North Korea

Well, since I'm out of things to say about drumming, I thought I might instead talk about North Korea. I've been listening to all this bluster and hub-bub about saber rattling and nukes, and even China and Russia is getting ticked off. So I got to thinking about it all--and thinking about what I really thought about North Korea. I realized I didn't really know what I thought about it, other than it seems like a weird place, and it likes to play really threatening games, and admittedly I'm glad the US does not share a border with. So I decided I'd try and figure out what its culture is like. I started here:

http://www.blogjam.com/north-korea/

This one is really funny. It's a travelogue by some western dude who went on a tour of North Korea with a group of other Americans. Americans had not been allowed access since the end of the Korean War, but they opened it up for this special, guided tour. Anyway, it's a really, really entertaining read, and enlightening as well. It tells the tale of what North Korea would want an American to see, and the American, Fraser I believe his name is, is quite aware of this, and has a good time with it.

Then I started poking around some more, and oh my God, I'll say it, because I'm a loud obnoxious American, and I can: Kim Jong Il is fucking wacko--the poster boy for SOCIOPATH!

Then I ended up here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4353274.stm

Which eventually lead to here:

http://www.myspace.com/mindgasms

Which ultimately made me want to go back to the funny guy again and go play around in Pyongyang.

The world is fixated on nukes, and threats from Kimmy's regime. He wants to keep it that way. It distracts from his experiments on humans, his concentration camps, the endless parade of kidnappings and propoganda that keeps his starving population docile. He has brought Huxley's vision of Brave New World to the earth. It is right there. And millions of people, Korean people, are suffering beyond belief, while he spends food aid from the UN on cars, and lavish meals.

What a brilliant little pickle this asshole has put the whole world in. He's not stupid. He's quite brilliant, and quite crazy, which means he's quite dangerous. Russia and China are pissed at him for blowing up another nuke, and they are traditional allies. He has managed to position South Korea to take sides with the US by scaring the bejeezus out of them with blatant threats of massive violence (which he likely could enact, because he could care less about his own people also being blown to smithereens), and add them to the evil, imperialist, empire list (Which hell if I know, maybe the US is). Russia and China won't bring down his regime because then they would be flooded with millions of starving, totally confused Koreans. He has threatened violence towards South Korea if the US searches any North Korean ships. If the US backs down from searching those ships for more weapons and materials to make bigger and better bombs, then Kim-Suck-Dill can once again, his fattened belly adorned in some expensive suit, go onto his government run television station(the only available), and with a broad smile, inform his people he has once again kept them safe from the imperialist aggression of the US. And if he kicks the bucket (which hell, maybe he already has), then his successor, the next Kim-Dong-Fill can easily slide right into the role of supreme asshole.

Man, that adds up to one tight little strategy. Guess if you think you're God, and that you have the right to destroy the lives of millions of otherwise decent people, then hey, go for it, bucko! There's a very special place in hell reserved for you.

So what would you do? If you're the US, one thing you could do is tell China and Russia it's their problem. Handle it. Sorry Kim, not paying attention to you this time. The threat of a nuke from this guy is appallingly real. But it wouldn't hit the US. Not yet anyway. It would hit Japan, South Korea, China perhaps, maybe Russia. So let those countries search the ships, send in the tanks, and rattle their own sabers back.

Or, you go ahead and search those ships, and see if jag-off makes good on his threat of Supreme violence from the Supreme leader. And if he does...well, guess it's time to double recruitment efforts on Native American reservations.

Ain't this just a shiny, wonderful world?

No wonder I beat on drums. It's either that, or beat on the wall.

Holy crap, there are cobwebs growing on this blog. Oops. I never made it to Africa. There was a military coup two days before I was slated to leave. I should have gone, I suppose, but there were other omens as well that caused me to reconsider. I'll not get into those. Suffice it to say, I am well, and there are other moments on the horizon. I am in the midst of a difficult semester, and I have just purchased a home with a basement that is steadily becoming the Drum Dungeon. My time has been filled with concerns that do not make for good blogging time. But there is still much to say. I am still here, and I will soon be back in action. Stay tuned.

Soon

A post will be coming soon, likely not the one you expect, as soon as I find an opening in the midst of my current grad school bonanza. I have this book I'm writing, and it's hitting a point where it's about all I can think about. This is a good thing. It's like stoking wet tinder for a few years, carefully, gently, and then suddenly the thing starts to take. I also have to take some time to formulate these posts, waiting for a moment of clarity before I commit them to writing. So do check in. I'll get it up, hopefully, in the coming days. Hell, you never know, could be tonight. The clarity is almost there. Just like music, writing is a process. There's no end in sight, and sometimes it takes a while to really understand what it is you want to say, just like it takes a long time, and a lot of tedium, to get a particular technique to sing. That's one of the beauties of writing. You can actually think before you speak, and revise, and edit, before what comes out of your mouth assaults, or comforts the listener. The consequences of the utterance are usually unexpected, but hopefully, it's something you truly mean.

DDG

Chik Chik Chik

The sound made when the roller coaster pulls onto the first hill, and the chain connects. I'm heading to Guinea in less than two weeks. I've been pumped full of viruses, am on my way to get a mosquito net, and have no idea what is about to happen. What I hear is that I will spend a few hours every day getting beat up on by Famoudou Konate's son, then will rehearse for another few hours every night leading up to some sort of performance on January 6 that will result in the ultimate dumb drum guy moment to date...er...maybe...you never know. Either way, the coaster is going up, and I'm on it, and at this point, I can't get off. I'm excited, apprehensive, and look forward to DDG posts following this strange journey to the source. And now, by god, when people ask ole DDG, "have you been to Africa?' I no longer have to answer "no." Which is followed by the standard, "oh." Yep, sorry, DDG here. I know a lot of shit, but I get it, man. Now, I'll be able to say, "yep." And then the inquisitor will no doubt look at me with great awe, amazement, searching me as some sort of super hero entitiy...and then, by god! We'll take over the world! We can do it! Mad drummers unite! Now is our time! Yeah, fine, I'm full of shit. The naysayers will never quite know where rhythm comes from, but maybe, just maybe, I'll get some sort of elsuive glimpse. That is if I can fend off the bugs smacking me in the face as this mad rush soon takes hold, and I tumble terrified down the hill. I'll let you know how it goes. Wish me luck. Happy freaking new year, folks! May there be rhythm to your life, and the right sounds inside your ears...

Drum Line

Worth a look:

Drum Line

AGGHHH!!!

Case in point. Check out this website: Dumb Drum

Note the slug line at the top: "The Dumb are mostly intrigued by The Drum..."

Will there ever be justice?

November Surprise

I refuse to allow an entire month to go by without putting something up here, particularly when there is plenty going on. Maybe it's that "plenty" that leads me to a place where I begin to feel mute. I'm out of the Celtic band. That's a good thing. That was turning into a real whack job, with more drama than even I might want to handle, and as a frequent leader of musical groups, I pride myself on having a fairly thick skin in that regards. I also pride myself on being blunt with people. When they get used to that, it builds trust. They know I might get a little irritable, but at least they know where I stand. I'll give you my reading on what happened.

I should know better. It's happened numerous times before--I get involved with a solo guitarist. I mean, I don't want to generalize; this could very easily just be my dumb luck, but every single act I've ever gotten into, that was led by someone who is primarily a solo guitarist, has turned out either too weird to worry about, or just plain bad, or both. This time was no exception. My take on it is they get it somewhere in their heads that they want percussion for what they are doing, and they want it because they want a new sound. The impulse is right. But then the ole Dumb Drum Guy phenomenon takes over.

I'll reiterate why I call myself the Dumb Drum Guy. People often ask why I do that. They don't get it. They say I'm obviously smart. They say that clearly I have talent, and skill, and drive to play hand drums. They even offer me alternative names, one of my favorite coming from an elderly couple who suggested I call myself, "The Eclectic Drum Guy." I've considered it...but...nah...I'll stick with my guns here. I call myself DDG in much the same way that Dave Chappelle runs his comedy. By stating what might be obvious to people, it's my hope they might see what is not obvious. Let me rephrase that. By giving myself the label, branding myself with what, in my experience, has been American culture's general understanding of hand drumming, it's my hope that some might be able to see that there is truth in that label, that yes, what I do is, despite what anyone will argue, often shoved to the side. Which yes, I think sucks. I'd love to see hand drummers take over the world. Fuck it. Why not? That's my ultimate mission. Not namby-pamby drum circleites, although they can certainly have at it, but people who obsess over getting rhythms right and paying homage to the depth and breadth of the craft, its traditions, and its possibilities. Chapelle said at the beginning of his enormously successful career on Chapelle's show that he would quit when people started laughing for the wrong reasons, that is when they started laughing at the stereotypes he was attempting to dissect, instead of laughing at how stupid those stereotypes actually were. And hats off to Chappelle. He made good on his word.

So these solo guitarist's impulse is correct. Yes. A good percussionist can entirely send your music to a new level, to a place that no one will have ever heard, to something unique and innovative. But the way they have gone about it is all wrong. They'll say they get it, that they know hand drums are truly musical, but they say one thing, and do the other: revert to seeing the DDG. I don't think they mean to do it, but the DDG goggles are there.

I'm thinking of this one cat that was gunning for me to join his band, that I'd "make a great addition." And at the first rehearsal I go to, dude, completely ignoring the fact I had two vintage 1977 Gon Bops sitting there, hands me a green LP jam block, says "This is for Latin" then hands me a washboard, says, "This is for bluegrass" then hands me tamborine, "This is for funk...any questions?" I remember standing there, holding his trinkets, and seeing my Gon Bops sort of slump. I could feel them wanting to retreat into the corner and I felt like I'd just walked into a classroom in my underwear.

Or the dude that wanted to start playing "Cuban music." And I show up, and it's all this New Orleans Jambalaya stuff, with none other than Gaunatanamera thrown in for a little Cuban spice I guess. And I'm thinking, well, all right, I'll see what I can do. And we end up at a gig at this ritzy ass hotel and we're playing this really slow, swung, Oldtime thing, and out of nowhere, dude calls out "Drum Solooo!" And stops playing, and there I am, playing a Tumbao rhythm at about 1 quarter of its usual speed. Uggh. Standing in my underwear in a ritzy hotel.

Or the dude that was looking for someone to emulate a drum set on a djembe. He has a ton of talent, this guy, and I saw his ad on Craigslist. He comes over, and asks me if I ever wrote music, and I said, do percussion arrangements count (some of which are original, all of which have their own complexities and intricate sets of intentions and so on)? And with something verging on a sneer, he said, plainly, glibly, quickly, "No." That's a whole other tangent I'm not going to get into right now: What is literacy of music? Yeesh. What matters is dude's sneer. I was proud of myself with this guy. After plenty of times feeling naked in public, I told the guy, "You know, this is really good music. If I had to play it though, like this, I'd go insane." Ah, the bluntness.

So when Celtic dude approached me, red flags went up. But I didn't listen to them. I figured I'd give it one more go. And it lasted about a year, which in some ways, I guess, is good, but in others not so, because I had to shut down some other creeping opportunities to do it. Oh well, water under the bridge.

Here's what happens, they get it in their head they want percussion, but then it's like they try to play your instrument for you. Like dude who handed me the trinkets. Here, do this, they say, without really having a clue what it is they're asking for, or what the real possibilities are, and because they have the DDG goggles on (and of course they'd never admit to this), they never really bother to ask. That's my reading. There were other problems as well. This dude had the peculiar tendency to quit on the band by sending out wonderfully dramatic, at times verging on sentimental, emails. Face to face, dude is mellow man. Get his fingers tacking away on a keyboard and look out. He did this, I bleieve three times in the course of my tenure with the band. The last time was so utterly insulting, that me and the other band members had a meeting, decided he was an utter freak, more interested in a personality dictatorship than collaborative music, and since we had several gigs coming up (which we thought were high profile, but turned out to be, meh...), we decided to put into play "Operation Sycophant." We would kiss his ass, stroke his bruised ego (what set this particular tantrum off was the fact that the rest of the band wanted to play something faster, and he couldn't do it), and when we were through the gigs, we'd fire his dumb ass.

Of course, that's not how it went. In the end, it came down to the DDG, which is no surprise. He made the assertion that my groove was "not deep enough." Of course he always told me to play with the melodies, and there is a big difference between playing a groove, and following a melody, something he might have known, had he asked. Of course he also frequently said we would be "the next Rusted Root." That's all well and good, but Rusted Root also toiled for five years before getting something right enough to penetrate the mainstream. Patience, patience. Music is tedium and full of failure. That's the name of the game. This dude had also never been in a band before. He once sent out an angry email telling us that he "simply [would] not tolerate being told what to do by those with less experience." Which I thought was kind of funny, considering he hadn't ever been in a band before, and he really had zero experience with percussion, but oh well, what are you going to do? You can't tell someone this who has made it abundantly clear, and even stated it to the band, that their input is not valid, because we just "Can't understand the nuance and subtlety of the music." I could go on and on here. I'll leave it with one more example, which I think is my favorite. After somehow misinterpreting my absurdist humor in a rehearsal, he genuinely believed I'd show up to a gig in a sumo thong and a pink feathered hat, so he informed me, via email of course, and two hours before a gig, something along the lines that he has a very important reputation, and because of that, the town "has very high expectations for this band." Which I found funny, and a little sad, considering our real fan base, the ones who followed us everywhere, were three middle aged women who were his guitar students, and one older guy who he got in some sort of argument with on a drunken night, and now refuses to speak to. Of course, dude is right in all matters small and great, so who's to argue?

Anyway, that's enough. You can see this has left a bit of battery acid in the ole gullet. But what are you going to do? The lesson here is simple. Dammit DDG! When the red flags go up...freaking listen! Don't be so dumb.

There are also some other things going on right now that are quite good. I'll get to those in a later post. I'll just let this one flap in the breeze for a while.

Authority and Who's Got It

It happened the other day in a class I am taking on pedagogy. Pedagogy is a fancy word for teaching method, and if you say it too much, it begins to stick to the roof of your mouth like I imagine cooked silly putty might. In this class we are required to write on an online discussion board about whatever reading we're looking at. This particular week we had been reading Writing/Teaching: Essays Toward a Rhetoric of Pedagogy (more silly putty in the mouth), by Paul Kameen. Paul Kameen, along with Dave Bartholomae, enjoy (or perhaps suffer) something of a celebrity status in the field of composition studies. They have made some significant influences on the ways in which composition studies are taught. One area that has come under question, is that of authority in the classroom, who has it, who needs, and what happens if it shifts from one place to another.

I swear, this has something fundamental to do with hand drum culture. Probably some of you think I could connect Brainy Smurf to hand drum culture (and you'd likely be right), but bear with me.

Kameen's book, dare I say it, despite its title, is actually a nice read. At times it is even moving. He talks about his initial days as a college student in the sixties when what is called the poststructuralist movement was starting to take hold, and how exciting that was for him. Postructuralism began, among other things, a fundamental shift in authority. The old so-called "structures" were being questioned. Civil Rights, women's rights, gay rights, the rights of the student in the academy to learn what they saw as worthwhile were all called into question and placed in opposition with the dominant culture. Among many other things, this gradually led to what is called, in wonderfully self-important language, "the canon wars", where so-called minority writers were beginning to usurp the old, dead white guys of traditional Western education.

This is, of course, a simplification of a movement that has acquired tens of billions of pages written about it. Anyway, I'm not here to discuss the moral implications of this either way, liberal, conservative, Martian, or whatever. There is something more important. It's a given that this shift happened, and there is a great deal of deliberation and talk about authority in the classroom, and that maybe, just maybe, the student should have it. Or should they? And so on and so on, with no end in sight. Kameen says this, "If a big part of our work in this venue is to produce colleagues--rather than, say, disciples--then our own authority needs to be attenuated in order for student authority to develop" (130), And this, "The discussion made me think again about the ways in which the role of the teacher, no matter how it's implemented, is, by dint of its instituionally sanctioned authority, oppressive" (122). And one more, "There was a lot of talk in the late sixties about replacing traditional, distribution-type curricula with curricula that were 'student-centered', that is, flexible enough to respond to the desires and needs of a wide variety of individual clients with a wide variety of individual plans" (183). I realize the potential danger of quoting these without much context. Again, my point is not to argue the right or wrong of any of this, but to illustrate that within educational systems today, at least in the humanities of higher institutions (and someone who is in this field can not help but note the irony of the word "higher" coupled with "institution" while at the same time grappling with questions of appropriate authority), there are a lot of questions and concerns around where to place authority. Kameen seems to favor "colleague" over "disciple", and that, I think is a very important distinction to make, and one he may have been taking for granted in some ways. The religious connotations imbedded in the word disciple are apparent--Christian patriarchy. Not favoring this word is very much a poststructuralist convention. But does it potentially miss something?

Although I am intrigued by what poststructuralism has done, and really, really glad for all the doors it opened up, I'm also entirely aware that it is not the only way. Kameen points this out as well, that he was very excited by all this when it was new, but now he has grown a bit weary of it and looks forward to what will come along to replace it. He essentially says that it is dying, and that it needs to, because poststructuralism has now become the orthodoxy that it originally aimed to break down. Now, no one questions that we will take a post-structuralist, multi cultural, student centered approach to teaching and learning--whatever that might mean, and I'm still not certain anybody really knows. Kameen also mentioned that he did not know where new ideas might come from, whether they would be from India, or China, or Africa. This caught my attention. I spent a few years in an Ashram, experienceing something of the ways in which subject matter is transmitted in that culture, but, relevant to the Dumb Drum Guy, of course, is Africa.

On the discussion board I wrote about the gains and losses of authoritarian, versus poststructural learning. I described my work with Yamoussa, and what has been my experience with every African drum teacher I have ever had. They are the authority. Period. There is no arguing with them, even though you want to sometimes. Right and wrong is strictly defined. The experience, for me, and for others who have pursued it has been, at times, degrading and harsh. It has demoralized me. It has beat me up. It has made me wonder why I bother. It has made it abundantly clear that I will go only so far before I die, and that will never be all the way. Hmm, might sound like, well, why the hell do you do it, moron? Because at the same time, I'm a part of it, I'm in its lineage, and it recognizes me as such. I'm good at it up to a certain extent, and I know this. I know this because there is no guessing as to what I do and do not know. When I am on and playing right, it's made very clear that was good. And when I screw up, Yamoussa, or whomever, makes it quickly and abundantly apparent. Of course not in performances, but in rehearsals, it's made public to the group, and whoever is getting the stink-eye sucks it up. And in the end, playing djembe is a hell of a lot of fun, and playing it for people brings up more energy, exhilaration, and excitement, than just about anything else I can think of.

So I wrote about what it's like to learn djembe from my perspective, and another guy in the class said, "Don't take this the wrong way or anything, but that just sounds, I don't know, old fashioned." Wow. What a moment. No I did not take that the wrong way. Yeah, in a poststructuralist classroom it is quite old fashioned. But what would Yamoussa think if he heard us talking about all this stuff? My guess is he might say what he often says, "Shut up. Listen." I can not imagine what would happen if you allowed this questioning of authority to happen trying to learn African music. It would turn into mush, attenuate, lose integrity, and become something else.

I'm glad that both of these ways of learning are out there, and that I am personally able to navigate them both without going too crazy. It can be a bit jarring, but the one enhances the other. If it were not for the movements of poststructuralism, civil rights, questioning of authority and so on, there's a good chance I would never have come across a djembe. A lot of doors were opened, way more than I can realize. On the other hand, if it weren't for Yamoussa's absolute authority, how would I be able to learn djembe? And back to the other hand, a trained, critical eye allows me to navigate the strains and stresses of being pushed by someone like Yamoussa without running screaming for the hills, something I've seen plenty of people do over the years who started to get into this business. Thinking through this only enhances my interest, and fascination, and continues to blow my mind with the infinite complexity and variety the human world offers.

And a note on unorganized drum circles. Aren't they very much a poststructural expression? They seem to be, in some ways, the very embodiment of the poststructural movement. They really started to take root in the popular culture of the so-called west when all of this questioning and breaking down of the old began. And in the midst of that, you've got the drum circle, a loud, noisy, machine, suppsoedly with no leadership, no authority, and no rules (although as I like to say, make no mistake, there are rules to a drum circle). I'm not sure what to make of all of this. Maybe there is nothing to make of it. Maybe it is just what it is, so many worlds living on the same planet.

