Just Fun with a Good Drum

Sometimes it's just fun with a good drum to find that your hands are easy tapping and it sounds good through the ease of the thing and the moment with the person and the sound and it is.  Good.  With.  A Drum.

Post Keita Workshop

After a workshop with Mamady Keita I am feeling very quiet and just calm with drumming.  Drumming and me.  My life's experience with it so far, the different pulls it has had on me.  I am currently thirty, and currently feeling calm: that I can play, keep playing and developing and learning and listening and expressing.  And also: I don't have to.  For some reason this is very calming and freeing and easier than some of the more ambitious times when I was younger.  Ambition is great and I look forward to more of it: but.  But, for example, I don't want or need to become totally proficient at djembe, so it is kind of freeing to learn something that I don't feel as intensely for.  Drumming, yes, rhythm, yes, celebration and joy and experience, yes.  But I don't have to do this particular style, I don't have to do everything.  I can do some things just on an experiential level, without competitiveness or self-judgement or self consciousness. Hurrah!

Sad drum day

Sometimes I have sad drum days; when my tone is not sharp enough, the drum is flat, I flatten, the drum circle disappoints.  I find the competitive masculine spirit that can pervade exclusive and annoying and dumb and hard.  But then I get frustrated with my sensitivity.  And want to just do.  Just solo.  Just free myself of the heaviness that is the reaction to the soloing over othes.

 P'raps it's sensitivity, introversion.  Being cultured female to be polite and considerate.  And also desiring to honestly be considerate and participate in play zones of room for all, to the mostest.  As opposed to struggling to be heard.

 It's also about practicing and having chops and wanting to show them, which is all good.

 Lotsa things.  Being Australian a bit.  Not wanting to be judged as a show off.  But then also wanting to be seen and heard.  Too complex!

So I breathe, take a break, remind myself of the millions of beautiful musicians in the world that would probably be drowned out also.

I do feel like I have a lot more to offer as a drummer in my lifetime.  So far it has been 12 years of drumming in my life, in different phases of intensity.  I am curious as to how it will develop.

Ultimately I love it and it will be in me and hopefully, more and more, come out.  Insh'allah.