Master Drummer, Teacher Dies At 73

Baba David Coleman taught hands all over New Haven how to be human.

Coleman died peacefully last Saturday at the age of 73.

He was a master drummer, teacher, and drum builder, whose music took him from New York to Ohio to New Haven and back to Ohio, with many stops in between.

Regionally he was a founding member of the Afro-Semitic Experience in New Haven and a member of the New York-based Yoruban drumming troupe Osere Irunmole Atilu Atorin and Latin jazz group Mikata. He had also played with internationally renowned musicians Hugh Masekela and Dick Gregory. He taught at Neighborhood Music School, Foote School, Worthington Hooker Elementary School, and Wintergreen Magnet School in Hamden — among many other places. He taught thousands of children to play drums. In 2011 the Hartford Courant called him ​“perhaps the state’s pre-eminent drumming ambassador and historian.” He received the C. Newton Schenck III Award for Lifetime Achievement in and Contribution to the Arts from the Arts Council of Greater New Haven in 2011.

Coleman was born in Manhattan in 1948 and raised in the Bronx. He began playing drums in junior high school. In his neighborhood, Afro-Caribbean drumming was all around him. He heard Mongo Santamaría, Carlos ​“Patato” Valdes, and Daniel Ponce. As it happened, his three older sisters also all married Black American musicians who had dove deep into their West African heritage — Babafemi Akinlana (born Al Humphries), Chief Bey (born James Hawthorne) and Nana Yao Opare Dinizulu (born Augustus Edwards).

In 1964, when Coleman was 16, Akinlana heard Coleman’s drumming and was impressed. He asked Coleman to join him in playing drums in Yoruba ceremonies.

For Coleman, music and spirituality were thus always intertwined. He became a priest in the Yoruba tradition and played drums regularly for ceremonies, continuing also to learn from his elders, including famous West African drummer Babatunde Olatunde and Guinean drum master ​“Papa” Ladji Camara. He was part of New York City’s back-to-Africa movement in the 1970s, when he played with Osere Irunmole Atilu Atorin, performing Yoruban ritual music. He also became a dedicated educator. He got his first teaching job in 1977, at a public school in Harlem. He moved to Ohio in 1989 and established himself there as a drummer and teacher. He also began to build drums himself, establishing a career that was able to support him.

Coleman moved to New Haven in 1996 when his wife began a Ph.D. program at Yale. In the New Haven area, he taught music at Neighborhood Music School, Foote School, Worthington Hooker Elementary School, and Wintergreen Magnet School in Hamden. Between performing and teaching music, he became a leader in the New Haven community, winning an arts award from the Arts Council in 2002.

“He lived his life, and it worked for him, and that’s how you get people curious,” said drummer Brian Jawara Gray, who was a mentee of Coleman’s while Coleman lived in the area. ​“People saw that light and they gravitated toward him.”

In teaching, ​“the drum is just a diagnostic tool for discovering the special needs of our children: their desires, their dreams,” Coleman told New Haven Register reporter Randall Beach in 2011. ​“Trust is one of my major words with kids. Trust me, trust your parents or you’ll miss what they have for you. To see kids get to a place where they can trust themselves and take over — wow! What a feeling…. It’s like watching a bird take two steps, then stand up and fly. It’s gorgeous. It makes you cry.”

“The other part is courage,” Coleman continued. ​“The courage you need to make it through life. Some kids will never try guitar or to sing; some are too scared or they get disappointed. Teaching them to overcome it, that’s what drums can do, if you have a good drum teacher. You can be like a music therapist.”

In the past, Coleman had taught at schools where, as Beach said, he competed with drug dealers for kids’ attention. ​“The dealers would pull out wads of money and kids wanted to be like them,” Coleman said. ​“So I pulled out my own stack of money and I told those kids, ​‘Man, you know how I got this? By playing that drum right there. And by making drums and flutes.’”

Coleman, said Gray, was ​“very articulate in the type of rhythms he played — one rhythm sounded different from another and there was a purpose for each one. He was able to connect me with where the different rhythms were and why they were played. He was able to demystify a lot of things.” And at the same time, on some visits, ​“we would play and let the spirit move us, and see what would happen.”

Musician and educator Jesse Hameen II played with Coleman and worked with him at Neighborhood Music School, particularly in the school’s summer jazz program. ​“Every time Baba ended a class, he ended it with a form of human advocacy,” Hameen said, ​“a note to realize that you have a responsibility to yourself, your parents, your society. Treat everybody with kindness. Be mindful of what you say and what you do.” Coleman pushed his students, Hameen said, ​“to aspire to human excellence.” That drive was informed by his deep knowledge of the music he played.

“He really knew the West African culture,” Hameen continued. Coleman knew ​“the integral parts of all the rhythms.” He knew ​“the sounds of the parts, the purpose of the parts, knowing how each part contributes to the whole. Each part might be simple, but it’s so important to the whole,” and ideally, ​“society works like that. You can’t necessarily hear it, but you can feel it.”

Coleman easily made the connection for his students between how to think, listen, and act as a drummer and how to think, act, and listen in life. ​“Don’t try to outplay each other with volume,” Hameen recalled Coleman telling his students. In his class, the drum circle was ​“a community, and you’re interacting with each other in a way that’s conducive to the environment. Instead of banging the drums, you play the drums with love.”

In 2011, Coleman faced a medical emergency. He was diagnosed with Buerger’s disease and was hospitalized. Musicians came together to raise money to cover his medical expenses by throwing a benefit concert at NMS in his honor. In a case of what Independent reporter Allan Appel called ​“impeccable” timing, he recovered just enough to be discharged from the hospital and attend the concert, joining 200 of his admirers.

Among them was Beach, who recalled Coleman helping his daughter assemble a drum set. Beach’s daughter had been a student of his through Worthington Hooker Elementary School and through NMS’s summer jazz camp.

Coleman ​“once asked us why our hands are what makes us human,” Beach reported his daughter saying. ​“And we all said, ​‘Because that way we can drum,’ thinking that was what he was leading us into. ​‘No,’ he said, ​‘they’re what allow us to build.’”

His treatment, however, required the amputation of parts of three of his fingers. ​“It won’t be the same, but he’ll be teaching,” his son Olu Manns-Coleman, also an accomplished drummer and teacher, said at the time.

Coleman moved back to Ohio, where he was closer to his family. As he recovered, he continued to play and to teach regularly well into last year, even as he was diagnosed with stage 4 liver cancer. Hameen said Coleman, ​“a thankful person,” had plans to try to come back to New Haven and put together a concert to express his gratitude for the community here that had supported him. He last played with the Afro-Semitic Experience in January 2020, playing two dates with the band in Ohio around the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. day. There were plans to record in March 2020, said David Chevan of the Afro-Semitic experience, but the pandemic put a stop to that. According to Chevan, he played as well as ever last January. ​“Once he recovered his physical strength from being sick, he really came back,” Chevan said. They didn’t record it, but ​“I have that footage in my heart and my head. He was such a profound player of the important patterns. You never lose track of the patterns that dancers need to hear. Because for him it was never just about playing drums. It was about what it means to be a spiritual musician.”

“He was almost iman el asim,” said Gray, ​“a leader supporter. Those are the people who create leaders. If they choose, they could take over the world, but instead they train and help others. Leaders came out of him. He trained and helped others. That’s David. That’s his essence.”