Talking Drums
Maxwell Amoh, gankogui, royal hartigan, drumset,
Freeman Kwadzo Donkor, sogo.
I began my life hearing my uncle
Ray Hart and my mother Hazel Hartigan tap dancing. Ray danced with Bill
Robinson, Peg Leg Bates, the Step Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers, and the Hines
Brothers. I started tapping at 3 years of age and felt the whole world through
the sound of my taps on wood floors and bakelite mats. At 8 years I started
playing piano and drums, listening to Errol Garner, Duke Ellington, Dave
Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, and Oscar Peterson. I joined a drum corps at age 11,
and shortly after added drumset to my studies. Since those early years
drumming, dance, and piano have been a way to understand and express life and
things beyond music.
I have studied drumset with Clifford Adams, Lenny
McBrowne, Clifford Jarvis, Max Roach, and Edward Blackwell.
Since the
early 1970s I have felt rhythms and time in many patterns: three or four layers
at once, playing on different sides of the beat, and time cycles of 5, 7, 9, 10,
11, 12, 13 , 15, 17, 23, and so on, beats. Also, groups of uneven beats, with
some longer than others. For me it is important to play these approaches in a
way which is natural and not mathematical, so that the sound swings in whatever
idiom I am playing: bebop, funk, blues, gospel, reggae, hip-hop, or Afro-Latin
styles. My musical home is the African American tradition with a focus on jazz,
so my drumset work centers on extending rhythm and time concepts without a
repeating beat, flowing over any time cycle in the same way Elvin Jones or Jack
DeJohnette make time flow.
My work at UMass Amherst from 1972-74 and
1978-81 with Roland Wiggins, Archie Shepp, Fred Tillis, Reggie Workman, and Max
Roach showed me the importance of knowing the entire span of African American
musical heritage, from African drumming, 17th -19th century plantation music,
hollers, shouts, clapping plays, Blues, Ragtime, and Church music, through the
early styles of Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie, to the
later innovations of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. My
teachers stressed the necessity of understanding the history and social
conditions out of which the music has been created.
At Wesleyan I
worked with master percussionists from Indonesia, India, Africa, China, and
African America, with Edward Blackwell showing me the heritage of the drumset.
For 12 years I lived in the sounds of Javanese gamelan, South Indian
solkattu, and West African drumming and dance. I found a connection with
the music of each culture and brought it home to the drumset.
The
meaning of my work is to experience the essence of each culture through its
drumming tradition, to play each with integrity, and to connect those realities
with the African American jazz drumset.
As Baby Dodds said, 'Drumming is spirit.' I work to give my blood through
the drum to share that spirit.
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For more information about the scheduling of performances,
contact me at the royal hartigan