Representation

"All cultures spin out a dialectic of self and other, the subject "I" who is native, authentic, at home and the "it" or "you," who is foreign, perhaps threatening, different, out there. From this dialectic comes the series of heroes and monsters, founding fathers and barbarians, prized master-pieces and despised opponents that express a culture from its deepest sense of national self-identity to its refined patriotism, and finally to its coarse jingoism, xenophobia, and exclusivist bias." (from Edward Said's essay States)

As I continue to work through this, much of the challenge of this project, of The Dumb Drum Guy, is concerned with representations, how they ultimately fail, and what it means to be an insider and an outsider. It gets more complicated because I am an insider in the world of drum and dance, but never in a way that makes me truly an insider, a child born into it, not surprised by its own language, understanding it, not left out. I am continually on the outside, even as my own sound and sense of rhythm continues to deepen and evolve. Moments come when playing or working with people, or looking at someone's behavior, and what I might think about them may be entirely wrong. To break down my own resistance to this fact has been an ongoing process, and a project that will carry me to my own end with no final resolution. This I admit.

To represent what I see and feel is all I really can do. To do that in a place with so much potential for misunderstanding, and an equal amount of potential to cross hardened lines with respect and invitation, is endlessly strange, wonderful, and perilous. I'm sticking my neck out here, stretching it really, perhaps across the tracks of a fast moving train, or maybe across a road mistaken as forbidden. I don't know yet. I have dedicated this project to asking the question, "So what?" To looking under as many stones I can find that haven't been looked under, or that have caused tension, because Lord knows there is plenty of that to be found in this business, despite the sometimes tired rhetoric of those spouting about the unity of the drum, its meditative trance properties, the coming together of all ages, all people, at all times. There is nothing wrong with those sentiments, but the picture is bigger than that and far more interesting. To me, staying inside just that, without the guts to accept the drama of the human world, reduces it to something that negates struggle, and how would this unity fit if there were no struggle, because unity can only exist if there is disunity.

I'm likely not making much sense, because this place is not a place of orderly sense. It's not Said's "dialectic" per se, although Said gets at much of what a Dumb Drum Guy is up against. It's so many snapshots, all tied together by an endless stream of the steady marking of time as it slips beneath the feet, beats struck, rhythms pounded out, new views made and just as quickly unmade, a note played, just a sound taking up its tiny moment in the air, threading together with other sounds, also with their ephemeral moment, then vanishing into something like meaning for those who might be there to witness.

I had the honor of performing with Aboubacar "Oscar" Camara the other night. Oscar's resumee is striking. Among other things, for 15 years he was the assistant choreographer for the great Les Ballets Africains that I have written about before. There are other things too, readily available on the web, sound bites, starry eyed articles written about him in town-haps rags, videos on YouTube. Bits and pieces of his resumee, some conflicting. I don't know what to make of these things. How do you represent someone in print, in dialog, someone who is like Oscar? Someone who has forgotten more than I will ever know? From my own eye, I suppose.

Oscar is easy to miss. His features are often buried beneath sunglasses and ball caps and a style of dress that to my eyes is more conservative than what I have seen with a lot of my Guinean friends. He plays Dunduns with Yamoussa and our group sometimes, nothing flashy, but relaxed and in the pocket. He seems to like it in the back, a notion that does not seem to match his resumee or his dance performances. He knows my name, is always gracious, and somehow never seems distant, even though I admit, I don't know him hardly at all. There is a lot there to know.

We played at a coffee shop called Arefa's Espresso. It's amusing to me that this guy who has played Sydney's Opera House, and who knows other world class venues, can hang with such ease in such a modest venue. At least that is what it is to my eyes, and all this is through them, tentative, provisional, shifting truth.

At first things felt a bit strained. I showed up late with Paul who also plays in the group. Not sure why we came in late. It's not like either of us, but that's the way it happened. Yamoussa has taken to my drum. He snatches it from me at every chance, says, "This is my drum. You can play that one." And laughs. What are you going to do? Give him the drum. It is quite an amazing piece of work. There's nothing fancy about it, no carvings on the shell, nothing in the roping that would signify this drum has something special, but it does. It's one of those one in 10,000 djembes that's got that extra special wang-a-lang. It came to me recently (another story), and when it showed up here, I knew I'd not let it move on to someone else. Yamoussa feels it too. He told me after the show, "You don't even know. With that djembe. You don't even know!" And laughed. Oh, I know, I know. Anyway, there was a shortage of djembes. I got sidelined while Yamoussa played.

The crowd was quite small, like three or four people sipping lattes and staring at the scene, that despite its energy, its attraction, had to look as strange and foreign as I was suddenly feeling. I kept crossing my legs, then uncrossing them, thinking, man, this is just such an American posture, trying to get into the fact that I could sit that close and just watch Yamoussa play for once without having to hold down the rhythm. But I felt awkward and stupidly silenced. Just another moment in the ride, another beat under the feet.

I went to retrieve another djembe. It's another one of mine. Another really nice instrument, this one from Senegal, and heavy as granite. By the time I got back, Yamoussa was outside smoking and taking a break. "Go inside. Set up your drum next to mine." Things got cooking a little more when the music started up. I relaxed into it, started working up a sweat. Yamoussa, in his characteristic strong manner, made people dance, got them doing simple steps. They, as usual, looked awkward at first, and slightly frightened by the forcefulness of Yamoussa's urgency to get them moving. "Oh yes, you are going to dance, now get up!" No one is safe. The poor saps are helpless. They must put down their lattes and for a moment do what they can to stave off the discomfort they are feeling, and I imagine, the questions and concerns that are nipping at their minds: I can't dance. I'm awkward and foolish. who is this guy? Am I safe? Dancing? African dancing? This is African, right? Or is it Caribbean? I hope my latte is safe.

Within moments he's got them lined up in small rows and having them move their arms out while they step back and forth. I've seen it before. I've been in it before with him. The first time I tried to hide, but Yamoussa shouted into a microphone, "Oh no, you get up here. I see you hiding!" And then everything is okay. Nothing is particularly hard, but the waves of anxiety are still echoing a bit. You can see it in the reddening of faces and the small beads of sweat that have formed without quite enough exertion yet for it to happen.

Oscar is hanging out, pretty much doing what he wants, filling in the gaps in the music. Yamoussa sits back down and plays. Other spectators and curious passersby come in. Yamoussa does another dance with some young girls, who seem more than delighted to oblige. Then a group of teen boys come in, and sit down on the couch that is immediately front of where we are playing. They're punching each other in the arms and pointing. Then Yamoussa stops the music and gets up. "Ok, you gonna dance now." One of the boys says, "No way." Yamoussa, edgy as he often is says, "You see me? I see you. What? You can't dance? You too cool for that?" He's got his hands on his hips, his head cocked to the side, looking at them. They look like they're not sure whether to panic and run, or maybe start a fight. But Yamoussa is not backing down. "Come on. You got one dance." He grabs one of the boys hands and pulls him off the couch and the others follow. "Come on," he shouts at me. I start the rhythm. Then the four of them are in a circle in the center and jumping around and laughing. Yamoussa high fives them all as they exit stage right as fast as they can.

We end the show once. Then it starts again. We end it a second time. Nope. It happend like this sometimes, and I take it as a good sign that the moment has been right somehow and no one wants it to end. Now Oscar is up and moving towards the crowd. He's going slowly, like he might be a little tipsy. Then he stops and bends over at the waist, pulls his knees together while keeping his feet apart. He places his hands near his knees, palms out, his head is turned crown down towards the floor. The whole posture is strange and awkward looking. There is no rhythm being played. I look at the faces of this new batch of a crowd, a group of attractive young women. They don't know what to do, or what the hell they've walked into. What is this man doing? Everyone except Yamoussa and Aboubacar is white, and I wonder if any of them are frightened by the strange antics of a large black man in front of them doing something that seemingly makes no sense. Then Oscar stands upright again and points at the crowd and says, "You can't steal it. That's mine." Yamoussa is laughing. The women are startled, a little scared. I'm not even sure they realize he's part of this troupe. "You can't steal that one. That one's mine." Then he goes back into his strange bent-bird pose. He stands again, "That pose, that one is mine. You have to get your own pose." The crowd still looks confused and perhaps slightly troubled. Yamoussa calls from the sidelines, "You can't steal his!" Then Oscar says, "We can't leave without the singing." Then he calls out a lyric which I wish I knew. I managed to blade-blah my way through it with everyone else, another aspect of this whole biz, another thing I don't know that I've sort of accepted, which is understanding and speaking the Susu language. The first time he calls it out, there are a few faint murmurs. He calls it out again. The murmurs get a bit louder. And again, until everyone is calling it back to him. Then there is another lyric, this one I caught, "Mafele-Mafele" (spelled phonetically of course). Then two more sets of lyrics, the last one more of a sound than a syllable. I can't do it justice in letters at this point and I'm not going to insult it by trying. See how I struggle with representation! Suffice it to say, it was an odd, nasally sound. And on that last syllable, Oscar struck his pose again.

Then he got everyone up. The first lyric had a marching move, knees up to the waist, hands up to the cheekbones. The second lyric's move was bent at the waist, hands twirling around each other, "Mafele Mafele." The third had a strong posture, arm outstretched, finger pointed. And the fourth, strike a pose! He managed to get everyone in the room who was not playing to do this. And when they struck their first pose, he said, "Nobody move." And someone did. So he said, "We have to do it again." And again someone moved. On the third or fourth one, Yamoussa called someone for moving. Oscar laughed a little, then moved to the couch and slumped down, legs outstretched, a smile on his face, "No. It's good. It's very good," he said in a bemused, slightly tired tone, and I wondered how much was inside that, the amusement, the honesty I sensed in his response, and the tiredness.

The challenge here is that representations of anyone will always fail in one way or another. In this, it is further complicated by the fact that there are things here I will never know, languages, rituals, cultural tendencies that make me feel awkward at times. That's the thing though, isn't it? That's the point where admitting the Dumb Drum Guyness of the whole situation helps.

And I bought my ticket to Africa, so it is for sure on!

Going to Guinea

Looks like I will be traveling to Guinea in December. The plan is to arrive in Conakry to a Dununba party, then on to Yamoussa Camara's native village of Boke, then to Kindia, then back to Conakry, where, apparently, we are scheduled to perform for the U.S. ambassador to Guinea. How's that for Dumb Drum Guyness? White boy going to Guinea to perform for the political elite. That should definitely be fuel for some stories.

The Wake

I played for a Scottish wake a few days ago. This was with my Celtic band of course. I didn't know what to expect. I've never even been to a wake before. But I think they certainly are a good idea. This was for a woman who died at the age of 94, and it followed the funeral, so I think everyone was good and cried out and ready to get drunk. The location was a farm up north, an old place, with a house from the early 1800s with 7 chimneys and rich dark wood lining its windows and doors. The floor inside was bent and curved in places and you could feel its age, smell its history. The door to the bathroom was only about 5 and a half feet high, made for smaller folk than myself. The house sat at the highest point of Butler County, surrounded by 85 acres of woods and farmlands, a wonderfully pastoral setting, quiet and sleepy, surrounded by the rich deep-dark green of summer Pennsylvania woods.

After we finished playing, and everyone had settled into their booze induced stupors, all the emotion of the day exhausting itself into a kind of comfort, I stood back from the house and the wakers (that's what you call them, right?) and tried to absorb the age and strange majesty of the place. So much had happened there. A queen told a people this was her land. They had no choice but to leave, and now are barely a memory. Babies had been born in that house, lived, and died there. The same family that built it, still held it. And for the first time the Highland pipes, the big military ones, threw their sound across the land. I thought about the old woman who died. I worked myself up enough to have a good old hallucinatory shiver over her, like she touched the back of my neck.

Death is something else. People don't talk about it. They know it's there, and they have to go through it, but the mere mention of it triggers accusations of morbidity, raised eyebrows, and uneasy grins. I first became serious about learning drums when I spent some years in a monastery, contemplating my own death in the way only a monastery can make you contemplate such a thing. I wasn't a monk or anything. Just a lucky kid, who found a brief time-out in the continuum of his life. I had access to civilization, the occasional job to make some money to support my drumming habit. This was a Vedantin monastery, not Christian, which I think people in this culture tend to associate with the word "monastery." It was an Ashram, a retreat to be more specific. After several years of bad living and tough mistakes I landed there. The place saved my life, even while I contemplated death. It gave me three years to sit down and listen to what was going on inside my skull, between my ears, in the vastness of the mind.

I was learning drum set and beginning my studies of African and Afro-Cuban percussion, and one day at dinner, sitting with a monk named Bryan, I got to talking about consciousness, and about rhythm. He urged me that time, and in subsequent conversations to give up the drum set, give up playing what is often very materialistic music, Rock and Roll, Country, Jazz, Blues, and follow the bliss of consciousness that I talked about within the context of hand percussion. Ultimately I followed his advice, or maybe I just followed the bliss. No idea now. Too many years away, but I remember the moment.

In Vedanta, which is often called Hinduism, there's a word to describe what, I guess, a Christian might call God. It's a word that makes more sense to me: Satchidananda. It's a three part word from the Sanskrit language which breaks down as Sat Chid Ananda. Sat is existence. Chid is consciousness or knowledge. Ananda is bliss. Existence, knowledge, bliss, absolute. The perfect definition for whatever may have blown this universe into existence. Why not? "Big energies" as Bryan liked to say. I was never evangelized there. That was hardly the nature of the place. It was silent as a tomb, barely known about by the 78 inhabitants of Ganges, Michigan. And I myself am certainly not an evangelical. In the words of Swami Vivekananda who was one of the inspirations for the place, "fanaticism is a disease of the mind." I was left to my own devices. I spent a lot of time in the library reading everything from Henry Miller, to Saint John of the Cross, to Ayn Rand, to obscure texts with tongue yanking titles like Yogavaasishtha.

The idea in Vedanta, and Buddhism, as well as what I've seen in nearly every religion, is to go deep within and discover that kernel, that Atman as it is called in Vedanta, that is the same as Satchidananda. This is done simply by concentrating the mind, watching it, waking it up, jarring at its play and sleepy tendencies. (Incidentally Buddha was a Vedantin, and is to Vedanta, in many ways, what Jesus was to Judaism. Chuck out the money changers and the bullshit and get back to what's really going on. Throw the first stone, bitch!). Concentration can be achieved by any number of processes, some more direct than others. It always comes back to process. And if you're a musician, or an artist, or a thinker of any sort, you know this is true. It's an infinite cave, and learning is an itty-bitty flashlight. It leaves a wake that will in time get swallowed up in forgetting, and you'll walk only so far, and only down certain paths of darkness until the walk is done.

Music is a torch. Good music is a Halogen, and great music can be a sun. I'm generally reluctant when people start talking to me about drumming being spiritual, unless they're from a culture that has specific uses towards those ends. Then, I know I won't precisely understand what they are talking about, but I'll respect it, and I'll be genuinely curious and interested. But there are other times. Yeesh. Moments that make my skin crawl, quite literally. I remember one time hanging out in a park with a bunch of folks interested in African percussion, and we were playing Tiriba or something and some white boy, dread headed wanker (apologies to Bob Marley) comes up with a giant flat-ass djembe and starts whacking away and screaming out, "Jah Rastafari!" I don't want to step on the kids bliss or nothing, but wow, that takes a special kind of dimness to pull off. After he was done, which took all of about five minutes for him to exhaust himself, he gets up and goes on a diatribe about how great is drumming, how we can all be together as one, how we can change the world, how it's just a matter of time (likely the Mayans know but aren't exactly telling) when we'll all just blossom into perfected, happy little blissful beings. He missed the blank, irritated, and perhaps slightly amused stares he was getting from the rest of us. Gag. That mentality is out there. This is a fairly over the top example--no it is over the top, but I've been through it enough times to know better than to get into it.

In Zen Buddhism, Vedanta, some Native American religions I've seen, and a whole bunch of others, there are warnings about telling of your so-called spiritual experiences. This makes sense to me. You tell them, you weaken their meaning. You give utterance to something that is yours alone, because it's an experience, I believe, of your own existing. Who else is going to understand that as well as you do? In my little world, the only one fact I truly know, when I get right down to it, has nothing to do with "we all got to eat" or that two and two makes four, it's that I sense that I am. That's the only thing I really know. I don't even know that I truly am, just that I sense it. I have no way to ultimately know if anything outside of that is real. That's just logic when you think about it. Hold on to it.

So what? Good question. What is all this yanking about? Hand drums, for lack of a better word, are spiritual tools. I'm not overly fond of the word "spiritual." It's got way too much baggage loaded into it for the meaning I want to convey, but I can't think of any other word. "Religious" is a whole other sack of worms. But drumming, and music (music is, after all, just drumming with breath and strings and pipes and such; no I'm not at all biased), chases death away. For the brief time it's happening, if it's good, the thoughts of the players and audience co-create, and generate a space that forgets it's in a cave. The steady marking of time lets the moment stay compressed. For the player, this allows a direct, and immediate access to a focal point for the mind. That's where the magic happens. The ananda, the bliss, the tail end of Satchidananda is touched, and everyone feels it. You can tell it in their utterances, see it in their movement. A good musician, a real one in my opinion, is someone who continually evolves what they know, the Chid of Satchidananda. Or, in the words of a great teacher I had, Abdoulaye Diakite, "Sometimes you have to purify your sound by yourself." The Sat part, the existence bit, well that's already there, otherwise it would never happen. At least I think so. At least I think I exist. Uh, right...

I stood there in the dark, after the wake, after the 94 year old woman had laid her head down in the cave and surrendered the light, and thought about all this. Maybe it was that old woman's dry hand on the back of my neck that did it. Maybe it was all the drunken, washed out grins of the emotionally exhausted who triggered it. Buddha said to think about death everyday, that way when it comes it won't be a stranger. This isn't morbid. This is just truth...a very scary word to a culture deeply hung up on clinging to every little thing. But it opens the door to the things that make this experience tolerable, and maybe even really worthwhile. Music is a good companion in the cave, a but brighter than going it alone...

Bet-Dihn-Boom

That's the sound the fireworks made on the Fourth of July. I've not watched fireworks for years. Not sure why. You could question my type of patriotism, if not my patriotism itself. But a friend of ours talked us into going. The display was down on the "Point." Apparently the show is done by some Italian family who have been doing it for generations here. I imagine they live for that one ultimate eve of fire and lights and smoke. Man, the smoke. It filled the streets of downtown, and by the time the grand finale went up, the bombs were plunging into what looked like a nebula in space. Maybe that's what it looks like when a star goes boom.

The thing is though, and this makes me want to go to more fireworks displays, is that more than noticing the lights, I was listening to the sound. Bet-Dihn-Boom. Over and over again. Sometimes if two went off very near each other, these sounds would come out as flams. Other times other explosions would overlap on top of them creating more complicated rhythms. I began tapping my foot, and wouldn't you know it, the pulse was at about 132 beats per minute. I was astonished by this, and quite delighted. It got me wondering about how much rhythm the performers put into it. There definitely was a pulse.

It got inside my head. I couldn't get it out of there even after the show ended. Bet-Dihn-Boom. Over and over again. The bus was packed with mostly youngish kids who were loud and worked up, many of them, I imagine, coming from the fireworks. I closed my eyes to listen. You ever listen to a crowd, just listen to the damn thing? And I tried to find a pulse to it. A very slow one, around 40 or slightly less seemed to do it.

I don't know what any of this really means, except that maybe I'm weird. I go to a fireworks show to listen, and tap my foot to the sound of a crowd. But I still got that Bet-Dihn-Boom in my head, and I'm looking forward to listening to another fireworks display.

Dry Air and Wind

I'm back in the desert again. Something keeps drawing me back here. I'd like to say it is some sort of romantic notion of the desert, with its giant skies, still nights. windy, dusty days, its plants and animals all spiked out and poisonous...but the truth is, Id likely not return here were it not for the decent paying job I have. It's also satisfying work. I teach an English class to mostly underprivileged, first generation college, minority students. I don't have to convince them that racism, classism, and sexism actually still exist in this country, and in a lot of ways, that makes my job easier. Yeah, yeah, I'm part of that evil, liberal academe...or high, holy, liberal academe, depending on your bent. Either way, these kids come from inner cities, broken families, reservations battered and numbed by the continuous breaking of treaties, as well as clever white kids from poor families that made it into fancy private schools by the merits of their brains and effort. It's really quite striking, the difference between these students and the usual fair I work with that often assume this country is beyond racism, and that, in the words of several students I've had, "people who don't get out of Harlem are just lazy." Right.

