Andrew Drury

Andrew Drury was born in 1964 in Bellevue, Washington and grew up in the Seattle area. He began playing drums at age 12 and began exploring the piano in his home a few years later. At Wesleyan University in the 1980s he studied with Ed Blackwell, Bill Lowe, Bill Barron, and writer Annie Dillard while earning a B.A. in American Studies. He began composing in 1987.

Drury has recorded three CDs as a bandleader. A Momentary Lapse (Innova, 2003) features Eyvind Kang, Briggan Krauss, Chris Speed, Myra Melford, and Mark Dresser. He also recorded Polish Theater Posters (Red Toucan, 1998) and a self-produced disk of multi-track solos and duets, As We Speak (to be released in 2004). A piece from As We Speak will be featured on the compilation disk, Just Drums II (Fever Pitch, 2004).

Drury currently leads two bands: Content Provider (with Brad Shepik, Briggan Krauss, and Adam Lane), and Breathe (with Jenny Scheinman, Matt Moran, Will Holshauser, and Adam Lane). He co-leads Lurie & Drury with Jessica Lurie. In addition he is active as an improviser and side person, and has played with Wadada Leo Smith, Wayne Horvitz, John Tchicai, Glen Moore, Curtis Hasselbring, Wally Shoup, Mike Bisio, Peggy Lee, and Dylan van der Schyff to name a few.

Other projects include Drury’s music for dance, which has been presented at Dance Theater Workshop, Oberlin College, On the Boards (Seattle), and elsewhere. His Earth Solos are an ongoing series of site-specific drum solos (currently numbering 25) performed and photographed in desert, prairie, mountain, and industrial settings in eight states in the western US. Connect! (1992-3) protested the Columbus 500th anniversary by initiating a variety of activities during a ten month period of travel abroad. These included 25 street performances for over 5,000 people in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Since 1989 Drury has led over 100 junk percussion workshops and residencies in schools, museums, Indian reservations, community theaters, prisons, festivals, with people with physical challenges, and in rural villages in Guatemala and Nicaragua. He was "Millennium Project" artist-in-residence with the Oneida Nation for six months in 2000, and was identified that year as "one of America’s 255 most skilled and experienced community artists" by the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation.

Andrew Drury has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Seattle Arts Commission, the Washington State Arts Commission, the Artist’s Trust, The Bossak/Heilbron Foundation, the King County Arts Commission, Very Special Arts Washington, and others.