Some months ago, a friend and colleague called. Her good friend moved out of the country and she was missing someone to go out and play with. So, she asked if I would like to take a Gavilan community education class with her? How about African Caribbean drumming? I have a bad habit of doing things just because certain people ask me to. Just on the basis of my relationship with and trust in someone, I sometimes find myself in the strangest places or doing things I never thought I would have, especially when I myself am in a rut of doing the same old same old.
Which is how I found myself whomping on a conga drum in a classroom at Gavilan College at dinner time on a Thursday night six weeks in a row. I was a woodwind player growing up and while I admired the drummers in our groups (they’re like soccer goalkeepers and water polo players … they seemed to have an extra screw-loose-and-fun gene), drumming never ever crossed my mind as something for me. I’ve found I love it. It’s like dancing – there’s one rhythm that is like doing the Tarantella – but with your hands.
The class was led by a young Gavilan sociology professor. He introduced us to African and Caribbean rhythms a little bit at a time, helping us with some basic beats, and then introducing us to those more intricate and intermediate ones. To keep up, some of us would focus without blinking on imitating his hands. Others would close their eyes. It seemed whenever we veered from however we kept rhythm, something would throw us off. I’d find myself laughing a lot. Sometimes, it’s from the look of concentration on a fellow drummer’s face or a look of being in the zone on another’s; most often, it’s just the shear joy of moving to a beat and having nothing else at all to do but that right at that moment. But often by laughing, I’d lose my own ability to keep the beat and it would be hard to just fall in wherever they all were.
So, the class leader would say: “Get back to the bass. Whenever you get lost, or things get too complicated, get back to the bass.”
Since the class ended, some of us have followed the class leader’s recommendation and have visited with a Congolese master drummer, Ma Boukaka, a man in his 80s, who hosts an “all-comers jam session” of folks, from beginners like us to the advanced like our leader. We gather in one of the most fun preschool settings I’ve ever been in. (I love to just bask in the kids’ art and projects displayed on every available surface. The children seem cherished and loved).
The group includes Brad, who brings his drum wrapped in the duffle bag he used when he fought in the Korean War. In addition to rhythms, Ma Boukaka teaches us chants and songs, which we attempt with varying degrees of success, more heart and desire than ability. And invariably, we get lost. And our class leader, who has resumed his participation with Ma Boukaka with us, steps in and reminds us: “Just get back to the bass.”
My friends and I have found that it’s not just for drumming, but elsewhere in our lives, too, where we need to remind ourselves, or need our friends to remind us, to get back to the bass. When I struggle, which is a lot right now, I am reminded to get back to the bass.
As much as try to keep them simple, I struggle with too many simple things that get complicated. My needs around what I expect of myself as a wife, a mother of teenagers, a member of an extended loving family, an active member of a community, and how I contribute to it, sometime throw me off rhythm when things converge too much at the same time.
And, as my friend has advised, I sometimes just take a break from it all to go and whomp on that conga that sits in my living room. I start with that bass, the beat that gives any rhythm not only its structure, but its fullness of sound. It brings the physical to the philosophical, the literal and the figurative all together. And, as always, I laugh.
Columnist Dina Campeau is a wife, mother of two teens and a resident of Morgan Hill. Her work for the last seven years has focused on affordable housing and homeless issues in Santa Clara County. Her column will be published each Friday. Reach her at
dc******@ch*****.net
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