunch of different drums,” Williams said, adding, “it will have a recording that’s playing through the speakers that I’m playing along with.”
Next will come “Boiling Moon” the premier of a piece Williams commissioned his fellow music student Grahm Jones to write. “That’s about the moon of Jupiter called Io. The moon is very volcanic and it’s a really rough place in the solar system. So he wrote the piece inspired by that.”
Next he’ll be playing two marimba solos, he said. One will be Robert Oetomo’s arrangement of “Over the Rainbow,” and the other will be “Northern Lights” by Eric Ewazen. “This piece has been the thing that inspired my whole recital. It’s about 13 minutes long and it’s the hardest piece of music I’ve had to play. It’s really technically demanding on the instrument as well as musically. I spent about the last year or so working on it and learning it and I’m really excited to be able to play it.”
“Northern Lights” was the first piece he chose for the recital, and he decided to build his performance around it. “I knew from the start that for my recital I didn’t want to just pick and choose random pieces to throw in there. I wanted there to be some kind of theme tying everything together.” This led him to choose the sky as his motif. “I’ve always been inspired by the sky and so that’s part of why I chose that.”
Beyond drums, Williams is a hiker and avid traveler who has visited England, France, Italy, Canada, and elsewhere. “I love learning about different places and cultures,” he said, adding, “My girlfriend is going to be studying in Japan next year and I’m going to visit her twice.”
He’s off to Hawaii next year to continue his studies, and has longterm plans of attending medical school, likely to study ophthalmology. Although he loves drumming, he said, “I think the life of a musician is not what I want to live.”
While he’s close to his family, and that’s part of what’s kept him here, Williams said it’s time for him to look beyond the horizon. “I don’t really want to stay in Fairbanks my whole life,” he concluded. “It’s a little cold.”
Zachary Williams will perform his student recital, “In the Sky,” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3, in Davis Concert Hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.Videos of him performing and more can be found on his Instagram page, www.instagram.com/the_gingerummer.
David James is a freelance writer who lives in Fairbanks. He can be emailed at nobugsinak@gmail.com.
