Discovering Drums

How this journey began

As of this month, I have been taking drum lessons for about a year. And it's still a few months from the anniversary of my starting to play live percussion with the band. Only a year...

The decision to start playing was such a small thing. I have four young sons. My older two play the drums (and the piano) and are really good. The second one is something akin to a prodigy actually, scary is the word our teacher uses. As I watched them learning to play, I started noticing exactly how important the drums, the rhythms, have always been to me in my musical tastes. Strong rhythms, strong harmonies - those are what I gravitate towards. And I prefer the exotic. Brazilian beats, for example, do strange and wonderful things to me.

I am the musical parent in this house. I have been singing and performing since preschool days, I play some piano... I knew that if the boys' drum talent had any genetic component, it must be from me...so I started thinking "What if I could... Maybe I could...."

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also profoundly influenced by my rediscovery of the music of Vinx. I saw Vinx live twice when I was in college. Fall of 1990, I believe it was. He was opening for Sting and I vividly remember being entranced by this blue haired man with his rich voice and his evocative drum. Something reminded me...I don't even know what..of how much I loved that music almost 20 years ago. So I went looking. I have no idea what happened to the CDs I had back then, but I found some of his music on iTunes and fell in love all over again.

Vinx plays the djembe. So I liked the djembe. Just one simple drum which can talk and sing so beautifully... Plus there's just something so lovely about the its shape. Silly I suppose, but I just love that drum. So djembe it was to be for me. (in one of those strange coincidences that make life so vastly amusing, turns out my teacher used to play with Vinx. )

So lessons began. Singles. Doubles. Paradiddles. Simple exercises. Simple patterns. Within a few weeks, I used some money for a voice-over gig to buy my own drum. I was tickled with this new hobby and it was fun... I didn't have a hunger for other instruments. And I was convinced that I would not ever be able to play the drum kit. Oh no. Not ME...

Video of Vinx performing It's Too Late

Relax

Fall into the flow
Relax with the groove
Breathe in the music
Let your heart guide the moves
Of your hands as they’re dancing
So rhythmically smooth
And loose
No need to force
or to push
or to pound
Simply play
As the sound and the silence surround
Sweetly surrender and softly slow down
Slow down

Straight to my Heart

My drum teacher gave me the cd Bona Makes You Sweat on Friday. I had no idea who this "Bona" was...but my teacher knows my tastes and he assured me I would love it. So late Friday as I drove the 30 minutes across town to play percussion with the band, I slipped it into the truck's cd player. I was daydreaming and talking to myself (what? that's not normal?) during the first few songs...so although I heard the music and knew I liked it, it had yet to really touch me. But as I neared my exit a song came on that cut right into my chest. Honestly, that's what it felt like. The harmony was so exquisite, I felt diagonal bands across my rib cage of yearning pleasure. I know...sounds kinda goofy, but that's how it felt. And the delicate pastel stripes of a desert sunset seemed to match the music for a sensory moment that was so glorious, I thought I was gonna wreck the truck! I'm telling you...It was GOOD. ;)

The song is an accapella number built loop upon loop, every perfect piece the voice of Richard Bona. Soaring, dipping, diving, popping, laughing... The beauty of it such that I actually found myself choking back tears. Even the laughter of the live audience seemed to be part of the music, part of the joy of the piece.

I fell in love at first hear with the song, and Richard Bona can now count me as a devoted fan. Don't you LOVE it when that happens?

Here is a video of him performing the song Samaouma . It's not the same concert as the cd. But the song sounds almost exactly the same... Never mind watching - just crank it, close your eyes, and soak it in.

What do I have to say?

I'm still reading Neil Peart's Traveling Music... This little sentence gave me pause:

The keystone of any artistic construction is contained in that simple question, what is the intention?

Hmm. I don't normally think of myself as a shallow person...and I don't know that I've ever been described that way. But there are times when I really start to wonder. My drum instructor does these insightful music workshops, and one of the points he always endeavors to hammer home is the idea of "expressing what's inside". That the whole point of gaining skill on your instrument is so you can say what you want to say. But I honestly am left twiddling my neurons going "I have something to say??...... Do I?"

Singing is easy. Singing, you are saying what the lyrics say. And I have never had trouble connecting with the songs and pouring myself out into someone else's carefully chosen words. A few months ago, communication was even easier, when for the first time I sang a solo where *I* had penned the lyrics. Words that truly reflected something from my own heart.... intense.

But drumming? Percussion? When I play...the only thought or emotion I have is simply how very much I LOVE playing. I am not thinking deeper meanings or profound epiphanies. When I'm jamming well enough that I'm not thinking about technique...which is happening more as my skills improve...then I'm really not thinking at all. I'm just lost in the delight and wonder and exquisite sensory overload that is making music. Is that enough of a message? Is that enough intention? To simply want to make the best music I can...because I really, really love it. That's all I've got. I hope it's enough.

And speaking of fire....

I stumbled across this poem by Stephen Spender recently and it is moving me in strange and mysterious ways.

I think continually of those who were truly great
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing, Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song,
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how those names are feted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre....
Grave evening demand for love...

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm One wonders about the line, "born of the sun, they traveled a SHORT while towards the sun". I do wonder about people who truly throw themselves after their passions. It doesn't always seem to be a life-prolonging phenomenon. I think of one of my musical heroes, George Gershwin. He was completely sold out to his musical visions. He died in surgery for a brain tumor at 37...but what an incredible musical legacy.

In Traveling Music, Neil Peart says about his own somewhat "fiery" (my word, not his) pursuits:

In a seldom-visited corner of my mind, I knew I probably couldn't get away with carrying on like that forever, but it still seemed the right way to live- as if every day were my last, though hoping desperately that it might not be. [...] The only consolation was that I could only die of one thing, and there was no knowing what that would be, or when it would strike. Earthquake, aneurysm, plane crash, ansy of the dark multitude of cancers - who knew?

Carrie sometimes type-casts me as a "risk-taker", even a "daredevil", talking of the way I drive, motorcycle, and live, and I guess it's true. How do I equate being "intelligent" with being moderately (I say) self-destructive?

Thrills? Yes. Sensuality? Yes. Sheer cantankerousness? Yes.

I have lived my life to this point with extreme caution. One reason I did not pursue music as a major and as a career was because I had myself convinced that "I'm not the starving artist type". That I couldn't handle the risks. And those with influence over me enthusiastically voiced that position as well. You can't handle the emotions. You can't handle the rejection. You can't handle the RISK. Looking back, how desperately I wish that the path had been to teach me to handle the dangers, instead of pushing me to avoid them. But still...if I had been more courageous I would have defied everyone, including my fearful self.

But I am no trembling child now. And I am TIRED of being ruled by fear. And the idea of yielding to thrills, sensuality, and even sheer cantankerousness is tempting indeed. But ohhhhhh the stakes are so much higher now... for we all know what can happen if you play with fire.