“Music for Six Percussionists and One Apartment” – Sounds of Noise

I absolutely loved this video when first I came across it, which must be almost 20 years ago now. I adored the tongue-in-cheek humor and serious devotion to craft. Plus, despite the unorthodox ‘instruments’, sound textures and blends, the musicianship is seen as top notch if you pay attention. The video and live music is one answer to what for some artistes and classical students arises as a deeply potent existential question in this 21st century, where the arts and economic life are in a state of constant warfare: What to do if you are six recent percussion graduates of the music academy in modern-day Denmark? All I can do is say watch & listen. Try it twice: once while observing the video and then again with eyes closed, focusing only on the rhythms.

There’s a backstory to all this, a confluence of several related trends in social music and my own biography. During the ’90s hand drumming became a thing for amateurs. Open classes sprang up teaching the basic techniques and traditional rhythms of middle eastern dumbeks, north African goatskin frame drums, and west African djembes. The dumbek is a beautiful goblet-shaped drum often used to accompany belly dancers. The djembes eventually became the most popular because of their spectacular volume. It wasn’t too difficult to learn their three basic hand strokes: the flat open palm bass, the rim tone, and the rifle-shot-like slap. Then it was a matter of building speed and accuracy while learning various combinations of strokes which made up well-known rhythms. It took real skill to become a soloist but a novice could make some noise after a year or so. And make noise they did. This was a problem for several of my friends who’d developed a desire to get a little more subtle in smaller ensembles. Djembes tend to be un-subtle. Besides, we noticed that almost nobody was bothering to learn and practice the traditional beats of Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Ghana which were complex and consisted of polyrhythms, meaning interlocking parts of various complimentary rhythm sequences. That sort of stuff required too much listening and restraint while the typical weekend party warrior wanted to zone out into a familiar 4/4 rock-and-roll beat and bang away for hours in communal bliss till their hands fell off.

There were a few famous percussion-oriented ensembles back even before the 90s which tried interesting things. Blue Man Group started out like this in Manhattan, combining heavy robotic theatrics with alien non-speaking personae and miles of PVC tubing. It has since moved on to become a worldwide brand affiliated with Cirque du Soleil accounting for hundreds of shows per year. There was also the Bang A Can festival every summer which got its start exploring the acoustic potentials of garbage cans and various car engine parts, often attracting a break dancer or two. It has now morphed into a kind of avant/post-jazz showcase for anything outré or experimental.

As for myself, after messing around with percussion with a small band of friends for some years I eventually moved to Montréal where I studied Indian classical tabla drumming for a few years with an expert. Everything tabla is about the fingers, which become very strong and independent, I can attest. One soon discovers however that no matter how much you love the sound, you cannot really do too much with other musicians for a long time. And finding the learning curve too lengthy at age fifty I found myself switching to Irish fiddling of all things, which is delightfully social and approachable as a discipline, if one finds the right teachers. A few years later a grass roots phenomenon took shape in the various underground metro stations of Montreal city. Often at rush hour, an anonymous group of twenty or more traditional musicians, watches synched, would appear from nowhere, coming from every angle, to some open space platform, brandishing fiddles, accordions, flutes, guitars, bozoukis, bagpipes and so on. Whereupon an equally anonymous leader would call out 1-2-3 and ten minutes or so of traditional Quebecois music (closely related to traditional Irish) would ring out. People need the arts. And the people who are infected by it have a deep need to expose it.

_______RS

Notes: (Public Service Announcement) I discovered later in life than usual that learning a musical instrument is light years easier and more fun than usually suspected. Many people do not realize how well their ears have been trained simply via decades of listening to music! You just passionately apply the same sort of exploratory, open, and curious mental qualities as you do to something like creative writing, for example. You needn’t become a virtuoso in order to function. Plus, it is a sensual and physical undertaking, which makes practice very relatable. In my 40s I got pretty into three of the percussive traditions mentioned above: dumbek (also known as darbuka), frame drum, and djembe. It is even a bit easier to approach nowadays (compared to when I did it) due to the plethora of great instructional videos out there in YouTube-land. In the spirit of inspiration, have a look at these samples, and if you get hooked, go fishing:

the Yankadi rhythm, said to imitate a strutting elephant, perhaps aroused 🙂 …

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