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

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.