Mickey and Baba

I wanted this project to have a focus that’s tied to where I am now—Southwestern Minnesota and the culture of the drum in Lakota—while also wanting to widen my focus at some point to include the role of the drum in worldwide culture. As I gather sources together on these global aspects of the drum, I experience a musical treat. Listening to Mickey Hart’s album “Planet Drum” gives me a peek, a wider view, into the use of drums in the wide variety of cultures that span the globe. On this album, Hart, the long time co-drummer for the Grateful Dead, and ethnomusicologist and drum researcher in his own right, brought together great percussion players from cultures around the world--India, Africa, South America, and the Middle East—to create a drum and percussion only album. It’s awesome listening. The liner notes indicate some of the ideas that Hart is trying to convey—that drumming is old, and is considered a sacred and connecting force among people and cultures.

In the liner notes to the Planet Drum CD, Hart says something meaningful about drum’s legacy of furthering humanity’s creative impulse; he wanted to reflect “the countless ways devised by humans over time to make rhythm and noise….there is no end to the variety and expanse of percussion instruments, and no limit to the sound and rhythms which those instruments make possible.” I’m impressed by Hart’s words here, and in his emphasis on sound, rhythm, and even an outlook on eternity, in humanity’s attachment to rhythm. While talking about the inspiration for the “Temple Caves” song, I like that he connects drumming and rhythm to an ancient and imaginary world where the roots of musical rhythm first took hold, in prehistoric dancers doing a ritual dance in a cave, playing the cave’s rock formations as percussion instruments. That drums are used in ritual and spiritual ways is a thread that is woven throughout the stories of drumming that I’ve read, and Hart keys into that here.

I’m also going to read parts of the companion book to the CD, which explores the history of the drum in more depth. In my book stack is also Babatunde Olatunji’s “The Beat of My Drum: An Autobiography”. Olatunji, from Nigeria, is one of the most famous African percussion players in the world, and was instrumental in bringing African drum rhythms to American popular culture (including the American cultural phenomenon of “drum circles”) in the 50’s and 60’s.