For many years as an adult I thought that I would never figure out what I wanted to do in life. I tried all sorts of jobs and careers. It has taken many moons and a few hard lessons in life to realize and pursue this creative path. So how did I choose this path? Perhaps it chose me.
As a child growing up in the bay area I was drawn to the drum. I was moved by artist’s like James Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Earth Wind & Fire and Sly and the Family Stone. There were two other major influences that led me to the drum. The first major influence came from a hand drummer by the name of Mongo Santa Maria. He initially captivated my attention with the sound of the conga drums. One afternoon our next-door neighbor big Ray was spinning his records and was playing his music pretty loud. Something caught my attention, a particular sound. It was a style that I hadn’t heard before. It was infectious! The warm melodic rhythms emanating from the conga drums. I was hooked!
The second major influence came from two of my six grade class mates Doyle and Dwayne. At school during class time they used to play out rhythms on their desktops that sounded pretty sophisticated. They were always warring against each other with their beats to see who was top dog. This intrigued me, so at the age of eleven I begin banging, and I do mean banging on anything that I could get my hands on. I played on desktops at school and coffee cans, pots and pails at home. Once in the sixth grade I even gave a little performance with two other aspiring singers in the girls restroom at school. I utilized the paper towel dispenser, at the time it had the best bass and volume that I could get my hands on.
At around this same period of time my brother David, my cousin Anna and I decided to form a musical group. David played the saxophone, Anna sang and I played the coffee can and flour canister, ouch! The edges of the cans were slightly raised; the repetitive contact from striking the same place with my hands caused me to develop two little cysts on my right wrist. I used several types of cans but my favorite was the flour canister because it was larger than the coffee cans and produced a bass like sound.
Well now, here is a kid that’s supposed to provide the rhythm like a trap(drumset) drummer with just a lowly little flour canister! I spent quite a bit of my spare time experimenting with those cans. In my head I could hear the rhythms that the drummers of James Brown played. I tried to imitate those rhythms on my humble little cans.
It was my desire or maybe my obsession to sound like a drum set, this would later help me to learn a unique way of playing that would later develop into “Urban Magic”.
A year or so after I began playing on cans my parents bought me my first drum. It was a set of bongos. I experimented with the different hand positions that I had used on my cans. Nothing seemed to work for me. I wasn’t getting anywhere with the bongos. I would later learn a better technique for playing bongo from an instructor. After a few months of fumbling around with the little set of drums, I abandoned them and went back to playing on cans.
To be continued....