I do have a romance with the desert, but she's a strange lady. She looks so fine, but she's got the temperament of the mountain lions who roam her high countries. She'll likely leave you alone, unless you engage her, in which case, she's likely going to eat you alive. I'm in the little mountain town of Flagstaff, a place I lived for nine years, about four of which were homeless, or rather houseless, because despite how unforgiving this environment can be, when the sun dips beneath the horizon, and the arms of the Milky Way shine overhead, and the wind dies down, and the quiet seeps into the bones, there's something so familiar that takes hold. It's the expansiveness of one's own self, the very same thing that makes music sing.

It doesn't take long to get to know the town again. It's a charming place really. The downtown is colored in the same tones as the desert, rich browns, blues, hints of purple and deep dark green. The people here are young and shiny, despite how much they smoke and drink, and man, I tell you, smoking and drinking are a serious occupation, not to be taken lightly at 7000 feet elevation. There's also something that strikes me about the people here. As one friend of mine put it, "It's like being in one giant bar, people just bumping into each other." Too true. It's small enough that everyone knows who everyone is. But there's something else, no one really knows anyone. No one really tries that much. It's like a little town that doesn't quite realize it. I arrive here, and no, I don't expect the red carpet, but mostly what I hear is a dry, "Hey, Dan." And the speaker walks on. As if we know each other so well there is nothing left to say. There's something weirdly lonely about this place, and maybe that reflects the land it inhabits. Maybe the minds of this town's inhabitants are so expanded, everything is perfectly familiar; nothing much needs to be said. Nothing much happens here, and people tend to go nowhere, and if they do, they often return here. It's a bit of a running joke in the town. The vortex of Flagstaff, tethering a person to its gorgeous despair.

And now I'm back in Pittsburgh, knowing I've not put much up here in some time. My last night in Flagstaff I found myself staring at a wall for some time. I hardly realized I was doing it. I was, in the words of Hemingway, "all fucked out and empty." My work there was done. The familiarity of the place had got to the point where it felt like I'd always been there...I managed to put together a decent Samba Batucada, and I blasted poor young kids with ways to deconstruct Disney and Britney Spears. What a damn rush. I'm glad it's over, and I miss it already. But there are other things for me to do. I'd keep rambling here, but it would be little more than that. I'm fatigued, gratified, and in a few days when I get a grip on my current location, I'll be ready to dive back in to something that is...well...is...

The Case for Counting: A Wonky Post

I continue to puzzle over this. The suspicion towards "counting." This suspicion is not an isolated thing, that is, not isolated to a solitary demographic. It is embedded in drum circle culture, with many respected African teachers I've worked with, and also with a lot of American folks who are starting the path of the drum, and some who are a ways along the path. I think this suspicion needs to be resolved somehow. I'm skeptical that that will ever happen, but I'd like to make a case for it.

I find myself asking what is counting anyway? What are people so worried about? In music all around the world, with a few certain exceptions, there is one fundamental thing that happens in all of them, whether it be Indian Sitar, Guinea Djembe, American Jazz, Pop, Angola, Maculele, Rumba, Soko, Symphony, Opera, Sweeney Todd, or whatever, and that one thing is that they all have a pulse, a steady, precise marking of a beat, with precise amounts of the passage of time between, that other notes situate themselves around in a logical fashion and that moves in a repeating cycle, often in 4 beats, sometimes in 5 or 7 or 9, sometimes in 15. It can be any number, but it is a fundamental fact of music. This, like a lot of things I've observed in learners of music, is so obvious, they can't see it. It's the mole on the back of the hand, the nose on the face, the elephant in the room, the cigarette still burning in a sleeping man's hand.

It's like this suspicion somehow assumes the pulse does not exist, or that it can somehow yank that fact out of the music, or that someone can learn it and feel it without understanding that because...what? It gets in the way? I'm perplexed.

Maybe it's the word "logic" that bothers people, that logic could somehow damage, or interfere with the emotional thing that music is ultimately all about. So strange. It would serve any learner of any music to understand what it feels like to put 3 notes between 2 pulses, and what it feels like to put 4 notes between them, cutting the two into three or four, or five, or whatever. And also to understand how every single one of those notes between feels around that pulse.

Like if you think about having 3 notes between 2 pulses, the way that first one feels is kind of shy, but kind of tricky, like a clever dog that got loose, knew how to shake off his leash, and now runs down the street not letting concerned observers grab the collar. Or the way the note right after that, the one right before the next beat bounces like agile feet leaping off a bench, and jumping back. Okay, okay, these are terrible similes. It's hard to describe, but these notes are notes, and they feel the way the feel.

These notes are notes. I have yet to find any music I play that does not use these in one way or another. There is push and pull, and stretching beats a hair, or pulling a note into another tiny subdivision, but notes are notes, and people who play, should know where they are. They make a drummer intentional. And intention is everything. If someone is half assed, or half confused, because they can't quite understand where a note fits, it's not the fault of the note, as many often blame. It's their fault.

If someone learns six, two note triplet combinations, and eight, two note quadruplet combos, man oh man, they'll have so much better understanding. That's it. Just those few notes.

But few want to cut their teeth on it, despite the fact that is the toolbox, and those who already know all this, who actually will cut their teeth on traditional music, are freaking rare. You can find those who commit, and those who can get it, and sometimes, you might find those who can do both, but for whatever reason, those are rare creatures. I've seen so many kids from an academic background in music and percussion come around African, or Afro-Cuban, or Brazilian rhythms, and say, wow, that is just bad ass stuff. That shit's the shit. It's the wang-a-lang. And then you never see them again. They can't, in their words, "commit." There have been the occasional exceptions in my experience, but for every one of them, there is hundred or more of the others. Shame on them.

Of course this is likely just my own malarkey, and what has worked for me. I can analyze a rhythm because then I can get some peace of mind. In this climate of learning, in the America I come from, trying to grasp rhythms that are learned in a culture where a child watches and watches until they can play it by rote, learning in the same way that child did, is an impossibility. This is another world. We pay our bucks, go to our workshops, get our rhythms, and go back home and do any number of things with those rhythms, some of them okay, some of them kind of dirty. Some capitalistic bastards turn around and sell them half-assed to someone else. Some sell them nicely and with humility and for a fair price. Others claim them as their own and confuse total rookies. Either way, we can't be the kids who stand and stare at the drummers, mouths open, eyes wide, drinking it in. At least I never was.

The best American players I've played with know how to count a pulse. They know triplet combos and fours. They can see them, understand them with confidence and clarity, and get on with the business of the important stuff in music. That is...not what you play...but how you play it. If you're stuck in the what, you'll never get to the how, and it's in the how where the good stuff lives.

Like a teacher I once had said to me, "It's easy...no...it's hard...no, it's hard, but it's easy." Makes perfect sense to me.

Weird Lingo

Y was on a rampage last night. Not sure what got into his Kool-Aid but he was somebody else. I've seen transformations like this in other teachers I've worked with. One minute they're smiling and carrying on, picking on you a little bit, the next they're in your face, telling you to keep quiet, lecturing, growling, frowning. I'm used to it. I'm still not a fan of it, but I'm used to it. The rest of this group, uh, we'll see what happens.

It started this way: There were just three of us at rehearsal at a friend's house, the lady who plays kenkeni and the guy who plays the sangba, waiting for Y to show. (For those of you who may not know, those are the high and low dun duns respectively in Guinea traditional music. They are tonal drums that lay down the melody on which the sharp, complex rhythmic structures of the mighty djembe play.) Anyway, we're fooling around with Guinea Fare again. It's nice not having Y there because I can tell them that no, the down beat is not on the sangba. The kenkeni lady asks me what her part is. I'd never heard it before last practice, which is no particular surprise. That's one of the the things with working with these guys is every single one of them has different parts to the same rhythms, and Y is no exception. You have to learn each dude's stuff as it is presented. But that's another story. So, I don't know the part. I figured out last time that the first hit immediately followed the sangba beat, but I wasn't kidding myself or her; I didn't know the rhythm well enough to say much more than that.

Y enters. He looks slightly crazed. I'm not sure why. He tells me: Dan, help her. I say I don't know the part. He insists: Dan, help her. I say, Show me the part. Help her! he barks. Uh, okay. I pick up a stick. He says, not with that. I look at the stick and am thinking, oh boy, this is going to be a long couple of hours. I put the stick down. He tells me to pick it up. Uh, okay. I pick it up. He says, help her. I say, what's the part? And hand him the sticks. He says, What? You don't know?

This little exchange pretty much exemplifies what turned out to be the next three hours of my life. His confusion or whatever it was, manifested the most with our names. He continually forgot all of them, even mine this time. He confused mine with another guy's. I'll admit, the two of us both have monosyllabic names, but it's all kind of funny to everybody, but everybody is mildly afraid to laugh about it. He tells all of us at one point or another, to keep quiet. Usually shouting it.

At one point he realized he needed a chair. Now this was funny, but I'm not trying to make fun here. He pushes open the door that separates the practice room from the dining room where the husband and kids of the lady who lets us use her home for rehearsal are eating dinner. Y orders one of the kids that he needs his chair. I see him from behind and I can't help but think he is lurching towards the child. The startled family looks...well...startled. He tells the kid to move and snatches his chair, then comes back in the room carrying it and shouts, "sit on your daddy's lap." I meet eyes with the wife. She's a pretty grounded person and I can tell she is troubled by this, but willing to give it some humor as well, and ends up mouthing "wow" in my direction. Y closes the door, which is made of glass, and through it I see the kid now standing and eating his pizza where once he was seated.

I'm not trying to bash Y here. This is just what happened. To many, this would appear as abusive, and they may well be right. I don't know. I've been in similar situations learning Guinea music, so I can detach a bit. The others, all of them easily beginners, I wonder about. I know the the sangba guy was quite pissed off after this session. At about 2 and a half hours, I was having a difficult time controlling my own irritation. He'd called me the wrong name again, and then did the same to another, and I said, "why don't you just give us all names?" This, I believe, he took as disrespect, some sort of affront. Fuck it. I have no idea. I had little voices in my head telling me to get up and walk out about an hour in to this, and managed to resist. It wasn't any fun. The practice was for the most part, counterproductive, and there was no way to explain this. Language fails.

At another point, and this made me feel a little sad, Y slumped in his chair and said to no one, and maybe everyone, "I don't know what I'm doing here." There was something in the way he said it that didn't feel personal to me. I felt he was talking about something bigger than a room full of goofy Americans whacking away on his country's traditional drums. Of course this was demoralizing for everyone, particular the newbies, whose faces twisted into question marks for which there was no appropriate question. Later on, and I don't think anyone else heard it, but Y said, his voice shaking a bit, "I miss it so much." I think, if I were to hazard a guess, and please, dear reader, be kind with me if I am making an idiotic American assumption somehow, but I think in both these instances, he was talking about home, talking about Africa, and it seemed like even though we were all in that little stuffy room, all sitting with djembes or dununs between our legs, the gulf that was between us was wide and far.

Interestingly, the lady who I ranted about in my last post, kept asking me questions about what was going on, how the parts fit together, where the one was. Weird. But I was glad for that, even though it made Y snap at me to stop telling people things I don't know.

Another strange thing, he had us play Kuku, which, even though I love the energy of the rhythm and always have a good time playing it, is something like the Freebird of Guinea rhythms in the United States. Y has sworn up and down we would never play it. I wasn't particularly surprised he had us play it that night.

After this emotionally taxing, strange rehearsal--if that's what it should be called--Y looks at me and says, finally getting my name right, "Dan, you know who I am. Don't mess with me. You know who I am." Then he asks me, "Who am I?" At this point I don't have a fucking clue. "Y?" I say. He says, "You know who I am. Don't mess with me." Uh, okay. I'll try not to. Of course I haven't a clue what this is about.

Ok, whew. Time to go home. I'm out on the front porch and Y is out there, just the two of us. He's smoking a cigarette. I'm tying my shoes. He says again, "Dan, you know who I am." I am still perplexed and have no particular response handy. Then he explains, "I am all the people who you have known who play the drum." This, and the way the light is, and his big eyes narrowed, all combine into something weirdly profound. I stand up and am struck by how freaking tall I am next to him. "See, you and me we know the drum. These others don't know nothing about it. We have to always show the most respect to each other." I ask him if he thinks I have disrespected him. "A little," he says. "Really?" I say, "I didn't mean to." I really have no idea what he is talking about exactly, but I can sense that he is feeling something. I'm thinking, fuck, here we go again. I say lamely, "I think it's just who I am." This does not explain it well, but I do mean something. A lot of things really about how cultures behave, how they are different, that in our culture it might be seen as a bit rude to snatch a child's chair while he eats. But there is just too much in all this, and too few words. He says, "I want for us to be the best friends. I want to teach all the drum. But it's hard here. We have to be together." I shake his hand. I have no other gesture, or words for all of this. I do not care to remind him that it might be nice if he remembers our names. We have known each other quite long enough now. I don't say that, and I don't say anything about his erratic behavior, because it won't matter much, and it's not important anyway, or maybe it is because I just don't know how. In this moment though, I really have no idea what exactly is important.

I've encountered moments like this before. Probably with more frequency than I realize. Also On the porch I started to say something to Y that I think all this discombobulation is about language, it is about difference. I start to mention that the way these Western folks he's playing with (or stuck with...who knows?) understand music is by concepts like "down beat" and "one." He responds with, "You have any question, you ask me anything." I don't think he knows what I just said, and I'm not going to tell him. This is his thing, not mine. I ask the questions, he gives answers, not the other way around. I would love to open this dialog with him, but how to get in to it? I haven't an answer. I haven't the language. So I head for home, walking with another guy from the group and he says, "that sure didn't help my mood any." I know how he feels.

Callan

My Irish trio is up and running and building momentum. Here's a link to our Myspace: Callan.

This has been a really fun project, and oddly demanding of me. It's very heady to stick to the program in the songs and follow these exact forms. We have our demo up on the Myspace page. It's representative of what we do, but I'm not real happy with the mix. The conga slaps are too tinny sometimes, the guitar is thin here and there, and the vocals are a little odd. But whatever. It's the idea. And it's a fun group. We're adding in a fiddler in the next couple months. We found her, we just have to get her up to speed on the tunes.

Counting and Entitlement: or Entitled to Hubris

It happened again. The same old tune. I'm playing with Y these days and that's been great. He didn't show up for one rehearsal and one person in the group, who has generally been, shall we say, difficult, had a bit of a tantrum about the different ways in which people learn. This was a familiar moment for me. This person is generally un-coachable, has had several contentious moments with Y, and really doesn't quite get where she's at yet, and may never figure it out. Y, for the most part, has been quite patient where others would likely have fired her. At this rehearsal I tried to explain something to her about the accompaniment for Tiriba, and for those of you who know that rhythm also know it can be a bit of a brain twister at first. She was playing the back end of the rhythm as straight quarter notes, instead of the swinging triplets they need to be. She would have no part of what I was telling her. Her reasoning was that she will "get it" if she just "plays it." God if I had a nickel for every damn time I've heard someone say that. A nickel for them saying it and a dime for every time they never get it like that. If you don't know what to aim for, how can you ever hit it? I don't think anyone expects immediate understanding, but you need to be told what is right and what is wrong. If you're going to call the rhythm Tiriba, then that is exactly what you need to play, otherwise call it something else. Yes, I do realize people learn differently, but in this case, that's not the point. To learn this music, you have to suck it up, you have to take criticism from many different angles and respect the ones who know more than you. This seems so basic and obvious, and I think it actually is. But for whatever reason, those who can put it into practice and make significant progress seem quite rare.

But I'm getting back to the title of this entry. The Entitlement bit anyway. I'll get to Counting in a moment. Stupidly, I tried to get into a philosophical discussion with her about what this moment was all about, that it is an expression of cultural patterns that are deeply imbedded, and it can be uncomfortable and threatening for an individual to think they are under the influence of forces other than themselves. I can see it because I've been doing this a long time, and I've seen the same bizarre craziness come out of different human bodies time and time again. I'd like to make a list of the top ten bizarre patterns of behavior around drums.

Here's an example. I was at a SCA event with my wife. She used to be really big into the whole thing. SCA stands for the Society for Creative Anachronism, and is a wildly cliquish, incredibly drunken, mostly fun festival where dudes get dressed in full armor and drunkenly smash each other in the heads with clubs. Hilarious, and some of them take it quite seriously. Naturally, this type of environment invites the good ole Drum Circle. I brought my djembe and found myself around a campfire one night, just a few people around, and took it out of the case and started playing some stuff--can't remember what, but people were digging it. Someone remarked, "wow, I never heard a drum sound like that." Another person said, "It'd be great if the SCA got some new beats." Yep. Sure would. Not likely to happen any time soon I'd wager. So soon enough, other people show up with drums. They plop down. Start their own thing. This is Drum Circle country so I'm not inclined to argue with it at all, or try to do anything with it. I just go with the flow. And pretty soon there are a bunch of people there, and a bunch of drums, and some girls show up dancing. It's getting louder and louder. The fire's popping. The King of Aten-whatever-the-fuck, is making out with some chick under a tree. I'm having fun, getting some energy, playing leads over the thing. The guys playing next to me, I can tell, are really digging what I'm doing, and it generally feels inviting. Of course, I know it won't last. This is Drum Circle country. And sure enough, it is one of the dancing girls who shuts me down, puts a hand on my shoulder, and actually says, I shit you not, "You're new here, aren't you? I can tell. Do you know what we're trying to do?"

I don't even bother. She won't understand if I tell her, yes, I know what you are trying to do. You are nothing unique, you are a different face over a moment I've suffered enough. I smile, put my drum in its case, look at all the folks around who seem suddenly disappointed by the situation. This girl tries to explain to me what it is they "do." I really don't pay much attention. No explanation needed. I've seen this a hundred times, and had it done to me a hundred more. Advanced players somehow threatening the space of someone. And it is often just one, or maybe two, and one of the main reasons you rarely find trained drummers in unorganized drum circles. This moment happened the second time I went to an SCA event as well, in much the same way. I could have explained to this girl that I had been humbly minding my own business, playing my drum by myself when all this congregated around me, and really it was she who didn't know where she was at. But there would be no point to it. I smiled at her, and said, "don't worry about it."

These situations are not unique. What she was expressing is much less original than she realizes. But how do you tell somebody this? Just like the woman in my group. I was an idiot for trying to talk about these things, because she's not ready to hear any of it. There were a couple of other things at work with her as well, at least I suspect. One of them is an age thing. I'm far younger in body, but in the drum I am far older. She disrespected me like a toddler and likely hasn't a clue. It was bad enough that she made herself look like a jackass in front of everyone. Oh well, you get pooped on, you have to be a grown up right? Maybe she'll read this blog entry and won't that be a barrel of monkeys? This isn't personal, it's just the nature of music and cultural mixing and where it goes awry. For me it is often about Entitlement. And often times, because I'm not old, I'm not black, I don't have dread locks, and am generally clean cut and conservative in appearance, I run up against these entitlement situations over and over again. Like that one dude who popped into a dance class I was playing for and told another guy I play with, "Man, he's really good. But he's just so...I don't know...clean cut." Sometimes I just wish I could tell people, no, that's wrong. Why? Because it just is. And this is right, and it's not personal, it's just music. Suck it up.

So what we finally ended up with was an unteachable moment. There are no doubt arguments that could be made against my approach, but the way I figure it, fuck it. I've paid my dues and worked really hard over the course of the years to become a fairly knowledgeable and competent artist. I'm no fucking saint, but I'm far from an ogre. When I am in the company of those who clearly know more than me, I know they're going to be weird. Their artists for Christ's sake! I'm not going to argue with them. Because I know I am going to be wrong. I just wait until I understand, and sometimes it takes a while, and other times it clicks pretty quick, but it always does, and it is often uncomfortable in the process.

So now on to Counting, and I swear all this rambling does connect. Counting just means counting the beats and naming them 1,2,3,4 etc... The African drummers I've encountered are suspicious as all hell of counting, even though I am convinced they are not entirely certain what we mean by it. Mamady Keita remarks in Billmeier's book of his rhythms that when he first started teaching in Europe, someone asked him where the "one" was. Mamady says he had no idea what the person meant by it. He says he has had to adjust to the ways westerners learn, but I know he is suspicious of all this counting business. It's my hope that these suspicions diminish over time because I think a lot more could be learned a lot quicker, and a lot of confusion could be cleared up in no time.

