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