Drum Arabesque: Communique #3 - Play for the Sun

Saturday. I drum in the morning, well, it is midday before I get out of bed, having spent the morning reading and writing. From my front steps I face the creek and the hillside, the grass a brilliant sandy white sea across the slope, waves lapping at a rocky shore. When my hands touch the drum I do not tell them what to do and they begin playing one of my deeply familiar rhythms, a Baladi with a variation every second cycle. So I practice my dance/drum solo patterns, interspersed with this first rhythm, then shifting to HayAllah, then Nau Ashta in 9/8, then Heavy Saiidi, then back to the Baladi variant, and round and round I go. Gradually I become aware of a resonance, like a second player with me, and I look up from my hands and hear the drum voice echoing back to me from the hillside. The landscape itself is my accompanist.

The afternoon light turns golden, pot plants in the house begin to glow against the western windows and I rush to grab my uke, heading for the back porch. Plucking and strumming, I lift my face directly into the light and let the warmth in. I let the magnificent glow of sunset in. I let the music that is inside me, out. I never play so sweetly as I do when I play for the sun.

As the light dims, broken up by trees and grasses, I get up and follow the sun across the hillside, still strumming and plucking, and I have never played so sweetly as I did standing there on the rocks.

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I am rediscovering the pleasure of playing music for myself, and for the pleasure it gives me to play with no purpose, no outcome, no audience. I am disciplined in my practice because the pleasure of music is so lovingly bound to the discovery and development of new skills. Searching for, and finding new techniques, new melodies, new rhythm patterns is exciting. It is not daunting to think of finding something new to try, there are limitless possibilities, and inspirations that can be drawn from the most basic building blocks of life.

Two Carrots

Consonants = Doum, Vowels = Tek

T-w-o-C-a-r-r-o-t-s

D-D-T-DkTkD-D-TkD-T---

Rhythms can be sourced from any pattern. Melodies, harmonies, entire arrangements can be heard in the patterns of bird song, interspersed with traffic noise, kitchen cutlery clunking and clanging and kids jumping and shouting. A song could be built from that last sentence alone. Everything you see, hear, think, feel and do, can become an inspiration for music, and your perspective, your bias is actually the most valuable component, for music is an expression of you, as an individual, with a lifetime of baggage to help the groove along.

Your tough childhood,             Verse
your morning commute,         Verse
your aching back,                      Break
your candle-lit dinner,             Chorus

Today for me.

The Saturday sleep in,           Instrumental Intro
the breakfast in bed,              Verse
a book in my hand,                  Verse 
the kids in the lounge room,   Chorus

*     *     *

And this week, another video for you.  This one was recorded a few months ago.

Garyan by Zebulon