But I don't think they know what we mean by counting. I know Y doesn't exactly, or if he does, he's not letting on. This happened in our last rehearsal: We started to play Guinea Fare (Yoqui), and again for those of you who know this rhythm, you also know it is notoriously confusing when you first learn it, but it is also surprisingly easy once it clicks. What makes it so hard to hear at first is the steady beats on the Sangba. (If you don't know what I'm talking about exactly, it doesn't matter that much). But they are not on the down beat as a westerner understands the concept of "down beat." They're on the ups. That's it. Nothing strange about it, or particularly difficult to hear, once your brain can feel those notes moving up and not down. So this woman (boy I feel like I'm really picking on her. Oh well, fuck it) asks Y if the beats on the sangba are on the down beat. Before he has time to answer, because I know what's going to happen, I quickly interject a preemptive, "no." I know why she's confused. It's another one of those things I've seen over and over again. This time it is specific to this rhythm. Y says, "right there." and points to the sangba. "That's the beat," he says. My little plea, my tiny little "no" was entirely ignored by her. No surprise. Again, entitlement. So either Y doesn't know what she means by that or else he has some other agenda. Frankly, I think he doesn't exactly know what she is asking. I don't think he is trying to intentionally confuse her. I have had my suspicions with other African teachers I've had that seem more interested in confounding you, but I've not felt this with him. So then she asks for him to show the dance step. He does. Clearly the foot movements are on the "down beat" as she is understanding it. That confuses her more, because they are not on the sangba beat he pointed at. Then she asks "where is the one?" I'm shaking my head and smiling inside. You're asking the wrong questions to the wrong dude, I want to say to her. But that would only piss her off. So I then watch Y show her a note in the middle of the accompaniment part and call it the one. The note is actually on 3 as her understanding would have it, if she understood.

I say nothing. I'm just thinking to myself how great it is to be the Dumb Drum Guy. It always comes back to that, doesn't it? Caught between worlds and surfing the seas of rhythm. This woman will not let me help because of certain entitlement issues, stemming from god knows what. Y has made it clear no one should ever count. But what he doesn't understand is that counting, or knowing where the one is, does not mean you're going to have 1,2,3,4 running through your head like a ticker tape the whole time you're playing. It is just a way, as any good jazz musician will tell you, to facilitate the memory and clarify the way parts fit together, and then you forget about it and play with confidence.

Man, you'd think from all this that music just drives me nuts. It doesn't actually...just most of the time...I'm an artist...guess that means I'm crazy.

Yup

I have no idea what to think about this.



Yup. There you have it. (Now I'm not so sure I want it)

Sambateria

This is a hot group, and it's hard to find the drum Timba (pronounced Chimba) featured. That's the lead, conical drum played by the guy in the middle. There is also some nice funk variants with Tumbao over it. Dig it.

From the Pen of the Prototype

This is not a political blog per se, but this one I just had to put up here.

'A moment I've been dreading. George brought his n'er-do-well son
around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the
political one who lives in Florida; the one who hangs around here all
the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already
almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley   over
at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a
contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.'
From the REAGAN DIARIES------entry datedMay 17, 1986.

Gifts

At the end of practice with Yamoussa tonight he said something that could easily be missed, and not just in terms of not hearing him, but the content of what he said. Towards the end of the practice, after attempting to beat Komodenu into the heads and hands of a few who have never played Guinea music, I could tell he was getting tired. Not tired literally...just...that feeling you get when you know what the energy can be, and it's not there. It's nothing you can explain to someone who has never been there. Anyway, he said, "Okay, you have the recordings. Please make sure you listen to them and you learn this all for the next time. Because when I come here, I come with a new gift in my mind." He put his hand to his forehead and squinted his eyes a bit. "And if you do not have this gift we just did, then we go and get into that, and it just gets left in that. Then I forget the gift I brought, and I can not give it to you...That's it.."

This is a lovely sentiment in so many ways. On the one hand, musically, it speaks to how memory works, and individual practice and tenacity. Do your homework, Junior. It speaks to discipline, respect, and integrity towards the music you play and the instrument you play it on. On another hand it also speaks to the generosity of West Africa in general, and Yamoussa in particular. It's still blowing my mind that he's giving us this for free, and I'm not really sure how lucky the others in this group realize they are. He is offering his culture, and his music, outside the context that has often shaped it in the US, the workshop phenomenon. There is something very new about this to me, and in that newness, there is something older and easier.

Heresy and Teaching

I'm going to gossip with you for a bit. Or rather, tell you what I know, if there is a difference. I have finally begun playing with Yamoussa Camara, the great djembe player from Guinea who is Fara Tolno's teacher (that is, according to Yamoussa; I wonder what Fara might say about that?). He recently quit the group in town called Umoja. Apparently there was a wee bit of drama, if you can imagine that. Umoja has remained a mystery to me. Kadiatou Conte, the dancer from Les Ballets Africains also quit this group. I am certain I have been around people from this group, but I've never known it. The exact reasons for the departure of Yamoussa and Kadiatou from Umoja is unclear, but since I have been in Pittsburgh, it has struck me odd that with these two hefty talents there is not a much bigger scene. Don't get me wrong, my intention here is not to bash this Umoja group. I don't know them, only what I have heard from a number of people. They require their members to sign contracts limiting them to doing only Umoja sponsored stuff, and within a certain narrow radius of Pittsburgh. I got that info straight from the horse's mouth, Yamoussa, as well as a man who helps Kadiatou with the business end of her practice (he urged her not to sign the contract and to leave Umoja; advice she took.) I have to wonder what Umoja's reasoning behind that is. Why would you put such a tight leash on these people? I've no idea. But what is not so good for them, is potentially very good for me, and hopefully, with the right massaging of the situation, very good for Yamoussa and Kadiatou, as well as Pittsburgh.

Here some juicier goo, but this I have to be suspect of, because I have thus heard it only as heresy, and only from white people, that Umoja is clearly, and vocally interested in avoiding contact with whites. Now if that is true, from a business perspective, you're shooting off your kneecaps, Pow! That's a huge demographic they're barring for reasons that I'm certain are quite complicated and complex. The only reason I even mention this is because I find myself, once again, in a peculiar position between worlds.

When I came out here, just as I did in good ole Flagstaff, Arizona, I was under the assumption that there would be a scene in place, and I could just wiggle my way in. In Flagstaff, it was always a boon when someone dropped off the train who actually knew something about percussion. That's a small town, and we were always quick to plug that person in however we could. I was naive when I went out there some ten years ago, under the assumption that well, hey, this was the great Wild Wild West where all the hip cats went, of course there would be a scene! I got out there and found a percussive ghost town. Echoes of a few guys that were playing Guinea music lingered about. They'd been there maybe five years prior, but when I got out there, nothing. Tumbleweeds of drum skins.

Coming out here was different. I researched online, found Umoja's website, and Afrikayetu. I called Elie Kihoniathe Congolese drummer who heads up Afrikayetu, and figured wow, here we go, I'll be the guy that falls off the train, and they'll plug me in, and I'll be off and running.

What I have found is something of a tattered scene, which surprises me considering the talent around here. And I've avoided it. Until now. Afrikayetu does a lot of drum circle kind of stuff, get in touch with your inner child things for 45 bucks. They host Riverbeat, a day long excursion on a riverboat where a couple hundred people show up with Remo djembes and have at it. A friend of mine from my Samba troupe went the year after Hurricane Katrina and told me how they were trying to channel their positive vibes down the Ohio, to the Mississippi, and all the way to New Orleans. He suggested they send money instead. So whatever, not my cup of milk. I like it raw, and real, and studied.

In Flagstaff, I rubbed my hands together, and got to work, building up the scene over the course of my nine years out there. Now, Flagstaff is on the map. When I left there, it didn't need me anymore. It still lives, and teachers go there regularly, and dance classes happen. The community college has classes in drumming and dance. A drummer from Guinea, if he can figure out his Visa issues, will be living there for six months soon. The whole situation makes me glad. But I'll be honest, pushing that scene made me feel like Sisyphus a lot of times, but I was younger then, and more in to being the boss. Now, not so much. I'd like to say I've mellowed, but I think what's happened is I just can't handle listening to poorly played music, or watching the same yo-yos in a drum class get their yucks off for an hour and a half, go home and forget about it, playing the exact same way for year after year.

So here I am. For whatever reason Yamoussa and Kadiatou have left Umoja. This thing with Yamoussa is just a tiny little seed right now that needs lots of water and love. We're putting a group of players together, and a lot of them are coming out of my Samba troupe.

And that is a whole other thing. I find myself as Yamoussa's repenique teacher, and what that has done for me is put me on this weird equal ground with him. That's new. When we're around his Guinea music, he's the general. But when he works at repenique, I watch him struggle. I watch his learning process happen, and it demystifies the learning of the djembe. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it feels like a good thing.

And so here I am. I guess the universe just wants to position me to do these kinds of things. The difference here is that I've got Yamoussa, and eventually when we have a competent group going, Kadiatou. I get to play with, and listen to, and learn from, the fount of this music. It's like a dream come true. I just have to stay on it. Which reminds me, I better call Yamoussa now. He took off for South Carolina to do a residency there, and I just want to make sure he's coming back to Pittsburgh.

DDG Is Not Abandoned!

If anyone has been wondering, or if anyone still pops in here from time to time, no I've not abandoned this project or its mission. I'm working on something right now that I'll get up soon enough. My thinking has been a bit haphazard about all this lately. I've been considering the narratives of teaching and learning as they get portrayed, and how I have seen them play out. I'm working on something of my own narrative of this. That's a hint as to what is coming.

On the music front, my Celtic trio, Callan (which means Ruckus in Gaelic), is coming along nicely--finally. It was touch and go there for a while, and those of you who have played in bands, or tried to get various projects going, can attest to, getting the fuckers off the ground seems a deceptively simple task, but when the actuality of making it happen comes, more often than not, for a zillion sundry reasons of human nature, fail. But this one, I think, will not be still born, and I will have some of its music up on my Myspace music page soon. It's a fascinating exploration of pipes, whistles, exotic percussion, dance, accordion, and singing, fusing ancient songs with contemporary textures. I've never heard anything quite like it, and that's good.

The Samba group finally has a name: Chimbeleza. It's a play on the Cuban word Timba, and the Brazilian drum the Chimba, with Beleza, which in Portuguese means "beautiful." That gig is rocking, and has become a force to be reckoned with in Pittsburgh's music scene. We played a pre-Carnaval party on Saturday to a ridiculously packed house. It was a small, dark, tunnel of a bar, with a lounge area near the front, a long bar set against one wall, and a small area in the back, the floors, walls, and ceiling all painted black. The place was so raucous that night that some of our group has to resort to standing on the small ledge in the back that housed the speakers and amps the DJ between our sets was using. The place was bumpin' humpin' grindin' and whatever other slightly eroticized adjective you might come up with.

One of my commentors wrote an interesting response to my post a couple down called "Lull." Thanks mb. It's worth checking out, and if you might have anything to further add, that'd be great.

So soon, my friends, I will get the fledgling, first attempts of my own narrative of learning and teaching up. A story, if you will, that I can hopefully expand upon and reveal some more of what I am talking about here. Which is...

At the Tuesday Pre-Carnaval party, my ganza player asked me what I am writing about these days. "What was that book you were tinkering at about?" Ha, good question. Very broadly it is about the dilemmas I have faced, physical, spiritual, ethical, emotional, as a white boy appropriating the music of other cultures. Even more broad, it is about American culture as a culture and the ways in which it is rendered invisible via its dominance, and the ways that learning this music flips that notion on its head. Its one of the most fantastic and wide open frontiers anyone can explore, if they've got the gumption, and the tenacity to deal with tedium.

So till next time, dear reader, keep the beat, and stay tuned. More to come...

Happy Freaking New Year!

2008 will be the year for DDG. You know how I know? Because somehow I have ended up as the front man for Pittsburgh's New Year's Eve parade on the city's 250th anniversary. I'm going to be a part of history! That's got to be a good sign. Music takes you places when you let it.

In the meantime, check this out: How to Write About Africa

This takes me back to a post I wrote a year or more ago that stirred up some frackus. I criticized Arthur Hull, taking a quote from his book Drum Circle Spirit (which still, I have to say, makes me gag) where he talks about the "children of Africa" throwing off the shackles of oppression or some such shit. I wish I'd had this article then. It says what I was trying to say soooo much better...

Lull

Well, I've not written on here in a while, and I really have no stories to tell. So this is no doubt going to be the most exciting post ever! I've got a bit of a dilemma, and I would sure like to hear from some of my loyal readers out there. Any and all input is greatly appreciated. Just go ahead and blah...It's what I do anyway. Not to discredit anyone else in any way, but MB, I'd really be interested in your take on this.

If you go back to the very first post of this blog, it lays out its intent, sort of. Things have changed over the course of about 14 months. There's more of a voice here. There's a lot more humor. Going back through those old posts, it occurs to me that they tended to be more academic. Gradually, as I've gotten more involved in Pittsburgh I've had more stories to tell, and stories are always good. But here's the dilemma. I'm interested in writing a book about the enculturation of ethnic percussion in the United States. Already, just saying that, there are complications. The most glaring one is the assumption that there is no apparent ethnicity in the United States. So I've already got a problem with terms, but it is that problem that I'm hoping may extend this to a larger audience than just drummers and dancers. Over the course of 15 years or so of engaging in the world of ethnic percussion (anybody have a different way to put it?), I've seen and experienced a lot of interesting moments of entitlement, of being dumbed down, not just by general ignorant perceptions of percussion, but also by my own whiteness. That's understandable, and rightly so. I've got no beef with it, and accept my own struggle to make what I do real, and make it mean something to this culture--after all this is my culture, and for all of its problems, weirdness, terrifying and lonely individuality, massive consumption, racial problems, gender issues and so on, I still have a spark of patriotism. Maybe it's genetic. I don't know. But this place, America, despite an often debilitating cynicism is worth adding to in a positive way. Drums can do that in ways too diverse to cover right now. And other cultures have a lot to teach us on that front.

Ok, I'm getting there. I wrote a proposal for this book which is aptly called The Dumb Drum Guy. I essentially tried to convey that it is about the enculturation of ethnic percussion in the U.S. and all the dilemmas those trying to get it face. This includes the UDC (Unorganized Drum Circle--perhaps this is the expression of percussion this culture actually owns?), the history of Les Ballets Africains which leads to the Diaspora we are encountering.

For those who do not know the history of Les Ballets Africains, here it is in brief. In 1952, Guinea was seeking independence from the reigning hands of France. The government formed the Ballet as a way to promote the culture of Guinea to an international audience, to make visible just how dynamic, sophisticated, and evolved that culture really was. They wanted the world to know they had the right to exist as a sovereign, independent nation on the world stage. The government took the best drummers and dancers from various villages in Guinea, and then took breaks, rhythms, and dances from these various villages, and put them together in a patchwork quilt of their culture and traditional music. This marked a dramatic shift in the function of these rhythms. Traditionally, many tasks, no matter how mundane, had a rhythm and song to go with them. These rhythms went along with life. They were based on total participation, and although they included a lot of spectacle, they were never meant to be packaged and sold. But the Ballets was going to a world where people did indeed by and sell entertainment. Guinea needed the help of that world, so the Ballet was the move they made. This, in turn, led to the Diaspora of teachers we now have in the western world. It also led to the phenomenon known as the "workshop" where generally speaking, white, middle class people pay these teachers for an hour and a half of their time to learn some bit of a rhythm, and maybe a smidgen of its purpose. The money these teachers make, compared to the average income of a household in Guinea is staggering. They can make in a day twice as much as an entire family can make in a year.

So I wrote my proposal and handed it in to a class on proposal writing I took. The class is taught by Lee Gutkind, who is often called the "Godfather of Creative Nonfiction." Creative Nonfiction sells by proposal, not by something already written as is the case with fiction, and often memoir. I'm getting workshopped (the term for people reading your work and giving you feedback on it in class) and Lee is up there, listening, sighing, and squinting, and I'm thinking, fuck, when's it going to come? Finally, he says, "Is it just me, or is there anyone else who has absolutely no idea what this is about?" Ok. Back to the drawing board. How do I take this stuff and convey it a more general audience? Is there something in it that extends to the larger American public? I rewrite the proposal, as if I am talking to Lee. I get it back, and he is all about it now. He gets it and thinks it is a worthwhile idea. Still, he wants me to think about how to make this for a bigger audience. Any thoughts on angles? Does it really matter? In some ways it does, because I am interested in changing perceptions, or at least making them more visible to the larger public. The Dumb Drum Guy fight is fraught with difficulty. At the same time a lot of perceptions amongst practitioners are not very clearly defined. For example, the UDC (Unorganized Drum Circle) are readily apparent, despite its ironic assertion that it is all about freedom from rules. To me, it is significantly more constricting than playing Guaguanco or Dununba. The same goes for those who study traditions. There are rules, some understood--don't hit a djembe with a stick--others not as clear--like when am I allowed to solo when I'm playing with Yamoussa Camara? For those who play this stuff, you know what I'm talking about. For those who don't, would you really care?

Aggh! Who is this for? Any thoughts on ways to strategize in terms of audience? Your beloved DDG would be most appreciative of your brilliance...

Another Dumb Drum Guy

This is definitely a Dumb Drum Guy. Welcome brother!



And read on for the latest post.

A Dumb Drum Guy Moment

As I was tinkering around with my new myspace space (is that what you call them? You say "space" twice? Is there any significance to that?), putting up music, all mostly old stuff from around 2001 when I played in a band called Soulstice, I recalled an ultimate Dumb Drum Guy tale. This was after the band Soulstice went defunct. Now the guys who started up the band are in Oregon playing in a group called, yep, Disco Organica. Click on the link and listen to them while you read the rest of this blog entry. Following the death of Soulstice, I wandered from band to band, playing here and there, getting into one band, getting bored with it, moving on, feeling like I wasn't finding the right place to let out what I had, or rather the right people to play it with. Ultimately, after plowing through every band in town, I finally ended up becoming a leader myself, which at times worked out quite a bit better, but those are other stories.

Anyway, one such person I plowed into had a hippie jam band of sorts, only it was all pretty scripted. He told me that "It'd be great if you played. You'd fit right in." This guy is no hack. He makes a living off playing studio gigs and touring around with a few fairly well known acts, so I'm thinking, all right, I'll give it a try.
"So you're looking to add percussion?" I say.
"Definitely," he says.
"It can add a lot, if it's done right," I say.
"Totally," he says.
"Sometimes I wonder what people want it for."
"Oh, man. It's just the best."
"Would you be open to trying a groove or two, like some heavy Mozambique or something polyrhythmic?"
"Oh, man, totally. That's totally what we do."

Okay. I'm not feeling great, but I'll give it a try. Along with the moniker of the Dumb Drum Guy, I am also the Intrepid dumbass. I'll give anything a whirl once. So I go over to the first rehearsal. I'm thinking, cool, this is going to work. I'll get into a band. There will be music already established to learn, enough to be up and running in no time, and then I'll be able to add my two cents and take it all up a notch. I get there, and the guy isn't there yet. The bass player, keyboardist, and kit drummer are there. I know the kit drummer. We play well together, really try to fuck with each other and toss the rhythm around. He respects what I do, and vice versa. He told me once that rehearsing with me would take 40 hours, 2 for actual playing, and then 38 to practice it and figure it out. Nice compliment. Anyway, I'm feeling better and better about this. The keyboardist is another guy I've played with, an idiot savant, people call him. He can play bass tumbaos in his left hand, and montunos with his right. He's not as dopey as people think. He's just really nervous all the time, and pretends he doesn't notice what is happening around him when clearly he does. The bass player is another full time pro. Wow, I'm thinking, this could be really great. Then the guy walks in.

He laughs and carries on with the other guys. The keyboardist guy is making weird sounds on his keyboard while all this is going on. Then the guy sees me. "Oh, you made it!" He shakes my hand laughing, then opens up a duffle bag he brought, hands me a neon green, plastic LP woodblock and says, "This is for Latin." Then he quickly hands me an old beat up washboard and says, "This is for bluegrass." While I am trying to negotiate these two items, he hangs a tamborine on my hand. "And this is for funk." He laughs, and the other guys join in, and suddenly It's like I've been asked to hang out with the fraternity but not allowed to join.

So there I am standing there with these trinkets, a fucking plastic jam block in one hand, a tamborine hanging by my fingers in the other, and a washboard stretched between my arms. I feel like Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree, or like I was just handed a stranger's baby, or like I'm suddenly naked, all except for some jester's hat on top of my head, and maybe an over sized sumo thong wrapped around my privates. Yep. Dumb Drum Guy at your service.

