In Juneteenth Drum Class, The Music Is Practice For Life

Drummer Brian Jarawa Gray peered into the camera from a room being Zoomed, a djembe stationed at his feet. ​“First of all, I want to salute the ancestors,” he said. ​“I’m glad we’re getting the opportunity to present ourselves. To be able to share what I have on another level.”

For an hour on Saturday, the New Haven-born drummer offered an open class in African drumming. With 10 eager students in his virtual classroom, he gave us a taste of the percussion wisdom he has accumulated over decades of playing, studying and teaching. As a teenager, he was a percussionist in the jazz band Deja Vu Noir, led by The Rev. Dr. Dwight Andrews. That meant Jarawa played with the likes of Pheroan Aklaff, Jay Hoggard, Nat Adderley Jr., and Gerri Allen. Jarawa has also been a member of numerous dance companies and is co-founder of The Healing Drum Society, founder dancer and drummer for the Total Movement Society, founder, bandleader, music director of the Vision Contemporary and Jazz Music Band, and musical director of Artsucation Academy Network’s Keepers of the Culture Performing Arts Company (KCPAC).

Jarawa has played and taught across the country. And on Saturday, he taught to people in New Haven and beyond, as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas’s celebration of Juneteenth, a weekend-long full house of virtual programming that Zoomed in performers from Senegal, South Africa, and right next door for a whirlwind of food, music, and dance that lifted up Black culture — and showed a white journalist like me how I could support it.

The classes were hosted by Hanan Hameen, founder of the Artsucation Academy Network and founder and chair of the Official Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven. This year marked its seventh annual Juneteenth celebration, with the Artsucation Academy Network as the lead organization in the coalition working with A&I.

“I’m going to start from the ground level, the way I was taught from many master drummers in Africa and America,” Jarawa said. “Especially growing up in New Haven, you get to meet people with different ideas.”

He started with a tour through the various drums he had gathered around him. “I love the light percussion,” he said. “I started off playing the conga,” a large wooden drum usually made from wood with an animal skin stretched over it, and metal lugs on it to adjust the tone.

“I also present the bongos,” he said, taking care to ensure that the class knew the difference.

“Later on,” he said, ​“after carrying these heavy congas on my back in younger days, I came across the djembe. I’m going to start off with this instrument right here.” The djembe, he explained, was a type of drum played ​“all over Africa,” but he found himself drawn to the particular styles of drumming from the Malinke, a group of people living primarily in Mali, Guinea, and Cote d’Ivoire.

In the West African context, Jarawa said, ​“each rhythm has a song to it, and a dance to it, and a time that it’s played. In America we have our own interpretation.”

He began with a rhythm called kuku. ​“It’s a great way of understanding the different tones you get out of this drum.” The rhythm had different parts to it, played by different drums. ​“All the songs have all the rhythms, all the parts,” he said. We were to learn the first accompaniment part on the djembe, partly because it was a great way to show us the ​“three main tones” we could get out of the drum. Striking the center of the drum head with the palm of your hand produced a bass tone. Striking toward the edge made a higher pitch. And slapping toward the edge made a different, higher pitch.

Jarawa then took a step back.“Open tones are very important,” he said. ​“It gives the sound depth and you can hear the music coming from the drum.” To create the tones, we couldn’t simply hit the drum. We had to hit it the right way, with the right intention. ​“You strike it like it’s hot, like an electric range,” Jarawa said. ​“You touch your hand on it, it’s gonna burn.” But ​“if you hit it and then release the sound,” he added, you can ​“let it fly.”

Playing the drums the right way was also a matter of stamina and health. If we played the drums the wrong way, the sound would not be good, and we were liable to hurt ourselves. Leaving the hand on the drum after hitting it, he said, meant ​“the vibration goes right up your arm and you get some type of damage.”

By contrast, ​“I’ve been playing for 50 years and my hands are still soft, because of the technique I was taught,” he said. ​“My hands have calluses on them but my hands are not banged up. My hand bounces off the drum like a ball.”

He demonstrated, first the tones, then the rhythm. As he played, he spoke. ​“You’re listening for the heatbeat. Kuku has the heartbeat in it,” he said. Then he demonstrated that, saying the pulses. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. Those pulses were not where I expected them to be, but I figured I’d just hang in there.

Jarawa dove deeper. ​“Most of these rhythms have breaks to them,” he said. ​“There’s a particular one that goes with the kuku.” The break was a signal to the other musicians, conveying information about rhythm, speed, intensity. ​“Professional drummers, they don’t talk. The drum speaks,” Jarawa said. ​“Just from the break,” other musicians ​“know what to play next.”

