D'DRUM
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A long-overlooked Dallas treasure reveals itself this week as percussion ensemble D'Drum releases “Village Beside Time”, their debut album, and celebrates with a free concert at the Dallas Museum of Art.

With it, the group--made up of some of the finest and hardest-working drummers on the local scene--has made an album of almost overwhelming musicality, avoiding through sheer devotion the pitfalls and tedium that mar many such "drummer's delight" efforts. “Village Beside Time” has plenty of rhythm, to be sure, but the music on it also has a tonal quality (and appeal) that most solo drum work lacks. This is accomplished through the use of exotic tunedpercussion instruments--collected by group members on their trips to exotic, beat-rich locales such as Africa and Bali--like the cimbalom and tingklik.

Western music fans won't get very far in D'Drum's world without asking questions. A cimbalom is a Hungarian instrument with over a hundred strings that's played with sticks and sounds like a hammer dulcimer. A tingklik is a Balinese instrument, perhaps best thought of as a small xylophone that uses sections of bamboo to produce sound. They range in size from a bird call no bigger than a finger to a bass drum that stands over three feet high, but all instruments D'Drum plays point to other cultures: glockenspiel, djembe, wind chimes from Persia and a Buddhist "ocean drum." One flavor, however, dominates the disc: the delicately pointillistic music of Bali.

D'Drum leader Ron Snider, 52, formed the group in 1989 when he acquired some African “ewe” drums, which come in a set that requires five people to play. Although the line-up was a bit fluid in the early days, it soon settled down into its present form: Mr. Snider plus John Bryant, 48; Ed Smith, 47; Jamal Mohammed, 52, and Doug Howard, also 52. The quintet has been getting together weekly--more or less--ever since. Sharp-eyed Dallas Symphony Orchestra fans may have noticed Mssrs. Snider and Howard in the back row, where the latter man is principle percussionist and the former, assistant. Mr. Mohammed is a local music fixture and “doumbek” master who fronts the long-running musical discussion Beledi. Mr. Bryant has worked on the road with acts like Ray Charles and the Paul Winter Consort and at home is a producer and composer. Mr. Smith has performed with John Cage and Johnny Mathis (unfortunately not at the same time) and teaches at several area colleges.

Mr. Snider had long been a fan of Indonesian music, which he terms "one of the world's great classical musics." When the DSO gig played Singapore in the early 90s, he was close enough to visit Bali. There, in the course of multiple trips, he's studied under native masters and shipped home crates of unusual and provocative percussion instruments. "It's an extraordinarily complicated music," he says. "You can have a 30-piece orchestra, and it's all percussion--drums, bells, gongs--with the exception of a flute or two."

Since his first trip, all of the other members of the troupe (except Mr. Mohammed) have made the journey at least once. Mr. Smith immersed himself in the culture so deeply that he ended up playing at a native cremation ceremony, and event so powerful that it left him in tears.

"I had come there as a student," he remembers, "and at one point Raka Swastika [the Indonesian master who has taught both Mr. Snider and Mr. Smith] asked me if I'd play at the ceremony. To be accepted like that when you basically come as an outsider was an amazing and emotional moment ... that really shows how music can build a bridge."

There have been complications: The the first “tingkliks” sent to Dallas did not fare well. "It was too dry, compared to Bali" Mr. Snider explains. "The bamboo tubes--each “tingklik” has 14--would crack and split until they'd literally explode." The solution was to dip each bamboo tube in polyurethane and then reassemble the instruments, an ordeal that left Mr. Snider's back patio covered in polyurethane and drying bamboo. "It was a mess," he says.

What makes it worthwhile--all the work, expensive travel, and the polyurethane parties-- is the joy of creation, the thrill of being that close to an ineffable starting point. That's the reason D'Drum was started in the first place.

"We did not start this to play a lot, to make money or get gigs," says Mr. Howard. "We did it for our own growth and enjoyment, just five friends exploring the world through percussion." That sense of unforced creativity is apparent whenever the group gets together to play-- unfortunately, only a handful of times a year. The voices of exotic instruments blend with the easy interplay of friendly conversation; themes emerge and retreat according to patterns as natural as breathing.

Watching the players interact is also striking. When rockers improvise, the often lock gazes, with each member watching the other closely to see where the song is going to go. While the members of D'Drum certainly look at each other frequently, they also go for surprisingly long stretches, steering by their fellows' music alone--as if their musical apprehension was keen enough to eliminate the need for so much eye work.

But there's another, more subtle difference. "Western audiences are big on foot-tapping and hand-clapping," Mr. Bryant says. "In declaring where you want things to go. In much of the music south and east of Europe, what's important is how the parts interact. They tune their instruments to each other, not some machine that tells them when they're ‘in tune.'

"In the West individuality is so important," he says. "In much of the rest of the world, the group is the thing, and they make their music without metronomes or conductors or click tracks. They don't hold their songs up to some theoretical ‘god' of meter or tuning. What sounds right works."

Watching D'Drum perform or practice reveals some interesting relationships. With their classical training, Mr.. Snider and Mr. Howard often seem to anchor songs, while Mr. Mohammed improvises using the circle of Middle Eastern hand drums that cluster around him. With their jazz training, Mr. Bryant and Mr. Smith can move in between those two poles, contributing as needed. At times, a decision about ‘what's needed' for a bit of music is decided on the fly and with an unspoken agreement that suggests five people so thoroughly in step with each other as to become a kind of group mind, with ten hands.

"Don't make this sound too kooky," Mr. Snider says, choosing his words carefully, "but when you play a lot together, when you spend that much time rhythmically in synch, it's like your brain wave patterns align, and you can pick up on what other people are doing and even thinking. I don't know how many times I've thought ‘what this needs right here is this, and when I reach for it, Doug's already got it in his hand and is holding it out to me."

Although the purity of their approach has kept D'Drum a frustratingly rare treat for area listeners, they have been slowly raising their profile. Several years ago they contributed to the National Geographic special “Lions of Darkness” and can be heard on the popular PBS series “Wishbone”. Many Dallasites first discovered the group through the local “Deep in the Arts” TV series profiling them that has run--and continues--on Channel 13 (KERA). The short episode-- which went on to win a regional Emmy--features the group in the studio and in Bali, where Mr. Snider and Mr. Smith can be seen performing in native dress.

Nothing helps you remember like something you can hold in your hand, however, (that ol' Western mind at work again) but the D'Drum CD has been one of the more discussed--and least heard--music scene mysteries over the years. When the ensemble was asked to perform at the prestigious Percussive Arts Society International Convention in Dallas this November, D'Drum finally had a compelling reason to put out “Village Beside Time”. "It really helped light a fire under us," reports Mr. Mohammed. "This convention is about the biggest thing in the world of drumming, and we wanted to have something that we could show our peers that they could take with them--besides their memories."

Now music fans in and around Dallas can consider themselves equally fortunate.

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