I have heard it said a hundred times or more, so what? You get paid right? And I have always resisted that attitude. If that's what music has to come down to, me in a sumo thong, jester's hat with a couple of little trinkets, knocking away a 2/4 back beat for 4 hours to pick up 50 bucks, or 100, or 300 then someone please shoot me. I give up. Throw in the towel. Leap into the subway. I'm not sure how many other types of musicians would ever get treated this way. Of course I could go down the long slow train track of total self pity and say, well maybe it is just because I'm no good. That's what I should be playing. But that, I know, is bullshit. I can know what I know without it being hubris. And I'm safe from moments like the one here illustrated. I'm psychically safe, that is. Who else would something like this happen to? A guitarist, a kit drummer, a horn player? Rhetorical question.

It ain't about the money, and it ain't about how good you look, and it ain't about how smart anyone is, or how great someone else is, or you are, it's about that quiet little thick-of-it place called good music.

And by the way, my new Myspace spacey space is here.

The Reluctant Sambista

I played a Samba gig the other night at some swank rich folk affair, following up an act of some swank Mambo troupe out of Cleveland. Samba No Name was the headliner. We're getting publicity. Too bad we don't have a name. After we were done playing, popping, and grooving, these two Brazilian women came up to me and started talking to me in Portuguese. I don't know who was more confused: me because I had no idea what they were saying, or them because I couldn't understand them. Our host, Kenia, graciously showed up and laughed. "He's not Brazilian," she said. Apparently they had mistaken me as such, which seemed odd to me. I certainly wanted to avoid a blunder such as our esteemed leader made when he asked the president of Brazil, "do you have blacks too?" But I couldn't help but think that a blond haired, blue-eyed, Aryan looking dude would not likely be mistaken as Brazilian, right? But what do I know? What it was though, was a pretty significant compliment. The Brazilians love their Samba. It is startling, for an instant, to be in the company of a culture that makes a Dumb Drum Guy no longer that, but something new, something rarefied, dare I say it, something even esteemed.

A friend of mine pointed out though that I seemed dissatisfied with the group in the past, and going through my blogs here, it certainly would appear that way. That is because, simply put, as a subheading under Dumb Drum Guy, I am the Reluctant Sambista.

The reasons for this are not entirely clear. They are buried somewhere in my percussive history. I began with African djembe, the proving ground, the place for a young punk's ego to latch on to its fullest extent, to callus the hands, to piss blood, to see if the slap sound can be as loud and high as that dude from Senegal. Somewhere in there I became interested in congas and folkloric rhythms, moody, broody, less interested in individual expression, but functioning as a single, smooth entity. I can only describe these things in abstracts, and certainly no one music holds any of these aspects absolutely. What these abstractions reveal is a shifting sense of what was important to me. Gradually, over the years, my desire shifted to a much less personal one, and something more in the service of the music. The evolution from West African djembe to Afro-Cuban congas was just a natural part of that for me. Of course I still play djembe, but the wild urgency to be something great has mellowed significantly.

So where does Samba fit into this big picture? I first encountered Samba some 7 odd years ago or so from a guy named Bernie. Bern-dog we liked to call him. He was in his sixties, skinny as a pencil lead, and had the disconcerting habit of talking to great lengths about not very much, all about 6 inches from the listener's face. If you were the listener, as you would back away, he would move forward, maintaining this proximity and occasionally letting fly a dabble of spittle. That's not a very flattering picture of the guy, I realize. In all other respects he was a really good guy. He also was the one who introduced me, and some of the others around the town I was living in, to Samba rhythms. Maybe he got so close because he was deaf from playing Samba.

And I did it. Here I must make a terrible confession. Because Bernie was from the U.S., because Bernie was white, because Bernie wasn't the most outstanding player, because my expectations, through years of snobbery and learning direct from the sources got in the way, I unconsciously relegated Bernie to the position of a Dumb Drum Guy. Shame on me. And in that, what I inadvertently did, was to place the art and craft of Samba into that position as well. I viewed it as lacking the complexity and appeal of the other styles I'd been playing. Hence when I moved to Pittsburgh, and the first musical outlet opened up for me in the genre of Brazilian Samba, I immediately became the Reluctant Sambista.

Now, I find myself at the head of what the Brazilian community in Pittsburgh often says is the best thing to ever happen to the city. I had Ricardo Pereira for a Samba teacher. He was from Brazil, and so I listened and learned. And all this occurred quite unconsciously. The lesson to be learned here, if there indeed is one, is be open to change. Not just a changing respect for any particular type of music, whether it be Garth Brooks, Britney Spears, Hip-Hop, Soka, or the Drums of Death of Japan. But also being open to the past that has created the present. It's an endlessly fascinating tome of weirdness to be sure. I think a lot of times in music, we forget to let others shift and change their focus, to become something better, or different. This happens, partly because these shifts take a great many years, and there are a lot of experiences and memories, many of which have been lost, that add to them. We can't see them happening. It is too easy to hold on to an image of someone or something as a static being, which flies in the face of what music really is. I have had a shift with Samba, but more importantly I've seen in myself, the ugly dregs of what looking at someone as a Dumb Drum Guy can do.

So next time you see someone out there with a drum, think long and hard about it before you say, "Nice bongo drum, man."

Survived NYC

And got some good ideas to boot. The journey, if I were the superstitious sort, could have seemed cursed from the get-go. Due to some strange glitch in the system, I was unable to drive the Buick. Yes, we went in a rented vehicle we knew only as the Buick. I thought this to be rather hilarious. Which way to New Yawk? I was thinking. I'm in mah Buick going to New Yawk. Anyway, we had to do some last minute wrangling to get someone else to drive. We attempted to leave Pittsburgh. We got lost. It happens. Then, we should have gone to Harrisburg, but ended up in Gettysburg. We were lost again. Then, as chance would have it, we ended up driving nearly 135 miles the wrong way, until we were almost in the Catskills. Lost again. Along the way--our newfound driver, Sam, had a heavy foot--we got pulled over by a cop. He asked us where we were headed. We said, we're going to New Yawk in our Buick! He looked at us funny. Which later made sense, seeing as how we were headed in the wrong damn direction. He could have at least told us we were way off track. But nope. Hope the fucker got a laugh out of it. Poor Sam got a 107 dollar ticket for his troubles.

After getting lost somewhere around the Lincoln Tunnel, we finally made it to our hostel, a dingy place about half a block from Times Square. The Square, if I might be so bold, is nothing if not vile. It's like being inside one gigantic, skyscraper of an advertisement for everything corporate and phony in American culture. It blinks, it stinks, and for whatever reason, there are about a million people swarming it like a pack of maggots without any rot to chew on. It's shiny and bright, except for the homeless folk packing themselves sleepily in abandoned doorways.

Anyway, we met a bunch of agents, and I began to discern a pattern. They like to use the word "platform" a lot. If you have a platform, then you're good to go. To get this mythic stature, one needs to publish. In order to publish, one needs a platform. That's all well and good. I'm still not totally convinced I'm out of the game just yet. It just feels like a bolder challenge, and now I've got a good sense of the way these folk talk. They're incredibly smart people, who happen to love books. They also have their thumbs on the pulse of the market. As one agent put it, it's all about 27 dollars. Can you yank people away from their internet, their ball games, their chat rooms, IMs, and blogs long enough to get them to sit through your written rigmarole and get them to shell out 27 dollars? If so, you're on your way to having a platform.

I went into the belly 0f the publishing world, sat down at absurdly long marble tables and looked down upon one word-geek after another, and heard them utter much the same thing over and over again. We went to The New Yorker. I entered the hallowed halls of the OZ of all writing and met with the wizard. Jon Bennet is his name, a frumpy curmudgeon to be sure, his round belly poking from under his too-small button-up shirt. He essentially told us right from the start that we've got a snowball's chance in hell at getting in the much esteemed New Yorker. Hence, I don't mind using the cliche here. Then he gave us a tour of the place. Everyone moved about in some weird hushed silence, like there was something sacred happening. I saw the latest week's issue pinned up on the wall in pages, waiting to go to copy, its leaves, if I was taking it seriously, mocking us in their simple, raw, white, 20 pound way, like they could be any high school yokels homework hammered to the wall. The place was a labyrinth, hallways darting off into unseen places where god knows what happened, great rooms full of old books and magazines neatly cataloged, the walls white with perfectly aligned pictures here and there, the whole place weirdly sterile with the constant hum of This-Is-The-New-Yorker buzzing about. He took us to lunch, and somehow I think we charmed the old bat, because he paid. We just talked a lot about Pittsburgh, its dinginess, the fact that there is estrogen in the water killing all the fish. The cafeteria was several floors below, its architecture clearly trying to emulate a cavern, the walls deeply rippled, the booths and tables arranged in what might seem a haphazard way to conform to the effect. The lighting was low, yet bright. A reflection of a giant, blinking Coca-Cola ad bounced off the silver glass windows of a building across the street. Good food too, lovingly prepared by--hmm--could they be immigrants? Hopefully not illegal, not here at The New Yawker. The spread had everything ranging from fried chicken and potato salad, to roasted red peppers and grilled portobella mushrooms. Yum. The great and powerful Oz told us the biggest thing he sees lacking in writing is structure. Everyone fucks around with time, and flashback, trying to seem smarter by confusing a reader. Good advice indeed.

I sat in at Elle magazine. The editorial staff was plainly not the supermodel type. Nothing is arbitrary. Everything is thought out in the best of all ways to continue to dupe the masses hungry for the next fashion, the next Brangelina story. The only word I have for it all is that it is co-creative. These suits, with their endless parade of degrees and pedigreed rhetoric, create the culture by following it, and pushing it into its desires, many of them base and as rude as the blinking lights of Times Square. In all fairness, there are still a few outposts of the intelligentsia out there, Harper's, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine. But these are a dying breed. Open a cover of Elle magazine. They have a senior editing staff of at least four people. I'm sure it is more. In about 600 pages, it seemed to me, although I did not have the stamina to fully count, there were about 10 pages of written text. Now that is some seriously edited text! How does that work?

For the most part we had gentle smoke blown up our asses. Good to meet you. Great that you're doing this. All people interested in writing should get to know the biz. Those are FANTASTIC ideas. Of course, you know, it's hard, real hard to break in. That's just the way it is. BLAH!

Towards the end of our journey we went to William Morris, and we were suddenly treated like writers by Dorian Karchmar. I appreciated it in a way. She handed us our asses. Cut us off when needed. Told us, with no sugar coating, the truth about the biz and our ideas. She has an MFA in nonfiction from Iowa, so she understands our unique gift for words. She also knows why, in no uncertain terms, we're full of shit. Damn. The smoke and mirrors blown away and shattered. Ah well.

Then we went to our last meeting with our final agent, Wendy Weil. She is Alice Walker's agent of The Color Purple fame. Suddenly, I found myself in a space that was not made of glass and marble, where the people were not dressed in suits and pricey New-York-sexy-but-don't-touch fashion. Books and papers were stacked willy-nilly. The place had a nice smell, and pictures covered the walls, some clearly drawn by relative's children. This was grandmother's living room. The place, somehow, was radiant with what seemed like natural light, even late in the afternoon, when the sun had long since dipped beneath the canyon walls of Manhattan's skyscrapers. She had a balcony outside the office she invited us out on, with a grand view of the streets below, and the regal Empire State Building looming above. She listened to our ideas. Told us stories about her own travels through the dizzying world of publishing. She would occasionally forget the name of some author she'd worked with a few decades ago. We sat on modest, comfortable couches with little macramed pillows in the corners. I became so relaxed (it may also have been exhaustion after four days in the belly of the whale) that I slumped deep into the couch and let this woman, and her honest environment sooth me, so much so that someone told me later that my own shirt had pulled up, revealing the skin of my belly underneath, just like Jon Bennet.

This was wisdom. When someone in our group asked, "what are numbers that are successful for a book?" She motioned to a mobile hung in the corner above my head. On it were little pieces of Styrofoam that had little book covers wrapped around them by the same author. "See that?" she said. "Have you ever heard of.......?" (I can't remember the author's name) "He writes these really intriguing, beautiful books. His last one sold 2400." She sighed. "It's a little depressing." And she left it at that. I knew what she meant. Success is not measured in numbers. She has been this guy's agent for years and years. She believes, and she knows there is more than Times Square. What is depressing is the world of numbers, the world that I think Wendy Weil is very, very aware of and can handle, but at the same time it's a newer world than the world of letters that literature used to be, the world she entered, a place where artistry and culture and craft merged and made people think, challenged their complacency, willed them to bigger things. She deflected the question. She knew what we'd been through I think, and she wanted us to remember our original impulse to art, the reason we do it, which in a cynical world sounds naively idealistic: because we can't help it, because we love it. For that, I thank her, and I am gratified by the way the story of my NYC trip unfolded. It was a story full of characters, some evil, some cruel, some manic, some wise, and it finally ended on a happy note. The Dumb Drum Guy will forge on.

The Big Apple

I'm headed to NYC in a few days to pitch books and articles to numerous magazines, agents, and editors, among them the New Yorker, Harper's, NY Times, and what will no doubt be an exhausting schlew of others. The Dumb Drum Guy is going to attempt to go national. I have two book projects to pitch to agents, one of them being the Dumb Drum Guy.

This all began back in the Cathouse days, and for those of you familiar with my memoir, then you know what that is. This was back in the early nineties, back when what people thought about drums and drumming was that it was just a bunch of hippy-dippy dipshits in the woods whacking away, trying to get in touch with their inner guru or something. Some vague notion off in the periphery of middle America, not worth thinking much about. Not a lot has changed in terms of that view. There are more practitioners now than there were then, and more teachers. The pedagogy around the whole thing has shifted and settled somewhat to accommodate learning styles and a capitalistic venue foreign to the places these rhythms and dance hail from. But all in all, we're all still just so many dumb drum guys. And yes, because I am a Dumb Drum Guy in a unique position, I've made it something of a quest to see if I might be able to make a dent in those perceptions.

It was a rainy night at the Cathouse in mid-July. The air was sticky enough to wet the yellowed walls of the place. It was a slow night, only a dozen or so people lingering about, smoking on the back deck, the music inside playing low, when a couple guys strolled in from off the road. They'd been hitchhiking around the country (a path I would follow in a couple years). As hipped-out hippy-dippy as they come, dressed in overalls with no shirt underneath, Birkenstock sandals, the soles peeling off and the cork ground down, dreadlocks framing their sparsely bearded faces. They each had a mini-conga. I didn't know at the time that is what they were called, and that they were marketed through LP, but there they were. Those two cats were the coolest thing I'd ever seen. They hit those drums, their bada-bing, off the road fling. That was the first moment. No doubt if I heard them whack away now, they'd drive me mad, but at the time, I knew I had found a calling.

A week later I bought my first set of congas, Matadors which I still have, although their shells are now mottled and pocked with age and a lot of miles of use and abuse (including a forest fire). I named them Jack and Jill. They bacame a new attraction at the Cathouse, like the six foot, gold hookah, the Megaworld Machine, and the Danger Box, and I drove everyone nuts trying to get them to beat on them with me.

This went on for some time, but it all felt limited somehow. To assuage my growing frustration, I would occasionally buy another drum. I got my first djembe then, a crooked and slumped chunk of weirdly heavy wood. Then I met a couple guys who were into the "traditional" as they called it. Huh, I thought. Wonder what that is. "Here's a tone...Here's a slap." They showed me the sounds as best they could and showed me a couple of new beats which stoked my fire for more. Then they told me Babatunde was coming to town.

That was the opening of the door, the watershed moment. It came when Babatunde, surrounded by a crowd of about a hundred thundering djembes, heard one little slap of mine stand out, like that "YOP!" that saved the Whos. At the time there was no consistency to my sound, but that one slap somehow found its way to the surface, and Baba made an exaggerated turn, pointed at me, and smiled. That was it. The journey really began there.

And now, some 15 years or so later, the journey has certainly evolved and settled. The question is, with this whole New York excursion, how do I let a larger audience into this world? How do I take up where the rest of the population left off: thinking of hand drums as those hippy-dippy things, harmless, and otherwise only irritating when heard? There is so much more that would be of interest if this is done right and proper. I was just as naive as anyone else, but along the way, I've learned a few things. I've worked for, and achieved the gift of being able to make music, of having an instrument I can handle. I know its history, its technique, its true practitioners. Hell, I'm even welcome around great drummers at this point. I can hang with them without losing my mind anymore. I've also learned quite a bit about people, culture, history, race, and all the other stuff I often rail about here. And I wouldn't know it in the same way had I never become a Dumb Drum Guy. The stuff is cultural, but it is largely hidden from much of America. They sit back when there is some Mamady knock-off group playing in the city square or wherever, and lick their ice cream cones, and stare, and blink, and applaud, and then wonder what the hell that was all about. "Ain't never seen nothing like it before, Ma." And they move on, and we, the rank and file Dumb Drum Guys and Gals continue our strange obsession.

Well, at any rate, wish me luck. I have no doubt this CAN be done, and that I'm the dummy to do it. Just got to get the door to let a toe in.

Providence

Shines not upon the Dumb Drum Guy these days. The Irish gig went belly up. Seems the other guy in it is a booking agent for some major league, full-time folk act who is irritated at his current calendar and demanding its change. A change of which my X-colleague must evoke on the one day that our meager trio was to rehearse. Personally, I think there is more to it than that. The piper, great as she is, is also a PhD student in literature. She is rarely around. Ah, such a shame to give up the years worth of work the two of them put in before I came on board. A years worth of work, and about two performances to show for it.

And of course I could not find the prison (see previous post). So then, what to do? Time for some heel-tip practice, and persevere on. What will happen next?

Happy Anniversary DDG!

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Dumb Drum Guy. I originally embarked upon this mission in the hopes of spouting out enough of my own stuff, and getting enough feedback on said stuff, to work out something of a book length manuscript exploring the dilemmas faced by a whit boy American trying to learn the craft of ethnic percussion. The dilemmas are sundry and challenging, and it is my belief that there is something very worthwhile to be said about those dilemmas, and ways they can be brought to the surface.

So to mark the anniversary of the DDG, I will tell you about my prison adventure. This could take but one sentence and one sentence only: it brings me great sorrow to announce that instead of playing a gig at a maximum security prison, I spent four hours in my truck driving around small town Pennsylvania searching for the damn place, only to finally call it quits and go home. How freaking dumb is that?

What I did see though, is something that might be equally as profound as playing congas and cajon for murderers, rapists, and kidnappers. I saw a young girl on a motorcycle. It was perhaps one of the more poignant representations of what small town life can be like. I found myself in Brownsville--at least I think that was the name of the town. These small towns get mashed together amongst the hills and rivers of southwest PA. Wherever I was, this place was crumbling. Tall buildings lined the Monongahela river, buildings that looked like no one had set foot in them for quite some years. Between derelict houses sat other slumping ones, their roofs in bad need of repair, with broken parts of cars and rubbish littering their lawns, gaggles of dirty little kids playing with tin cans and naked dolls with missing hair. The whole place depressed me fiercely. Had it not been there, if all there was was the green meandering river and the even greener forests, now lightly dusted with the reds and yellows of autumn, this would have been sublime. But the indelible thumb print of a wasted and exploited humanity reminded me how great it is to be a dumb drum guy, if nothing else.

The girl sat sidesaddle on an old, mud covered Honda. It was parked on a patch of crumbled and smashed concrete that at one time must have been the driveway for a garage. The garage was dug into the side of a rocky hill, but not much of it was left, just a few rotten timbers, and craggy bricks tumbled onto a rain swept floor with piles of rotting leaves. The girl sat there, vacantly staring at nothing in particular, an old skinny hound dog curled up nearby. She was overweight, but wore tight, pale denim jeans anyway with a wide black belt studded with silver rivets. Her lips were painted a bright red, and her hair was streaked with sadly artificial blond highlights. She just sat there, some weird echo of Britney Spears and Hollywood, yawning through this land of no opportunity. At one time, I imagine, the mill along the river made this place prosperous. Someone got rich while others eeked out a meager, pained existence. Hence the neatly manicured, state funded sign on one of the roads that said, National Historic Highway, as if to suggest that all of the inhabitants of this grim place were a piece of history and nothing more.

I did, however, give one woman some excitement, or near hysterics, when I drove the wrong way down a one-way street. I knew it was a one-way, and didn't care; I was too damn lost and sick of it all at that point, and this was the easiest way back to the nearest route out of there. The woman came running out to the side of the street, hands clasped to her mouth, informing me of the danger I was in. I'm glad she got a little excitement. Of course there wasn't another moving car anywhere, but at least I gave her a little adventure. For that I felt somewhat gratified.

