"Give Some To The Drummer!"

Most people who know me know I'm a drummer. Never mind the fact that I've not sat behind a kit for any length of time in ten years. I’ve found that passage of time is largely inconsequential to things like that. Time, however, is the focus of this rumination.

Drumming gets into your soul. I know it was true for me, and I suspect I’m not the only one. Once I was introduced to and embraced the romance of percussion, everything became, in one way or another, about rhythm, cycles and the Beautiful Repetition. I’m not given to mathematics at all, but this was one objective left-brained structure that I ‘got’. Solid 4/4 time, 4 beats to a measure, 16 bars to a verse, downbeat on the 2 and 4, or the elegant 7/8 time, with its jazz nuances and endless variety of punctuations. Here was a structure could be trusted. It was the palette for thousands of hours of aimless driving and countless nights in the attic of Weem’s Music Store in my hometown, when various incarnations of ‘the band’ would thrash away during high school for the entire evening, until sunrise.

The current and pervasive theory about the universe in general is that It all turns on so-small-as-to-be-invisible quantum rubber bands of energy and their relational vibrations. Superstring Theory, it's called. I tend to believe it's true, lacking any contradictory evidence. And it’s easy for me to believe this, based on precedent. Patterns, relationships, all the cycles of expectation and fulfillment seem to drive, satisfy, and order nature. A biological example of this is demonstrated in the fact that even our hearts beat in time, some say to the rhythm of the heart of Universe. I prefer to think they beat in concert with the angels, in the empty time between God’s own heart beat, but that’s just me, and I tend to be a bit too romantic at times.

So forget all the jokes about drummers and drumming: “How many people are in your band? Three musicians and a drummer,” Very funny. Personally, I believe interplay with the basis of the universe is a pretty cool way to spend an evening. Shakespeare once said that “All the world’s a stage”. I like to think it’s one big drum set, too. And I will avail myself at every opportunity. Tu-dum-dum!

“Give some to the drummer.”-James Brown

Right on.