Richard's Notes

Last night a small group of us drove down to New Jersey to hear Glen Velez do a concert with his wife Lori Cotler, an incredible South Indian vocal percussion (Konakkol) singer.

Glen is the most famous frame drummer on earth and has influenced world music far and wide, won a Grammy Award, and collaborated with dancers, orchestras, singers, and more. In this first picture Glen is playing an Irish frame drum called a bodhran which he plays from both sides, stroking, snapping, warping, rubbing, and more to get an enormous amount of sound and mood out of it.

One of our drum group members, Jenn Whitney (blond girl facing the light) is now one of his students and she and other top students of his played in the beginning and the end of the concert and they were fantastic. They played smaller middle eastern frame drums called tars.

Glen and Lori clapped a south Indian rhythm and then she sang it in Konakkol style. Many people who have heard expert Indian tabla players have heard fast recitals of strokes prior to playing but Lori takes this ancient Indian musical tradition and pushes its boundaries in much the same way that Glen pushes the boundaries with percussion and the result is astounding. Listen to more of her here.

Glen had two plastic-bodied, clear plastic-headed pandeiros with him. Pandeiro is a Brazilian tambourine but Glen played his more like a riq, a middle eastern tambourine which he also played (see next picture). The great thing about the pandeiro having a clear head was that we could see how Glen used his left hand to warp it to change its tone. He played it warped most of the time and we only heard it’s lowest, seemingly unwarped sound occasionally.

Glen played the middle eastern riq both traditionally and in ways I’d never seen before. He has such a light touch and is so in command of his fingers, hands, arms, the instrument’s position, and his distance from he microphone that he was able to envelope the entire room in sound with just this small tambourine.

What is great about Glen’s music is that he knows the deep history and culture behind each of these instruments and that knowledge influences his playing, but it does not restrict it; he crosses all sorts of cultural boundaries and doesn’t treat instruments and their traditional capabilities rigidly but as a starting place for his own thinking, improvisation, and collaboration.

Glen started as a drumset drummer and his independent use of all of his limbs is evidence that he’s not just about hands. He put a maraca in his shoe and used both slap and buzz sticks and voice to create a fantastic array of overlayed sounds. This was not only a demonstration of skill but of deep musicality and as the evening went on it was obvious to me and probably most people in the room that Glen could make music with anything: the music and rhythm is completely within him and sticks and pandeiros are simply vehicles to let it out. In a very amateurish kind of way, I have a similar feeling as I play middle eastern rhythms each morning on the edge of our stainless steel kitchen sink while waiting for the coffee to drip. Give me a butcher block table or a dumbek; give Glen a nice riq or a piece of tin with plastic wrap over it, he’ll make music.

We all came away from the concert in awe of one of the great percussionists of all time and the fact that we were sitting ten feet away from him watching him play, think, make music and what experiencing that will mean for our small drum group. Jenn has already started teaching us some of his gross motor technique (stepping metronomically to make a back beat) and we hope to learn more from her and maybe, if we can arrange it from Glen if we can arrange for him to come up to Connecticut for a workshop. Stay tuned.

Explore Glen’s web site for more on his drums, CDs and technique and there is a great interview with Glen that N. Scott Robinson (another gifted frame drummer and student of Glen’s) did for Modern Drummer in 2000 up at Glen’s site: Glen Velez: A World of Sound in His Hands.