Sometimes we go places and we think we know why, and all of a sudden it becomes something else. I guess the thing to do is to try and look, even when it is ugly and sad. I could link that to why I play drums, to methodology and all that, and how rhythm can parallel just about anything, but I think I'll just leave it at that for now, and may DDG see another fine year of rambling and rhythm...
God bless, and good night...

He's Back!

And just as dumb as ever!

There have been some things going on recently. Most notably I saw Kadiatou's group called Balafon. I'll write about that soon. A good show, with a lot of interesting moments that fit right in with my take on the matter. Of course, I'm not going to tell you about that right now.

I also hooked up with Yamoussa Camara. That should prove quite fruitful. Amazing player and teacher. But I'm not going to tell you about that now either. Sorry.

The Samba troupe is mildly maddening as always, but I'm not going to whine about that either.

I've been attempting a gathering of people interested in playing congas, and that is slightly more and slightly less maddening than Samba, for a lot of the same reasons of which, you guessed it, I'm not going to talk about.

So why am I blathering anyway? I'm here to tell you that tomorrow I am going on one of the more interesting and peculiar gigs I've ever had, one that will make the hair on the back of my mother's neck bristle. I am going to play for prisoners in a high security penitentiary here in Pennsylvania, the location of which has no address, and special permission is required just to get directions to this clandestine location. I am going with the lovely Lilly Abreu to play old Jobim songs for rapists and murderers. Now isn't that far more exciting than that other stuff anyway?

More later. Wish me luck.

Because I'm Cautious

I'm cautious because I've been screamed at for playing drums. I'm cautious because I've had things thrown at me. I'm cautious because I've been run out by cops more times than I can count, sometimes angrily, sometimes not. I'm cautious because I got shot at once for playing Dununba.

I went to Frick Park with my bongos yesterday. It was a gorgeous day, just a touch of Fall on the air, enough to mellow out the heat, but not enough to begin changing the emerald green of Frick. Frick park is 800 acres of rolling hills, forest, playgrounds, sports fields and basketball courts, plopped in the middle of Squirrel Hill, which is perhaps the most affluent neighborhood within Pittsburgh. Couples milled about. Joggers jogged, headphones in ears. Large throngs of Jewish families with strollers, dressed in traditional garb, casually walked the wide, sweeping sidewalk that moves through the immense lawn of this particular area of the park. A kid's baseball game was going on. A father and son were shooting some hoops. The big playground area teemed with toddlers. I made my way to a bench that was out of the way of the main flow and started to play, tentatively at first; it's always a little strange to sit down in public by yourself with a pair of bongos. A hippie looking white dude with an infant in a stroller wheeled his way up. The infant giggled and clapped, his little potato head sticking up just enough outside the stroller so he could see. They wandered on. Endless colors and sizes of dogs scampered and loped around, some on leashes, some not. Another Jewish woman came up with her two daughters. The oldest of them danced and clapped. They moved on. The breeze blew, cool air with the smell of green, pushing back the general funk of city air. I started to relax more and more. A young couple sat down in the grass nearby, their faces close together, talking quietly. Yeah, man, this was good stuff.

Then a man came out of the woods. He walked across the sidewalk and seemed to be heading my way. He had his shirt off, and was wearing white jeans. His hair was cropped close to his head, and sprinkled through with gray. At first I thought he was coming over to listen, which is a little weird anyway. It's always an odd sensation to be a spectacle. I might prefer it if someone came over and played something, but then I'd likely be in a drum circle and want to slit my wrists. Anyway, as he got closer, I realized his right hand was wrapped in a white cloth. I also realized he was really really big. He was also really really tanned, as if he spent a lot of time outside. His white jeans were also covered in mud stains. It occurred to me that he had just crawled out of the woods with absolutely no regard for the people who had to get out of his way as he moved closer to me, his walk determined. His eyes were not directly on me. They were looking through me and past me, but I could tell I was in his periphery. When he got close enough, I could see a vacant look in his eyes. I fixated on his right hand wrapped in a white cloth, the hand I now thought had the intention of smashing itself as hard as possible into my face. I stopped playing. He came closer, his walk not slowing. I thought about getting up and moving. Instead, adrenalin pumping through me, I sat still and watched his hand, and prepared my own to block. I considered how I would roll out of the way, and how I would attack his groin as quick as possible, because toe-to-toe, even with my own martial arts background, this could be ugly. Closer. Closer. I was sitting on the far right side of the bench. Closer. Then he passed by me. He walked in a beeline up the hill behind me into its underbrush, up and over its crest, then out of site.

My hands shook. I started playing again, but it took my hands awhile to get used to the idea, and I kept looking back over my shoulder, expecting this guy to come screaming over the top of the hill, ready to plunge and beat me to death for being a dumb drum guy.

Call me paranoid. It's okay. I am paranoid, but with good reason. After all these years watching these drums interact with this American culture, I have come to expect the weird, the dangerous, the hostile. For the most part, that's not what happens, but it is always there, lying in wait for the right moment with the wrong person, to bring it to the surface.

As for this guy, I can only come to a few conclusions. Either he has a very different sense of personal space than I do (the path he chose to walk, coming mere inches from me, was in a vast park with plenty of elbow room) or else he is a wingnut, a vagabond, a homeless, likely mentally ill, individual. He may also have had the intention of taking off my head, but something stopped him from carrying out the final act of crunching his giant brick of a hand into my face. He may also have wanted to scare me, which if that was his intention, he succeeded. Or perhaps, in a crazed brain, he had no idea I was even there. I don't know.

One thing I do know is how much my own reaction simultaneously puzzled me, and really brought to the surface just how aware I am of the potential dangers evoked by drums. They bring out the weird in people. Anybody else out there have any stories like this? I'd like to hear them. Stories of the bizarre, the weird, or the hostile around drums.

Irish

There's something about the tempo of Irish music that works for me.

I landed a bar gig, typical shit, some guy calls me up and says, all right, I've got this gig, I need a drummer, light stuff, jam stuff, just kick it out, let the people drink. Okay, so what's the pay? Enough. Fine, I say, I'll come play.

I go to the gig. No rehearsals. That makes me nervous right away, but screw it, I'm the Dumb Drum Guy, I can hang with whatever. The bar is smoky. It smells like a weird combination of aftershave, dirty socks, distilling apples on the floor, chicken fat rotting somewhere in not-too-distant vats. Typical. I set up my drums on stage. Nothing too fancy. I have no idea what this is all about. I'm getting paid. Can use the money. A couple congas, a set of bongos on a stand, a cajon to sit on. Should be sufficient, or in this case, I'm thinking to myself, more than sufficient.

The gig begins with the guitarist playing none other than Wish You Were Here (Man, if only it was Freebird, I'm thinking). It's a beautiful song and has certainly had its day, a day when its originators played it, and where it maybe should have stopped. Disposable, that's the cultural way. Make a song, dispose of it, wait for Britney Spears to come out of the closet (figuratively speaking, although you never know; Britney Spears exploits an endlessly fascinating tension between the Jezebel and the southern bell, but that's another story). Songs in my culture are marketed to be disposable, just like Kleenex, which was perhaps the first disposable product officially marketed that way.

I'm suddenly thinking: Wish I Weren't Here. But got to get through the gig. The tempos are enormously slow. I'm feeling a hot knot form in my gut. What am I dong here? What compels me to this? Is it the money (paltry)? Is it the love of the stage? I think it is likely the hope that something beautiful might come my way. But of course, it does not. I'm left with 80 bucks and a bad mood. Same stupid story.

Now there is the Irish. I landed a gig in an Irish band called Callan. It's Gaelic for ruckus. Already I'm happy about that. I'm feeling good about it. There is something about the tempo of Irish music that allows me to explore what I know. This trio, small as it is, is made up of a piper/penny whistle player/ dancer, a guitarist, and me. The guy who started this thing is a full time booking agent for some folk music group I can't remember. He knows his stuff. The piper is a bread winner on the instrument, competitions, grew up inside of it.

The thing is, when I'm playing something cultural and authentic, it makes sense. If it tries to fuse other instruments from other cultures and does so with appreciation, there are possibilities. When it's just the same old American/British pop shit that everyone has heard a million times piped through endless streams of overhead speakers in florescent lit rooms like Wal-Mart and Rite Aid, then it fits like a rotten shoe on what I do.

I'll give it a whirl, eyes wide shut, or open, or whatever the latest cliche is. Tempo is important. The ability to play in a band that can hang with polyrhythms in a new context is an exciting prospect. I'm weathered and have seen a lot in music. But I am never without hope.

The Endless Summer

Is coming to an end. The summer of Samba is nearly over. Ricardo will be gone in a few days, and I will return to the university. Sad times, sad times. Autumn will set in. Cool days ahead, Pennsylvania leaves turning bright colors. Today, however, it is close to 90 degrees with about 90% humidity. The air is a wet blanket. In a few short weeks that will all change.

One thing this summer has certainly done for me is given me a whole new appreciation for Samba. I always knew there was something more to it than what I'd played before, but I'd never had a chance to work with someone like Ricardo. He'll be missed. Maybe it is the culture of Brasil, maybe it is just the way Ricardo is, but there is something wonderfully inclusive about Samba that I haven't felt in other styles of ethnic percussion. Maybe that has something to do with its structure. There are several sections all playing one instrument and one part. These sections can be enormous, as many people as you can fit in them. Maybe it has something to do with the Carnaval aspect to the whole affair. It's about getting your funk on one last time before Lent after all. Who can say? It's an easy going space.

I played with Kadiatou, and an older djembe player named Yamoussa Camara has moved to Pittsburgh. He is Fara Tolno's teacher. He's a great player of course, and of course he growls when you get off beat. Ricardo laughs at you. What is it about African, or my experience with it? There is something at times competitive about it...but that's not quite the right word. There is something imitative about it that seems impossible to overcome if you're not born into it. I'll never be a real part of it, and that I feel.

Kadiatou wants me to take a class every week. Problem is, it's with a 20 year old kid who is not from Africa, and charges 20 dollars. I've been playing nearly as long as he's been alive. He's an okay player at 20, but nothing particularly special. If it were Yamoussa I would consider it. But there is a part of me that is, dare I say it, moving away from African music. I think I'm losing that weird need for intensity it requires. More and more I find myself just sitting back and listening to the stars.

Yes, I'm rambling, and have not written in a while. So it goes. We, the nameless Samba group, played our final show with Ricardo. It was in an old church that has been "desanctified" and turned into a bar. It used to have waitresses dressed in mini-skirt Catholic school girl outfits. Now it has big screens above the bar with silhouettes of thin, dancing women spanking each other with riding crops. Oddly enough, despite this, the clientèle it attracts tends to the affluent and educated. The show was a watershed moment for me. I got it. I understood this Samba thing, and the power it evokes. A dancing Brazilian girl told me after it was over, "You're Brazilian."

So now I have been given the ability to play the repenique, and play it I shall. An Irish band is knocking on my door as well, and Kadiatou, and I have a gig in a prison with Lilly Abreu. The tides are bringing in the things that matter. I'm just taking it slow, picking what will work. Another thing I've noticed around African, in this town, as well as elsewhere, I'll get to talking to someone about it, and if they're established, they'll say, "oh great, you should come take my class." I want to say, "I don't want to come take your class. You might show me a new part, but I'm sure I've got a few for you too. I want to play. Not pay." In fact, next time someone says this to me, I think I may just say that.

Entitlement

Be forewarned, this is going to be a rant. I received another email today in response to my invitation to meet people in the park to play some Guaguanco (see previous post). This one told me to hold off until Labor Day because this person might be able to round up a 24 year old second generation Cuban kid that this person taught clave to 9 years ago. I want to say it loudly now. BIG FUCKING SHIT!!! I sent out an email that said, that's all well and good, but I will be playing my drums in the park on Thursday at 6:00. Feel free to come on out. I have no idea who this kid is. I've likely been playing music since before he was born. That is neither here nor there, and I wish people could see that. I would certainly like to meet him, but I sure as hell ain't waiting around for the real deal to show up. How many times have I been asked, "Have you been to Africa?" Nope. "Oh." "Cuba?" Nope. "Oh?" "Are you an initiate?" Nope. "Ah, I see." I'll say it again. BIG FUCKING SHIT!!! Not that I don't want to go to those places, not that I would not benefit from going, but the point here is that people are often much more interested in your resumee than the music you make. I have to admit, were I a person of color, this would all be much easier. I don't think that is a racist comment. I think it's true, and I think there is a lot inside that truth. Not that I want to go there right now. I'm just ranting.

Another thing I've often found irksome is the way people laud praise on other people to someone else before really having any idea where the person they are talking to is at. Let me give you an example. I used to play with one Mr. Bobby Flanagan. Amazing jazz drummer, smooth as silk, laid back, highly disciplined, great chops. I laud the praise. I also played with one Mr. Roberto Olivera Garcia. You can find him here. Working with Roberto is a story I need to tell at some point. It was one of the most challenging experiences of my life, and not musically, although there was an element of that. The problem was that Roberto is a bit crazy to work with. He's got a great presence, and I love the guy to death (well almost), but he has bad timing and tends to blame it on everyone else. In rehearsals it was lucky if you made it halfway through a new song in three hours with all his starts and stops, and cigarette and rum breaks, and perhaps worst of all, he had the peculiar habit of always thinking the next guy would make the gig right, so he'd drop one person for this other person, and do this over and over again and essentially get nowhere. He eventually did this to me with a kid named Jesus who could play a mean guiro. I admit, he was a great guiro player, but as far as being anything useful beyond that, he was a putz, and was only there to have fun. When it got down to the nitty-gritty of rehearsal, he'd storm out without a word, and go sit in Roberto's yellow Toyota Celica and pout until Roberto would pack up his gear and drive him home. Anyway, like I said, a lot of stories there I perhaps need to write. But let me get back to Mr. Flanagan and the point of this tirade. Mr. Flanagan also attempted to work with Roberto. Drove Flanagan apeshit. He quit pretty early on. But he ran into Roberto rehearsing with Jesus at the music building on the campus where Mr. Flanagan was working on his music degree. Roberto lauded Jesus, told Mr. Flanagan over and over again how great he was, "See the way he plays the guiro? You see that? Just right. Perfecto!" Bobby told me later he thought that was insulting. He put it to me this way, as if this is what he wanted to say to Roberto: "Uh, do you see me standing here? I can watch the guy on my own and see what he can do. I'm standing right here, Roberto. Hi, dude. " He told me, "Sure, Jesus can play a guiro better than me, but I think I know enough to be able to judge music on my own without someone telling me how great someone else is."

Exactly my point. Too often people are presumptuous around this stuff before they know who they are talking to. I always find it troubling when someone lauds the latest book by Michael Spiro (great books by the way. That's all I'll say), or talks about how that guy on the other side of town, wow, man, that cat can really play. This then suggests that what you do is not really playing. It's hobby stuff. Cute. Dumb Drum Guy.

Personally I keep my mouth shut most of the time. Except, of course, for this blog. At least during the writing of it, it doesn't talk back. But when I'm talking to people about music, I don't find a lot of use in saying how great someone else is, and repeating it over and over. Sure, Giovanni Hidalgo and Mamady Keita, as well as Beethoven, and maybe even Sting are genius. They're inspiring and worth listening to and learning from. But leave it at that for chrissake.

What is entitlement anyway? To me your entitled to the space you can create with the music itself. Another thing I've said for what feels like a million years is it's not what you play that matters but how you play it. Some people are rhythm whores. They think getting a million breaks and rhythms crammed inside their noggins means they're a great drummer. They don't worry about pronunciation of those rhythms, that stuff is too hard. They just keep stuffing their bellies and heads with rhythms until they play like a waddling duck. Well played drums are so much about relaxation. If you get that, there's no damn need to talk anything up anymore. If someone is talking shit up to me, I think that really says little about the person they are lauding, and really says something more about them. Anyway, my rant will now come to an end.

If You Take it Too Seriously, You Can't Take It Seriously Enough

I've said this for years, and occasionally run into someone who knows what I am talking about. I've been playing in this Samba group, and if you've been following this blog, you know that it has occasionally been a source of mild irritation. Mild irritation in music is good. That's a good sign. It means there's enough to care about, but not so much to piss you off. It's when it boils over, you have to watch out. Mostly this summer I have been playing Samba, learning the repenique, which I am delighted to add to my repertoire. I'm not a stellar player at this point, but I am adequate, and I've come to terms with that beast of an instrument.

Anyway, it has come as something of a surprise that I have been playing Samba all summer. Of all the different styles I've studied over the years, it comes in at number three or four on my list. I'm not knocking it, it's just that it is repetitive raw power, not a ton of melody in a Samba School (They're called Samba schools. I think of them as schools of fish with drums. You've got different sections, and each one can have as many as a hundred players, and they all move the same way at once), just a crashing, smashing, bass driven thunder. And, not surprising, it's oddly difficult to learn.

Ok, so I'm getting to my point here. I've been practicing congas religiously since I got here to Pittsburgh over a year ago. I always do, always have, always will. But they're not meant to be kept in a vacuum. So I sent out an email to the Samba group saying, hey, anyone want to get together and play some Guaguanco? I got the instruments, I can show the various parts, it'll be fun. Shockingly, I got a few responses saying I should hold off, wait until after Ricardo (our Samba guru from Sao Paulo) heads back to Brasil in a month. One message reminded me that we have four shows coming up. I have to admit, I found this all a bit stunning (which I guess at this point it shouldn't be). I'm getting to the title of this entry, I promise.

Drums are not meant to be kept in a vacuum. At least to me. They are not meant to be packaged and sold to the highest bidder either. Money confuses the issue. I don't know how much of a minority I am in this, but it feels that way a lot of times. Drumming comes out of the village, out of the human need to blow it out, to throw off the shackles of earthly living and get high the good old natural way. This is the impulse of the UDC, which is right, I think. The thing about the UDC is that it has such a tremendously limited vocabulary and gets so defensive and at times downright hostile to more advanced vocabulary, that even though its impulse is right, its answer to that impulse is...dare I go so far as to say wrong? How about problematic and limited. That aside, what I suggested to this groupo- de-Sambistas, was coming out, sitting around, and have fun playing Guaguanco. For some reason (what could that be?), I think they got the impression that I was suggesting it's time to get something else going, by God, to get it out there, get it tight, get gigging! Sell the fucker off to the highest bidder! Nope just something from the heart before I lose my frigging mind.

Hmm, I could be wrong. Maybe they're right. Maybe if I push another rhythm into their heads it'll cause a cascade effect and all the Samba stuff will spill right out onto the ground, a big heap of jumbled notes, like the dropped film of a feature length film.

But that's what I mean. If you take it too seriously, that is, it becomes a serious endeavor in the sense of a certain kind of seriousness (whatever the hell that means; I hope you're with me here), you can't take it seriously enough. You miss the point. And the point is the village, sitting around making it happen. And to do that, to make it happen takes a lot of seriousness. If you want to get anywhere in the craft itself, you have to be prepared to risk life and limb facing down its tedium and difficulty. That's where the real seriousness lies, not in slamming something together so you can get out there and get paid. I oversimplify, yes, but there's something to this.

Yeesh, I think I am a minority. I catch a lot of flack for my ideas. And if one were to read all of these blog entries, they would no doubt be able to call me on at least a hundred contradictions, but I think if they looked closer, they might be able to see this does not contradict at all.

For me, the greatest way to spend time is inside the envelope of rhythm, with people who know how to make it happen, who like being around each other (most of the time; life would be boring if we were all happy-joy-joy all the time), know each other, and can laugh about it, and turn off all aspects of their non-lizard brain except the part that spent all those hours locked in the closet, inside the tedium of wrestling rhythms into the body.

Where are all these people? I'm growing impatient and getting older.

Oh, and incidentally I've decided to run for president. My agenda is a simple one: I will focus entirely on contacting alien species. What better way to unify the earth than that?

Sealed the Deal

Just got hitched on Saturday. And now, I'm heading to Ohio to ride roller coasters. Be back soon.

What's in a Name? The Summer of Samba

No idea how this has happened. I've been plunged into nothing-but-Samba all summer. When I left Pittsburgh for Arizona last month, the group was a few guys getting together to learn some stuff. But then I set in motion this whole thing with Ricardo. And wow! He and his wife, out of necessity, have been sucking in the money and at the same time creating a giant group of disparate people who barely know each other. Ricardo's got section classes throughout the week, surdo, caixa, repenique, tamborim, pandeiro, and a large group practice once a week. There's about 15 or 16 people in this whole thing at this point, at two classes a week, at 15 bucks a pop. Not bad bread for Ricardo. And I'm far from knocking him for it. It's worth every penny to me to get the repenique. He's got to feed that family of four of his. And I am glad to pay the respect to his culture and his music. But what the hell am I going to do with this juggernaut when he's gone? You've got to dig the people you're playing with and know them for a group like this to go beyond novelty. Yeesh, it's hard being the DDG sometimes.

