The Ryndex

Life is problematic. Work is hard. Taxes are complicated. That special someone is elusive. Everything costs more than you expected. You have arguments that you don’t really care about. The entropy of your living space eternally tends toward filthy.

Obviously, you need therapy. Even if you don’t need therapy, you need this therapy. If you’re already getting therapy, congratulations, good luck and please add djembé-playing to your mental health routine.

I started African drumming a week ago. Another Canadian expatriate invited me out to Versaille to for a lesson. It’s a very small association — one instructor, three or four experts for support, two or three intermediate players and four or five beginners. We sit in a single circle, legs wrapped around our djembé and play together, taking turns playing the phrases we’re learning, or playing an accompaniment. The other experts play the dunduns, the three bass drums that provide a backbone for the music.

Last week, I started with just the accompaniment. BOOM-bada BOOM-bada BOOM-bada: a single bass note with the flat right hand, followed by a right-left strike on the edge of the drum skin with the fingers closed. Over and over and over:

R . r l R . r l

It sounds so simple — the rhythm couldn’t be much easier and the hands are right-left-right, repeat. When you start in the circle, however, it takes up 100% of your conscious brain to keep a consistent beat in sync with all the others.

It gets harder with the more complicated phrases. In addition to the bass and the strike, there’s also a slap on the edge of the drum with the fingers open. The first phrase I learned was:

r l . L rx . R . rx . . L rx . R .

which is sixteen half beats. Notice that the right hand always plays on the beat. The capital letters are bass notes in the centre, and the small letters are strikes at the edge. I added an x if it’s a slap instead of a strike, but it’s still difficult to make a difference between the two at this stage.

The next phrase is a variation:

r l . L rx . R . rx . rx lx rx lx rx .

So while half the group is playing the BOOM-bada accompaniment, the other half is alternating the two variations on the first phrase. The dunduns are playing a cool rhythm and the leader cues people in and out with a special rhythm (a ‘call’) that you quickly learn to recognize inside all the rest of the noise. If you’ve ever seen a drumming circle going all out and suddenly stopping on a dime in complete synchronization, this is how they do it.

We learned another phrase, but it has triplets to I’m not going to transcribe it here. We have two or three more phrases to learn and practice and we’ll have finished our first song — Lolo. I’m not sure if we’re going to learn the dundun parts as well, since they involve both hands playing separate rhythms.

The pleasure comes from sitting in the circle, either grooving on the accompaniment, or trying a complicated phrase and getting it wrong, and wrong, and off-beat and with the wrong hands. You struggle with it, and get it right once and wrong a dozen times again, even though you can hear the right beat in your head. Then it comes together and it’s right, and suddenly you’re listening to the correct beat and it’s surprising to realize that it’s you. The drum sings like a bell, and it’s a bit like life.

In conclusion, musical instruments are expensive and drumming circles aren’t just for hippies although they are welcome to play as long as they don’t stink up the place.