One of the wonderful things about US culture is that the people have a fresh approach to things where tradition is not much of a hindrance to innovation. This is true of practical inventions (blue jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts) as well as the arts. This openness to new ideas has enriched US culture with new forms of expression that the rest of the world has embraced enthusiastically. Perhaps the epitome of this in the music world is rock and roll. The melding of African, Afro-Cuban, gospel, and Scotch-Irish musical forms into the blues, jazz, country, and, ultimately, rock and roll was a clear example of the open, creative nature of North Americans. Not only has this freedom of development brought the world new, exciting music, it has given Americans a way to express their unique experiences and attitudes.

Clipart Drumming
In recent years, so-called ethnic drumming has grown in popularity in the US and Europe. These drummers usually choose a style of performance from a particular overseas culture, learn the drumming (and often dancing) techniques and rhythms, and play the music as a hobby or in public performance. Particularly popular are samba, salsa, West African Mande, and Middle Eastern belly dancing. You might even catch a performance of Japanese taiko or Indonesian gemelan. Such folkloric forms are very enjoyable to learn and watch. They spread understanding of other cultures, albeit in a compromised form, and bring a wide, colorful assortment of arts to a formula-driven, commercialized Western world.

While all of this multicultural expression can be wonderful, there is something largely missing from the US drumming world: that same freedom and cultural expression that gave birth to rock and roll. While we can associate cultures around the world with drum-based music, such as Brazilians with samba, Japanese with taiko, and Africans with a stereotypical image of "tribal" drumming, the US has no drumming tradition of its own. Drummers in the US focus almost all their energy on copying other cultures and have largely failed to develop their own drum-based culture.

The result has been several communities of drummers who specialize in one or two forms of imported music, systematically trying to reproduce those forms according to their teachers. The particulars of the ethnic form have become more important than a general sense of rhythm and a whole population of drummers end up being able to strike the heads according to the way they were taught and do cover versions of rhythms from their target foreign culture, divorced from its original environment, occasion, and purpose. I refer to this lifting of traditional rhythms as “clipart drumming”. But they too often lack creativity, adaptability, and general rhythmic skill. They become lost when they try to join another group of drummers who play other styles of music or even improvised music.

What's wrong with learning only folkloric music styles? Outside of dance, drums and percussion are unique in the music world for giving us a common art form that can be expressed in a very basic way, free of melody, language, and tonal scales that can hamper the equal participation of multiple cultures in other forms of music. This means we have a wonderful opportunity to meet with other musicians from any background and produce music together spontaneously. The potential for an open, inclusive musical art makes drumming special, but that potential is not being met on a large scale.

The answer could have been found in drum circles, and certainly some participants hope for that. The problem is that drum circles are mostly made up of drummers from specific folkloric disciplines that are limited by a self-imposed feeling that they have to play drums the way they were taught by their folkloric teacher, or people that go to circles to do a kind of group entrainment meditation, which produces a repetitive rhythm in which each player tends to conform to other drummer's rhythms, rather than compliment them.

A New Way of Learning
Exploring the possibilities of group drumming without imitating other cultures means changing the way drumming is taught and performed. Training should include basic rhythm knowledge of downbeats, upbeats, syncopation, tempo, back beat, groove, dynamics, space, rhythmic integration, times, etc. In the classes, the drummers would first practice with sticks on hardwood slit drums or something comparable. This would divorce them from the particulars of hand techniques and the characteristics of specific drums and force them to focus only on rhythm, which is fundamental to both creative and folkloric drumming.

Later, they would switch to a variety of drums of all kinds, from bass drums to wood and metal percussion, and practice rhythmic integration. Emphasis would be on discovering how very distinct rhythms fit together in multiple layers to form polyrhythms. They would understand the relationships between bass, clave, lead, groove, and timekeeping roles, leading to an understanding of how they can employ in either composed or spontaneous group drumming.

From there, all techniques would be learned in a general way, not specific to any particular style. Drummers would develop a kind of rhythm "toolkit" allowing them to adapt themselves to any drumming environment, even folkloric forms, if they chose. Students would be encouraged to explore their own ways of producing good sounds on the various drums they may play.

After all this, it is possible that a student of drumming will have an understanding not of only gamelan, samul nori, or bembe, but of the fundamentals of rhythm, tempo, time, and rhythmic integration. From there, drummers have the tools to built from, to create and express in their own rhythmic language, and not plunder the personal expressions of people of a different class, religion, age, on the far side of the world.

Maybe US drumming will spread around the world as rock and roll has and people in other lands will be going to folkloric teachers to copy it.