Samba is a rumbling, endless groove with breaks. I like it as a part of my repertoire, but not the entire thing. And now there's been a debate over the name of this thing. This debate has been going on for months, with little end in sight, because there is only quasi authority in the group, right now most of it being given to Ricardo with the knowledge that he will be gone in a few short weeks. Which will leave what? A vacuum. I'm not good in vacuums. I tend to fill them up. But how much of this do I really want to take on?

The name choices have been narrowed down to: Hot Metal Samba, Crash Samba, Three Rivers Samba, Samba Tres Rios, and Samba De Burgh.

Samba De Burgh sounds like a fast food joint created by idiots, Three Rivers Samba is about as creative as a popcorn fart, and about as interesting as a textbook that quotes Shakespeare too much (there must be 5000 things in this town named Three Rivers something-or-other), Samba Tres Rios is a wee bit pretentious, considering this is a a group of uni-lingual gringos (It's also not in the right language...and is likely to be the final name of this thing...bleh! Sometimes I hate democracy.), Crash Samba is funky and fun, and Hot Metal Samba is sexy and cheesy, but at least it recognizes its own cheese. Samba Tres Rios takes itself seriously. And its acronym is close to STD. I'd ask for input on these names from any reader out there, but I'd ask you to try and forget my rant about this naming thing.

So here I am, the Dumb Drum Guy, sort of stuck at the head of a ship with no one manning the sails, that's on course to destinations unknown. Like Borders book store. Borders! Corporate book burning at its finest! Bet we can yank in a few customers for 'em! Borders asked the group to play there. For free of course, and a lot of the crew got really excited about this nod, and I'm worried about this turning into a Dumb Drum Group. The pretense will be set that we play for free because of our love of the art, our joy in its production, our sharing of cultures (these are all true and noble and exactly right. The appeal is correct, but too often the public's view of what these drums mean is a little skewed, cutesy, auxilliary, novel), and because we're demonstrating something from somewhere else, and don't really own it anyway, which to me, tends to devalue the personal time and work I spend on learning this stuff, and respecting the cultures it comes from.

Ah, but I'm in the minority. People just want to have fun, get their yucks on, and be super-cool for a thirty minute set. Some think I question this all too much, that I shouldn't worry about what it means to appropriate another culture's music. I'll say it. I am interested in owning the music. The music. Not the culture it comes from. And that means finding an authentic voice in it that has that extra punch of clarity and energy that comes from the stuff being played right and well. I don't kid myself. I will never sound Cuban, African, Brazilian, or anything else. But at the same time, I know those cultures have a lot to teach me about hitting a drum, if I can deal with tedium, and pain, and struggle, and not kid myself. I know why I hit the thing. I know what it does for me, and how much it has taught me about myself and about human interaction. I don't want to water it down. I want to learn it, play it, make it mine. Then maybe, someday, well beyond my own grave, maybe someone who knew someone who knew someone I played with, can take it back to those other cultures and offer it up to them, something that makes their eyes go wide, their hands sweat, their lips pull into a genuine grin. That would be the best pay and homage I could ever offer. If I can just find the right moment in the time of my life, with the right people. Until then, keep learning, thinking hard about it all, and fuck yo-yos who don't think it matters much. They have no imagination.

Wow! Who'd've Thunk It?

My blog is rated the same as Ron Jeremy! I'm so flattered! Here is why:
The rating was determined on the basis of the presence of the following words:

Dead (15x), Shit (12x), hell (11x), slap (5x), fucking (4x), fucker (3x), gun (2x), bitches (1x)

What the hell is up with this shit? If I had any fucking clue who the fucker is with the potty mouth, I might take a gun to his or her head, and slap the bitches right out of their mouth!

Ok, I wasn't sure how to get bitches into that, but I must say, I'm proud I have an NC-17 site. Percussion is, after all, a place for the seedy and crude. That's been my experience anyway...uh, joking...sort of...

Fashionable Drumming: Part Deux

I hitched a ride to the fashion show with Paul in his Ab5urd Mobile. Ab5urd is on his license plate. Someone had already claimed "absurd" apparently, but it is a fitting moniker nonetheless. The car is about the size of a Matchbox car. Some little red racing thing, with two fat white racing stripes running from front to back, and a mini spoiler on the trunk lid. Of course, as Paul explained, the spoiler is only for show, since the thing is a four cylinder and can nowhere near approach the speed necessary for a spoiler to be of any use. What makes the car truly ab5urd is its owner, Paul, who is something of an intellectual (he's in the writing program with me at Pitt), wears glasses, has a thin, bony frame, and is about as safe and sane as anyone I know. But indeed, he has a conscious sense of the Ab5urd, a trait I certainly appreciate. I have been gradually indoctrinating him into the craft of hand percussion, and he is now one of the surdo players in this troupe that has built up.

The Samba troupe does not have a name yet. There is a fitful attempt to get one democratically, but I fear that it may go on indefinitely, and since I was away in the desert so long, I have lost some authority to put down the fist and say, all right people, get it done! There are many in the troupe who are leaning towards Samba de Trois Rios, which in my opinion is horribly clunky, difficult to say, spelled in a way that is unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't know much about Portuguese, which is almost everyone who will read the name, and will be rather ironic when the troupe steps onto stage and there is not a single Portuguese speaking person amongst them. Oh well. Got to love democracy. My vote is for Hot Metal Samba at this point; it's sleek, sexy, regional without being the typical three rivers shit, and stands out in the mind. There's a famous bridge in Pittsburgh called The Hot Metal Bridge. Dr. Siamak wants to call us Andy Howard, and only he knows why.

Anyway, we make our way to the location of the Fashion Show. We pick up another two people. I cram myself in the back seat, my knees smashed against my chest. Getting in and out of Paul's car requires a bit of athleticism. We drive across a bridge, down an interstate, then, in the middle of the city, turn onto a dirt road, round a bend, and suddenly it is like we could be anywhere in Appalachia. There are no buildings visible through the dense foliage. Off to the left, through spaces in the trees, I can see into a wide green valley, reaching more than a mile across. The dirt road rattles Paul's puny car, but that's okay because I'm packed in firm like a full box of Kleenex. We pass an orange log cabin, although the word "cabin" does not do justice to its size. It's fairly modest, only about half the length of a football field, with decks attached, a separate garage the size of a red barn, a rolling green lawn, plenty of blooming flowers adding splashes of purples, pinks, and blues to the green. A sign points to parking. We continue on, down the dirt road, around another bend, and into a dirt parking lot. I wonder how much land this property is. It reminds me of Tom Wolfe's millionaires, or places where vice president's shoot their friends in the face. I am literally green with envy, the light reflecting from the trees making everything green, a terrible emotion to say the least, but I can not help myself. I dream of how if I had this place I would have drums every night, all night, around great bonfires. In the winter, I would build a vast wigwam, with a fire pit made of stone, where people who knew something real and authentic about drumming would be all the time, making music, making it better.

Ahem. I digress. I snap out of this reverie and make my way back up the dirt road to the cabin. A Porsche and a Mercedes Benz pass me. Some woman in high heels is attempting to walk along the dirt, but her heels keep spiking into the soft earth, and she's moving slowly. She smiles as I pass her, very briefly, a quick flash before she looks at the offending ground again, a look that lets me know this inconvenience is not anything she needs worry about, a trifle really, even though it is driving her mad! The universe conspiring against her, not realizing who she is. Where is the damn conveyor sidewalk when you need it?

There are tents set up in case of rain. I walk down the drive, and down a wooden set of stairs and into the tent area. A vast spread of food is laid out, shrimp, rolls, bruschettas, cheese, plates of fruit, bowls of hummus and dolmas, kalamata olives, meatballs, sausages basted in sweet sauce, piles of peppers, mountains of vegetables. A table full of bottles of white wine chilling, and red wine staying warm sits next to a full keg of beer, which sits next to two ice chests full of green bottles of Heineken. Of course it would be Heineken.

Of course no one is touching the food. No one wants to be the first one. That would perhaps be rude, or roughian. People mingle about here and there. The models for the fashion show are obvious. It's something about the way they stand, the sober expressions on their faces, the fact I can't stop looking at them, even though I would urge them all to eat a steak and drink a glass of milk. This is weirdville. I'm not a part of this, yet here I am again. Music has landed me amongst the living dead once again, once again. Fuck it, I say, and pour myself a beer from the keg, find a plate and pile it high with food. My example sets off a wave of appetites. Somehow the starving artist has given the nouveau riche an example to go by. They indulge without hesitation after that.

Then I see Ricardo. He is the teacher from Brasil, and suddenly this all makes sense. I am learning Samba. We are here as a troupe for a specific purpose. We want to bring Ricardo back next year. He needs a work visa for that to happen. We can get him one with a business sponsor. The people putting on this function own a business. Ah, yes, we have that reason to be here, and we are going to play Samba. I ain't getting paid. In fact, I've been shelling out cash to learn Samba all summer (except for the month I was gone, ahem) so I can play it to help a teacher, and fellow player. Good stuff. That's the rub with this kind of music. The behind-the-scenes. Nothing's for free.

We are supposed to play at 6:30. By 7:30, we're all standing around in our white t-shirts, (mine's black; it was the closest thing I could find to white) still having not played. Some in our troupe of twelve are getting antsy. Kip says, "I hate waiting around to play. It's the one thing about music that really makes me impatient." Uh-huh, I think. You're a lucky one to have only one thing about music that makes you impatient. He's a frigging saint to me. I'm not impatient. I'm getting full of cheese, veggies, and olives, and getting a little boozy, and the sun is getting low in the sky. I'm looking out on the valley behind the house. I try to find any sign of another structure. I can't. I know I am in the metro area of Pittsburgh, but somehow I'm also in the forest. The geography of this place never ceases to confound me. It rained earlier today, then moved on, leaving well formed clusters of clouds for the sunlight to play off of. I can wait.

We are lined up to play. Then a woman comes out and announces what this benefit is for. It's for homeless children in Brasil, which strikes me simultaneously as a good thing and weirdly Ab5urd. I wonder how this works. We are gorging on beer and wine and all sorts of goodies, about to watch slightly thin, and freakishly tall models walk down the runway in extravagantly expensive clothing that I never see anyone actually wear, and all for homeless children in Brasil. I try not to think about it. Dr. Siamak, the one who originally got me involved in this Samba troupe comes over to me and says, "this is why I hate rich people." I say, "But you're a doctor. Doctors are rich." He shrugs. "Yeah, well," he says. I allow the Ab5urdity of it all to sink in, but try to block out the cultural critic in my head urging me to run screaming into the green valley, find a nice rushing stream and wash my hands of it all.

We play. Ricardo is conducting, jumping back and forth, blowing out whistle calls. For the most part the music works well. A Brasilian lady sings, some sort of trancey high pitched thing that reminds me of the Sirens, beckoning hapless Dumb Drum Guys in from the sea, while the models parade down one by one, stopping, turning, flowing pieces of cloth streaming from them like sails and angel's wings. I take it in. Breathe deep, laugh to myself, maybe a bit alone in that laughter, and watch as the people dance, the models take small bites of crackers, the white haired men who drove in expensive convertibles drink Heineken. It's not a bad life sometimes, being a Dumb Drum Guy. Not bad at all. God bless the homeless.

Some images from this event:




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Fashionable Drumming

Tomorrow, yours truly is off to play at a fashion show. That's right, DDG will find himself among the riche and the ritz, in none other than Theresa Heinz's neighborhood here in Pittsburgh, schmoozing it up, drinking Beaujolais, or whatever it is you do at riche people fashion shows, eating bonbons, exotic cheeses, perhaps bear liver. Do you think they'll have bear liver? I've never had it, but it sounds riche and exotic enough for a sophisticated palate.

These are the places music leads me. This is with this Samba troupe I've been drafted into. We have no name yet, but no matter. I'm hoping for Hot Metal Samba, someone else wants to call it Andy Howard. I have no idea why. There are 16 people playing. We'll all be dressed in white, sort of like a backdrop for fashion models; it'll bring out their colors. Apparently the clothes are some new line about to hit stores for rich people. Move over Gucci. I'll be wearing a wife beater and some really old, faded out khakis. No one will notice, or if they do they'll think, how quaint, a starving artist, may I have another bonbon, dear? Ah, yes, the Dumb Drum Guy in action. No finer thing than that. I'll give 'em what for, a day they'll not soon forget, by God! I'll bring the house down! I'll play as if all poor people in the world mattered! I'll let my flag fly! I'll rant and I'll rave! I'll do a Jimie Hendrix Star Spangled Banner on my Repenique. I'll bite the head off a bat! I'll stage dive! I'll smash my drum on the ground and then set it on fire, and me too! Yeah, fire! And I'll vanish in a puff of DDG smoke...

Which Came First? A Masturbatory Question

All right so I made it back to Pittsburgh well enough. Humidity is a blessing, even if it does make drum heads slack. After baking like a cinder under 3% humidity and a punishing sun, it's nice to breathe again, even if it is occasionally what I call the brown fog of Pittsburgh--this random invisible air goo that floats in and sinks on the city. The smell, if it had a color, might be a yellowish brown, sort of like the color of...ah, nevermind.

The Samba group I have been playing with has grown to an impressive 20 or so and seems to be doing quite well. I had my first practice with them yesterday. The strange thing is I am the only Repenique player besides Ricardo. Ricardo, as I mentioned somewhere in an earlier post is from Brazil. I don't know his exact history. He doesn't speak any English, only Portuguese. He grew up around the music and is proficient on all the instruments. The repenique is the lead drum. How has this happened? Why has no one else elected to learn the damn thing while I was gone? It's like they set a plate for the chief, and no one removed it while he was away. I must say, it is somewhat maddening. Ricardo's wife manages the money. Each session costs 15 bucks. I got an email from her saying how great it is that I'm back and that from now until my wedding, I need to take a minimum of one private class a day with Ricardo every single day.

Uh, how do you say "no" in Portuguese? Somehow I think no will work just fine.

That aside, my little bitching rant, I'm impressed with the group. It's brought out some of the finest percussionists in Pittsburgh, a lot of the people I've been trying to meet since I got here. The power of being from somewhere else is demonstrated. It seems to take that to get otherwise flaky musicians out of their holes in the ground. A dumb drum guy has not the authority--yet a dumb drum guy has enough chutzpah to be thrust into the lead and asked to pay hundreds of dollars in order to play at his own wedding --something they have said is required of me: which will again require a "no." Absurd. Truly absurd. Do you not see the endless plight and flounderings of a dumb drum guy? Will it never end? Is there a government institution that handles these sorts of things? Maybe I don't want to know. I'll buck it up. Chin held high and proud, and go nearly mad trying to figure out if Ricardo wants a rim shot or a click on the rim. I had that conversation with him yesterday. It took about an hour. I have no answer.

Okay, so now for my totally masturbatory question: Which came first, the drum or the rhythm? Did the drum beget certain rhythms? Or did certain rhythms require the begetting of a particular drum with a particular sound?

Yes, feel free to get creative with any response you might have.

Now I need to learn about 800 breaks from a recording so I don't have to give all my wedding money to Ricardo. Bye fer now...

The Rhetoric of the Homeless

It's been another long haul since I put anything here. I've been heavily involved in a class in rhetoric, and it is about all I have thought about. Well, that and pool and playing music, but some things got swept under the carpet.

That said, this is my last post from the desert for now. Tomorrow I make my way back east, to the hustle and bustle of the city with its sirens, honking horns, loud workers, diverse peoples, energy and pulse.

The thing I most note about this place is that it is not really a home. Although I spent nine years here, it never quite fit. In those nine years I spent here, I spent four of them homeless, living in tents in the woods, and eventually out of the back of an old 85 Chevy station wagon. I loved waking up in the woods out here, smelling the pines on the dry air (today's humidity is at 3%). But it's also tiring. You drag yourself from one spot to the next, often looking for shade, sometimes for food. I know the feeling too well, and living in a dorm room has reminded me of it.

The homeless have all sorts of rhetoric. One guy came up to me the other day. I was sitting on the patio at the pool haul. He looked at me with teeth missing, stringy hair snaking from under the brim of a ball cap and asked me for some cash. I gave him the least resistant response I know, "Sorry, man. No cash. I only use a card." A terribly classist thing to say, but I wasn't in the mood. I'd been hit up a few times already. He said, "I'm trying to get a beer. I ain't going to lie." Sometimes they say this. He didn't believe my bit about the card, and he was trying to ingratiate himself, build his ethos as it were, that he was honest enough not to lie about what he was going to use the money for. He knows a lot of beggars say they're hungry, or at least he thinks he knows. I really don't know what he knows, but I've heard that line a hundred times. "No cash," I repeated.

Then there's my friend who just dumped his girlfriend of 3 and a half years. He's now homeless in an entirely different way. He's couch surfing now. "There's a freedom in it," he says. "You don't have to worry about the landlord." Which is just another way of saying that being homeless sucks, and he's going to miss his life, and he's wrecked inside and sucking it up like any red blooded American man should do.

Then there's Gene whose dog, Toy, died a few months back. I've always called him the rose guy, and if you've ever been here, you would know who he is. He limps around town with a cane and and a bouquet of roses he sells for five dollars. He has some sort of degenerative illness and he shakes. But he's got a niche here. The town buys his flowers, some because he is an oddity and they are from somewhere else and the man wants to impress the woman he's with. Others buy them because they feel it is their duty. Others because they feel guilty. Still others move across the room. Whatever the reason, Gene has found a way, whether he meant to or not, to persuade the world to throw him a bone. The pool hall is hosting a benefit to raise money to get him a new assistance dog.

Then there's me. I guess I am technically not homeless, and these guy's plights are far worse than my current one. But I feel that way I used to feel as a homeless person. Weirdly accepting of things, quiet to discomfort. I am reminded of these things right now in this white walled dorm room with its rattling blinds and plastic mattress, and also certain that I would prefer not to feel them. I could do without instability. But I will say this as well, knowing what it feels like and how to weather moments of stasis is definitely a bonus.

All right then. Enough of these sentimental musings. When next I write, it will be back in my own space, with my own drums, my own people around, a kitchen--god bless having a kitchen--and a screaming cat.

Familiarity has its Advantages: Some Thoughts on Tempo

So I went downtown the last two nights because I had nothing better to do. I could sit and stare at the white brick walls of my dorm room. I could plink away at this bad novel I'm writing. I could maybe even find some Nascar on the TV I borrowed from Target. But oh, how downtown beckons, the call of the wild, the promise of adventure, of conversation, of human interaction...to much to resist.

So, alone, I wandered downtown. Both nights I ended up at Charly's, The Weatherford Hotel
It was always a favorite haunt, a classy place, a place you are wonderfully encouraged to get as drunk as you possibly can. It's got an old west kind of feel carefully cultivated with a very modern class. The upstairs bar and balcony are called the Zane Grey Ballroom, or Zane's for us local yocals. It's named after the old Wild Wild West author that used to hang out here. His black and white portrait hangs over the fireplace, his observant, strangely sober looking face watching the guests, perhaps logging info for writing about. I think it's the colors of the place that make it so appealing, deep crimson and rich brown wood, that and the way the floors creak and moan. The actual bar in Zane's was imported from Tombstone, from some famous bar down there that the likes of Billy the Kid, and Jesse James used to haunt. Ah the history, the Wild Wild West. The bartenders are the same as before, knew me on sight, didn't bother to ask what I wanted, had it in front of me with a cheery hello before I could even grin.

The Foot Soljahs were playing. That's the latest name and incarnation of roughly the same group of guys who have been playing together around here for years. They've gone by such diverse names as Shredlocks, Sai Baba, and now the Foot Soljahs. It always happens: one guy in the band gets pissed off or bored with the situation, the band dissolves for a few months, and then is reborn again under a different name. I have often sat in with these guys, though not surprising, I don't know all their names, and I'm sure they don't all know mine. But I am always welcome.

Anyway, the style of music they play, if I might be so bold, I would call white boy reggae. I'm not a huge fan of reggae. I don't mind it. It's good in the background when shooting pool, but it is...well...rather monotonous to me. But it's fun to play for a while. They have a percussionist (although many would argue he is not a percussionist, just a nice man with a lot of drums), who has openly admired my playing, but never really had the desire, or tenacity, or interest to learn any traditional rhythms and constructs. Strangely enough though, he thinks he has. Dumb Drum Guys UNITE!