He returned to the rhythm, incorporating that break. ​“I’m going to slow it down for those just starting,” he said. There was a brief conversation among the participants as to where the downbeat was, where the rhythm began. Jarawa explained, and I realized I’d been hearing it wrong; I’d had it flipped over in my mind. Suddenly it clicked, and I understood where to put the emphasis. It felt better. It felt more like a heartbeat.

He told us where to position our hands on the drum for speed, comfort, and efficiency of movement. He showed us the rhythm. Then each of us unmuted ourselves to try it.

I had a djembe in front of me and took a deep breath. I played the rhythm I thought I heard. ​“You’re a drummer? You’ve done this before!” Jarawa said to me. I was flattered and humbled, but even over Zoom, I knew I was not getting the sound out of my drum that Jarawa was getting out of his. Mine was the sound of a musician who has loved African music for decades but has barely scratched the surface of being able to play drums. Jarawa’s drum was the sound of a musician who had been swimming in it for decades, deep, profound, generous of spirit.

Jarawa seemed to read my mind. ​“Don’t try to make your drum sound like my drum,” he said. ​“Make it sound like your drum.” That was very kind, and very encouraging. But was it wrong that I liked the sound of his drum more?

And I wasn’t sure I was coaxing all three distinct tones out of my drum. ​“You can’t always see the difference between two sounds,” Jarawa said. ​“But you can hear it. That’s the difference between banging and music. You can hear all those tones.”

That was true when I watched and listened to Jarawa’s demonstration. The difference in motion was subtle. The difference in sound was clear. On my end, on my drum, both were unclear.

“It’s music. You’ll hear those tones. Especially when they’re all played together,” Jarawa said. By ​“they” he meant the panoply of drums that made up the rest of the rhythms, from a bell and a shekere to the larger, deeper drums that anchored the ensemble.

“These drums are a family,” he said of those larger drums, collectively known as dunun. The largest drum, with the deepest pitch, was called dundunba. The middle-pitched drum was called sangban. The highest-pitched one was called kenkeni. ​“Papa, mama, baby,” Jawara said, tapping each of them on the head with tenderness.

“Before I even picked up a djembe, I played dunduns for three or four years,” Jarawa said. His teacher ​“wouldn’t let me touch a djembe. He told me I wasn’t a drummer! He was mean,” he said with a smile. But he had a similar piece of wisdom to impart. He was showing us a djembe part, but in another sense, we weren’t really ready to play. ​“If you don’t know the dunduns, you don’t know the heartbeat — you’re perpetrating,” he said. ​“If you don’t know what’s going on down there” — he motioned to the dunduns — ​“you don’t know what’s going on up here,” tapping the djembe.

I heard that message clearly. It was OK for me to participate, to play the drums. As a musician, I had an advantage. I had been trained to comprehend, remember, and repeat the rhythms Jarawa had shown us, and I could play them back to him. But that did not mean that I understood them, or truly grasped their meaning. I could not be fooled by my past musical experience into thinking I really knew something about what was going on; in fact, my past musical experience had taught me the opposite lesson, that understanding a new style of music involves as much unlearning as learning. If I wanted to do more, I would have to begin again, almost as a child learning a new language.

There was time for Jarawa to check our rhythms again, and to us to play along with him. This wasn’t the first time in my life I had played drums, learning a simple part to hold down so that other, more experienced drummers could build the music into something beautiful. Last year, in Belize, I had spent a glorious afternoon with Garifuna musician Pen Cayetano, who showed me basic parts on drums; once I had them, he joined in on a larger, more powerful drum and his even more powerful singing voice. He was impressed when I caught on (he did not know, and I was too shy to tell him, that I had already been listening to his music for years) and laughed rightly and gently when I messed up. The year before that, in New Orleans, I had joined a drum circle and class hosted by the Congo Square Preservation Society, where such music has been played for centuries. I was taught the basic parts, and held them down while the more experienced drummers around me sang and played gorgeous, elaborate rhythms.

We are in a political moment where many white people, myself included, are asking how we can help and support our Black friends and Black people. Jawara’s class asked me to approach the music as a student, no matter what I thought I may already have known. His style of teaching asked me to listen, and listen hard, more than to play or speak. He encouraged me when I did well, and reminded me that I was just putting the smallest toe in a vast musical ocean. It gave me a small part to play in holding things down while the music blossomed around me, led by a Black musician steeped in the culture. Music can be practice for life. The way we play can be the way we speak, and walk through the world.

Over Zoom, I did my best to play the basic parts for Jarawa while marveling at the strength and delicacy in his own playing. The last time he gave the signal to stop, I caught it.

“Boy I wish I could hear everyone. You look like you’re doing it right,” he said. I hoped I would have the chance to do it again.