His set up includes three congas, which he always has set up with the Tumba (the lowest) on the left. He does the same with the bongos. He is also right handed, and for those of you out there who may have studied traditional conga playing, this is..well..backwards. But not in this setting. This guy somehow seems to fit in in a weird way. I'm never quite sure what he's doing. It's never really a groove, it's more of an ornamental confusion that works well in the drunken, pot and opium soaked haze where this music situates itself. He also has a set of timbales, the hembra (the low drum) cranked to a moaning pitch, the macho (the high drum) not cranked enough. I think they're tuned to about a fourth instead of an octave. But whatever. Something to do for a lonely dumb drum guy on a lonely weekend night in a lonely busy town.

So here's the thing I notice with tempo in this sort of music and in a lot of music that does not specifically stem from, or is lead by, percussion. About one out of three songs, maybe less, has a tempo that fits well. In this music you either play at its crunching slow pace, emphasized by the upbeats on the guitar, and by the slow-mo-pot-land-drag-it-down, which can be painfully slow, or you can try to double it, which then becomes painfully busy. I wonder what that's all about. I'm sure there are music theory freaks out there that could talk a lot of jargon about time signatures and length of notes etc...but that doesn't help much. I found myself, with each new song, wandering through the brief catalogue of rhythms that I felt fit in this setting; I've never played cascara so slow in my life for so long and found it a unique challenge. I tried to double the time on it. That wasn't right either.

So what is tempo exactly? Just saying how many beats per minute is too simplistic. There's something more. Try playing a Kuku rhythm over a Garth Brooks tune, or Bombo with AC/DC. Even if the beats per minute are there, the tempo isn't. I'm not exactly sure what I'm saying. Maybe someone else can help me wrestle with this. The mystery of tempo...

Where Does the Time Go?

Holy moley! I looked at the time of my last post, and I got to say I had no idea it's been this long since I posted. The desert will do that to you. The sun beats you down, sucks the water from the bottoms of your feet out the top of your head. I've been staying in a dorm room. It's a white painted brick cubicle with a plastic mattress for a bed. Terribly uninspiring. There's some guy across the hall who likes to keep his door open, plays exploding war games on the computer, and bathes himself in Tag Body Spray. Strangely enough, despite the image the commercials offer, there are never women in his room.

I've had a few musical experiences thus far, but nothing noteworthy: a night in Heritage Square where some old fucker came up and started randomly whacking on the congas. We waited for him to move on. He grinned, had a great time, then moved on, inspired by the machinations of dumb drum guyness.

Responding to the drums is universal. Responding to them in a way that does not make drummers cringe is another thing...

But, anyway, I was stunned when I saw how long I'd not said anything here. It seems like I just got here, in this itty-bitty Southwest town, and at the same time I've been here a million years. This blog has inadvertently become a mile marker. There's something about this town that makes people talk a lot about doing things, and then they never quite follow through. I wonder about that, and I wonder about the tenacity I had out here to make things happen. I certainly did when I first got out here. I had grand ideas about the West, about savvy folks freeing their minds, about open frontiers and organic gardens, hippies communing with nature in all the right ways, institutions torn down, corporate America held fiercely at bay by the simple truth of the people who inhabited the place.

I got here, and there was nothing, no drums, no Africans, no Cubans (well there was one, but that is another story), so, naive as I was, I made something happen. Built up the almighty Ashe Drum and Dance. Through thick and thin, through drama and love affairs, I kept that fucker alive, gasping for air at times, but alive. Now, returning, I see that what plagues this country most, that is, Apathy, is best exemplified here. Driving SUVs to environmental gatherings is so filled with irony I don't know where to start and don't intend to. This is a terribly friendly, unfriendly town. Maybe it's because it is so small. Maybe it's because it is so transient. Maybe both. People know that everyone will leave soon, and yet everyone is so familiar, and so what happens is the bridge is never quite thrown all the way over the canyon of familiarity. Faces remain exactly the same. The person beneath never excavated for its complexity. People are polite, wry, postpolitical, postreligious, so, so free, drying up in the crystal clear air, skin flaking and shedding everywhere, DNA strewn about like the clumpy lava rocks that piled this place 7000 feet into the sky.

I see the same homeless bums wandering about. Gene, the rose guy, his foot lame, his hands shaking with some sort of ailment, well known by any and all around here, cared for through buying his roses. The dog that used to wander the bars and restaurants with him is no longer by his side, gone even higher than the peaks that loom 13,000 feet above the city, always north, always bigger than anything else, like Zeus, some great caretaker that never shows his face exactly. The Kachinas live up there. Best not to go.

Benny is somehow still alive, still drunk as shit any time of the day or night, jumping out of bushes, his brown pinched Indian face harmless but frightening, speaking the truth of here...no one really connects all that much...No one really understands what is going on...No one really knows they are supposed to try...or else they don't care. Everyone has a Benny story. I've got a deck of cards worth of Benny stories.

Then the old man, the soul of Flagstaff I used to call him, his head bent towards the ground. There's something about his face that is noble, but his hands, holding a burning cigarette he can barely get to his mouth, shake with palsy. He's still wearing the same navy blue pants as when I left, the same blue hoodie, the zipper still broken. He's never begged from me. I don't know how he survives.

On and on it seems to go, an endless parade of familiarity that has made me wonder how I could have once called it home. It's a sad place, but I think I may be the only one that openly sees it. The rest smile, nod to each familiar face, think how grand it is to be in a place populated by such characters, characters that make them think they are part of something original and new.

Back in the Desert

So I made it out here safe and sound. Back to this little mountain town, and man is it little. Nothing has changed here, well not much anyway. There are a few shops that have closed down, a few others have moved elsewhere. I have the peculiar tendency of running into people I know everywhere I go. I was walking through a back parking lot, bam, there's Sal. I'm in Safeway, Bam, You Jin and Erkan. Go to the bar, there is no dearth of familiar faces. But something is significantly different. I am.

And that's not a bad thing. I've got this weird East/West dialog going on in my head; I can't help but compare the two. Out West the East is thought of as a place not to go, that it's backwards, devoid of freedom. It's the same old mythos of the Wild Wild West thriving today. People back east often wonder why anyone from out West would ever go back that way. You mention the West, and it seems like it's a million miles away, a place like Mars, only more exotic, filled with wild types, and wide sandy beaches, beautiful people who knew better, who got out while they could. But got out from what?

Both halves of this country got it wrong. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm generalizing. I'll call myself on it before you do, dear reader. But there's truth in this. Everyone in the West is zipping around at a million miles an hour. No one stops for anything. There is an urgency and an energy about the place. Faces are familiar, but beyond familiarity, they aren't much more. It's a shiny veneer signifying very little. I always wondered why I often felt alone out here. Now, it makes sense. Back East is old. You've got generations of people settled in one place. There are generations of architecture, and in Pittsburgh there are all sorts of different people. Go to the bus stop on a rainy morning and crowd inside the shelter with Asians, Blacks, Latinos, old people, young people, Thai people, rich people, poor people. No one really bothers with each other, or bothers each other. You become secure inside a place where your outward identity is of no consequence. Get on the bus and the feeling deepens. You're all just one mass entity. Someone may speak up on the bus, or there might be some crazy fucker muttering to himself about how he could have been rich, should have been rich, and no one pays him no mind. He challenges someone to move outside this safety zone of anonymity, but no one really does. It's just natural, the way things are, the dude's got his problems, just like I got mine.

Then you get off the bus and reemerge into your own individuality.

There's something real about all that. People talk loudly in the East. People are polite out here, a trait I was never very good at. People out East are blunt. If they don't like you, they tell you so. Out here, if they don't like you, they tell somebody else and wonder if it will get back to you. The land out here is not so cut up, at least not in the Southwest, but that's because nothing but things with claws and poison can live here. There is something so gorgeous in this land, and something so unassimilable. My puny human brain can only look in awe at the vast tracks of dusty nothingness that leap and bound across the earth, running occasionally into craggy peaks and ridges, great serrated knives, their blades paying homage to the sky.

I think it is because this place remains novel in our American consciousness that is becoming what it is becoming--a place where no one stays, and if they do it's because they can make a fortune, or because they like driving SUVs to environmental rallies, being middle aged and a sensitive ponytail guy.

I played at a party Saturday night. It was this 2.5 acre spread up Shultz Pass Road. It had several buildings, one of which housed an indoor pool. Best to keep them indoor in the desert--helps preserve water. The whole ranch would sell for god knows what bajillions of dollars to some Californicating asshole. The funny thing was, the crowd was full of sensitive pony tail guys with a lot of money. They're not a bad lot; there's just something surreal about them. They try desperately to be part of a land that does not want them, that continually rejects them. You see it in their lined and dried skin, in their ponytails, and earth tone button down shirts. I tried to play with a couple guitarists. Of course, I am the Dumb Drum Guy. They told me to stop. I was trodding on their sentimentality, their communion with the San Francisco Peaks. They were also, as many guitarists who play solo do, having a hard time keeping a steady beat. I played African drums for a bit. I was invited to do so. A very drunk woman got on a microphone and started moaning into it, I guess having some spiritual encounter with the gods of beer, maybe even the Kachinas who are said to live only mere miles away in the forest. I had to stop. Ole Sam Paisley scolded me for being cynical. I wondered if he even knew what the word meant. But Ole Sam Paisley is another story. I always find it funny getting scolded about my behavior by him. He mythologizes me and finds it his duty to let me know what he thinks. Most of the time I think he's talking about himself. For those of you out there who may know who I'm referring to, you no doubt understand my meaning.

But enough of all that. In the end, I wonder if I might be more suited to the East, to talking loud and speaking my mind, to not taking it all that seriously. I do know for certain that man, this town is small. It's kind of creeping me out. Better go bang on drums and get run out by the cops again. It's happened only once thus far in my stay here, and that, is simply unacceptable.

This One Is for My Wife

She'll Know Why

Who Says Rhythm Is Just a Human Thing?

Check It

Back to the Desert

I'm headed back to the desert tomorrow, back to where I used to be before Pittsburgh. The timing is a little off. The wave of music is about to crash over my head here in Pittsburgh. I can feel it coming. My Samba group has been working with a guy named Ricardo. I don't know his last name. He's from Brazil, grew up around the Samba Schools there, and is here in Pittsburgh for the summer. He does not speak any English. Well, actually that is not true. As I was driving him to our practice, I got lost--yes, it's always Pittsburgh--and he looked at me and said, "Ah, shit." Cross cultural communication. Gotta love it.

Anyway, under his tutelage, I'm finally getting somewhere with the subtlety of the repenique. I have always admired the instrument, but never gave Samba the same devotion I have given to Afro-Cuban and African styles. But now, with him here, that's changing, and I'm leaving. But just for a month. It's the only month out of the four of summer that I'm working. The pay is great, and three months off is nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to pass up. And besides, I'm going back to that willy-nilly, desert town full of liberals and indians, rich people and hippies, and all its small town drama. When I was there, whether I wanted it or not, and most of the time I didn't, I was king of the hill in the percussion scene. It's a teeny little hill. Wonder what stories will come from this adventure? In the meantime, here's a video of the repenique:





And here's an entire Samba School:





And this has nothing to do with why I like Samba:

Audition

I know both of my readers out there are dying to know about my audition. I just got back from it. I did indeed get slightly lost this time, but so it goes. The audition was at the YMCA in Homewood. Homewood is considered one of the worst neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. Whether this is true or not, I have no idea. Sometimes I wonder about claims like that--I wonder who makes them, and what measuring stick they use. Sometimes I wonder if a neighborhood is called worse because it is a black neighborhood. Anyway, I did not see another white person around, and it felt good to be a minority in my own skin. I don't know why, but it always challenges me to find a deeper sense of my own identity.

The YMCA is a new facility. I enter, ask a guy at the front desk, "This the right place for the Umoja auditions?" His expression is stony. "Sign in." He motions to a sign in sheet. I sign my name. "Up the stairs and to the left." He takes a bite from an apple. I go back out to my truck and get my djembe then go back in and walk by him with a grin and say, "Thanks." He doesn't smile back. He seems vaguely surprised by me, but that might just be in my head. Not only am I white, with a djembe, but I am also, by most standards, clean cut, and dressed neutral and conservative. No dreadlocks, no red, yellow, and green Rasta hat, trailing no wake of patchouli. Ah the stereotypes.

I walk down the hall. A couple guys are shooting baskets on the court I pass. Some sort of knitting circle is going on in another room. I climb the stairs and turn left. Through a window next to a door I see three young women standing in a row and another row of women seated. One of the women standing is wearing a lapa. I'm guessing this must be the right place, but I'm not entirely sure. Then I see that Mama Kadiatou is seated there. She's wearing a saffron colored dress of sorts with loose sleeves, and her head is wrapped in a matching cloth. One of the women standing notices me with my drum and smiles then crosses over, opens the door, peeks her head out and says, "Oh, the drum class isn't this week."

Somewhat confused I say, "Uh, isn't there an audition."

"Oh yes, yes, yes," she says. "Come on in."

I enter. Another woman, who was seated, brings me a form on a clipboard to fill out. I sit down and begin the task. It asks for references, performances done, availability, willingness to travel, contact information. I'm filling it out when I suddenly realize, not only am I the only white one in the room, not only am I the only male, but I'm also the only one with a drum. S-okay by me, I s'pose. I had no idea what I was in store for anyway. Then one of the women goes in a closet on the left, and suddenly there are djembes and dununs playing over a speaker system. Mama Kadiatou says something to the woman wearing the lapa I can't quite make out. She has a loud voice, but it is thick with a Guinea accent. She says something to the effect, "just do what you do." The woman dances. She smiles. She looks comfortable. This isn't new to her.

The next woman comes up. I notice that she is standing sideways to Mama Kadiatou, looking at her from over her shoulder. She's nervous. Mama Kadiatou says with a smile, "I can leave the room, you know. You come to the dance class all the time. I see you. I know what you do. If you want, I can leave the room for you." The others laugh. It's good natured. Mama Kadiatou is setting this scared deer in the headlights at ease. "So you want me to stay?" she says.

The woman nods, and barely says, "yes."

"GOOD!" Mama says and claps her hands. "You just do what you do. Anything."

The girl is a bit heavy on her feet, and the nerves are obvious. Mama keeps nodding her head at her and quietly clapping time.

And me? Am I nervous? Nah. Why worry? Because I got three hours of sleep? Because I had insomnia? Because I had a dream about all this where dundun sticks were chasing me up the hole of a djembe? No, man, I'm good.

So my turn comes up. A woman places a chair in the middle of the room. If it weren't for the shiny wood dance floor, and the large window looking out at a clear blue sky over the city, I might feel like I was about to be interrogated. She tells me to play something. "Anything?" I say.
"You know, I just want to see the hands," she says. "Just play anything. I can get up and dance if you want."

I play the call for Kuku and hit the accompaniment, then move quickly through a few other rhythms, play some random tone and slap gladbabble, play the call and stop.

"OH!" Mama says and claps her hand. "You see?" She addresses this to the others around who are smiling at me. "He plays the call. You see? You have to have the call. There are so many. They don't know the call. You don't know the call, you don't know the rhythm. Can you play something else for me?"

"Okay." I play the call for Tiriba and the accompaniment.

Again Mama cries, "OH!" and claps her hands. One woman starts in on a dance step for Tiriba. I play the call out, and Mama leans forward with a clap on the final beat. "You see?" she says to everyone again. "It don't matter you black, white, or blue. You play it, you play it."

"That's it?" I say.

"That's it," Mama says and tells me to come to the dance class on Tuesday. "Give me a hug," she says. "I did not think anyone would play Tiriba for me today."

So there it is. I guess I got the part. No idea what it is. I heard Mama Kadiatou talking about performing for 13,000 people in D.C. I think I heard it right. I hope not. Or maybe I hope so.

And another thing about it all: She's right. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, or blue. If you got it, you got it. But, if I hadn't been white, she never would have said it. There's nothing wrong with looking at color, and with looking at its so-called absence. Somebody gonna tell me I ain't got no color? Somebody gonna tell me white boys ain't got no rhythm? Uh-huh...

Guaguanco

The Suns lost, dammit. Guess I'll have to get back to playing. I found this labeled as Guaguanco. It seems to me to be somewhere between that and Mozambique. Either way, it's got a nice groove.

Non Sequitur

I'm also a big Sci-Fi, special effects buff. Here is the first sci-fi movie ever made.

A Trip to the Moon

And while I'm at it, and not practicing my congas or getting ready for my audition on Saturday, I am completely pissed off at the NBA. Basketball is the only sport I ever really got into--well, apart from MMA and other martial arts--and the Phoenix Suns are my team. Something happens when you connect with a team. You start acting like they're your child or something. You feel their triumphs and disappointments viscerally. You lay awake at night hoping they'll make it all the way to the finals and win the gold! This year, the Suns have a great chance. They're tied two to two with the San Antonio Spurs. The Spurs are a dirty team. Robert Horry body checked Steve Nash into the tables on the side. He checked him hard; it was no accident. Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw were on the bench, and of course they got up and started out onto the floor. Who wouldn't? They got corralled pretty quick, but the NBA has a rule that no one can get off the bench during an altercation. So what happens? Stoudemire and Diaw get suspended for one game, game five, which is tonight in Phoenix. So this cat Horry slams Nash, and Phoenix pays the price. Dirty pool, I say. Another guy from the Spurs kneed Nash in the groin in game three. They're a dirty team, and if they win, it's because they cheat, and they need to think long and hard about that, the bullies.

I like basketball because it reminds me of music, the interweaving interplay of team members slicing through struggle. But right now, I hate the NBA. But I'll tell you this, when game five comes on tonight, I'll be sitting there biting my nails the whole way through.

Another Great Woman Drummer

Sheila E is just so calm in the storm.

Something to Watch Before Practice

Or any other time for that matter, for any other reason.

Found Them!

Sule Greg Wilson says in his poem, The Percussionist:

The movers and the shakers/the World Rhythm makers...
Those folks ain't pressed on vinyl.

You'll find them in a basement.
You'll meet them in a park.
At a party or a family reunion.
Or maybe even backstage,
Greeting again, secure and rested,
Folks who used to be
Their students.

Their road.
Their Truth
Is not in beating and fronting.

It's in guiding spirits
And divining signs
And spreading the Word
And Living It.
And Playing it
Deep inside.
I found them. Or were they sent to me?

Well, in my case, I found them...maybe...maybe they were sent to me. Either way, I'm in with the West African drummers in Pittsburgh. Mama Kadiatou is a bright light in the bunch, the mamma-jamma that nobody messes with. And they shouldn't. She's the head honcho for Umoja. She's also got a great smile, and despite her age--she's in her mid fifties--she's fit as a fiddle and looks not a day over thirty. There's a dundun player from Guinea named Aboubacar. He's a monster on the duns. Apparently he's a great dancer as well. There's a Senegalese djembe player named Youssou Lo who's got the slap and feel, that funky swing like two notes just so-so closer together than they could ever be written. Mama Kadiatou's son, Nick Spivey (not sure how that name happens, but I'm sure I'll find out at some point) is 20 years old, but he's got some chops. I met all these cats and more in a cafeteria. Kelly invited me. She occasionally plays in my little dumb drum group Samba thing. But she vouched for me. Which is good because from what I understand, and hear, from Kelly and others, is that the Pittsburgh scene likes to stay Black. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I was the only person of non-color in the room.

I'll tell you too, I got the giddies as soon as I walked in. Not because I'm white, but because I heard the djembe speaking. Nothing gets me quite like that, and it's been a long time. Kelly told me to use one of her drums, a great big flat djembe. I didn't care about that either. Or about the fact I have no calluses left, or the fact that my hands were going to hurt (and did) for a few days after. I just sat there grinning like a kid with a mouthful of candy and playing accompaniment. Kelly told me later they were all impressed with my playing, and I am going to audition for them. Go figure. I'd actually get paid to play djembe. The White Tornado, aka The Dumb Drum Guy strikes again!

And this time, it's a great position, which will no doubt lead to some lines of inquiry that I'm interested in. As it says in the description of this blog, I'm interested in the way djembe is being enculturated into the U.S. My position here, hopefully, if all goes as planned, will be as something of a bridge between worlds and races. I've got the chops and credentials to get past color, but I've also got the skin to work with all these drum circleites running amok who are interested in learning traditional rhythms. We'll see what comes of it. New drama awaits! Apathy is a disease of the mind, and may the underachievers of the world unite in their bed-wetting!

Did I find the drummers? Did they find me? Who cares? Let's play!