By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
The same rhythm that regulates heart rate and breathing allows RhythmWorks to create a clattering drum circle from percussion novices and odd-sounding instruments such as djembe, dun duns, doumbeck, congas, bongos, an old-fashioned washboard scratched with thimble fingers and even shaken plastic Easter eggs filled with Nerds candy.
"Every human being in the world has a sense of rhythm. That's what we want you to know after today," Cass County students participating in a School of Rock "rhythm circle" heard Wednesday at Educational Talent Search.
ETS is a college preparation program funded by the U.S. Department of Education Trio programs.
Goal of this program is to provide students in grades 6-12 with support, motivation and encouragement toward educational advancement and pursuit of post-secondary educational programs.
This goal is reached by providing individual assistance in the classroom, group workshops and individual guidance in various service areas.
Today ETS catches a bus to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
Vincenzo "Vinny" Carrasco of South Bend, Ind., has been a professional kit drummer for 13 years, since he was 19.
Billy Nicks is one of his teachers. "Stix" toured with Junior Walker and the All Stars in the 1960s and '70s.
Carrasco has been doing hand drums professionally for the past eight years.
He and his wife, Judith Hizer, met drumming. She's been a professional for three years.
Next month Carrasco will be appearing at Wood Fire with the blues band Kalamazoo Kenny and the Rhythm Ratz.
RhythmNation, which can be a quartet of percussionists, has performed at the Cass County Council on Aging.
Djembes come from West Africa. Judith's hails from Ghana. Authentic ones made from wood and goat skin can't get wet, and Vinny is anxious to shield them from sun beating down on the campus center quad.
Other versions made with synthetic skins can be played in rain.
Judith displays Native American mother drums that tradition dictates men play, another with a spider web design and a West African family of drums known as dun duns stretched with cowskin. Deer hide covers some other instruments, giving each a distinctive sound.
Congas originate in Latin America, including Cuba, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Colombia.
Two drums from the Middle East are doumbecks. The silver one resembles a smaller version of hockey's Stanley Cup. The other one looks like a vase.
"You might find these in Iraq or Turkey," Judith explained.
Others originate in Nigeria, India and Pakistan. Some are made to be drummed with the fingers or struck with the palm of the hand, others are thumped with sticks.
One drum looks like a tambourine, recalling its role as a "sifter" to make work easier by combining farming with music.
"You pound grain, put it in here and shake it, and the wind blows away the part you don't need," she said.
A similar instrument held by a crosspiece and hit with a stick hails from Ireland by way of Pakistan.
The only thing missing is someone to shout, "More cowbell."
"One of the earliest uses of rhythm was to make work easier," Vinny said. "A lot of different songs originated because people did hard work all day in the hot sun, and that's how they kept going – creating songs or tapping, using whatever they had to make the work go by easier.
"Another use of the drum was call and response for communication."
He demonstrates with a loud burst of syncopation that attracts the attention of a passerby at the other end of campus.
"How the heck are you?" he pounds out in time, answering his own message with three blows that suggest an answer of, "I'm doing fine."
Carrasco has not been to Africa. "I learned to play some of the West African rhythms from people from Senegal, Guinea and Ghana," he said. "To a person, everyone's in agreement that none of the rhythms you might hear is the right way to play it. Each village in each country has its own way to play some of the rhythms. There's no right or wrong way, it's how you express yourself."
Students asked Carrasco if he ever plays at pow wows.
No, because "for the Native American tribes in this area it's kind of disrespectful for someone other than someone who's in the tribe to participate in their drumming. I love going to pow wows, but I listen – and listening is the most important part of being a good drummer. If you can't learn to just sit and listen to something, you'll never be a good player. You won't ever learn another style of drumming without listening – sitting and not playing – and letting it become a part of you. So I listen to drumming at pow wows, but I don't participate because I'm not Native American."
Carrasco also eschews percussion competitions.
"I like to use drumming and rhythm to bring people together – not to separate one person as better from another," Carrasco. "Everybody has a sense of rhythm. It's not like you can say one ethnic group or another has rhythm and another doesn't, or one color of skin has rhythm and another doesn't because we all have heartbeats. We all walk with rhythm, we all breathe with rhythm. It's just that some groups of people or some individuals don't express their rhythm. If you don't use it and practice it, you're not going to be as good at it as someone who does."
Which brings us to dancing, at which Carrasco is admittedly less stellar than at drumming.
"One of my drum teachers once said to me – and it sticks with me to this day – 'You can never be a great drummer unless you're also a dancer.' He didn't say you had to be a good dancer to be a good drummer or a great dancer to be a great drummer, he just said you have to be a dancer, so I try every so often just to dance and to let my body do what it wants to do with the rhythm.
"I don't care if I'm any good or not. When you don't think or care about what other people think of your rhythm, it feels really good."
Performers who sing, dance and play instruments got that way by developing and honing their inherent skills, he said, recalling "Pots and Pans," the street performer at Chicago's Wrigley Field or United Center who plays drums made of things you'd find around the house.
"I've never seen someone make so much rhythmic sound out of things you find lying around," Carrasco said. "We don't have to go buy a $2,000 drum set to be a good drummer."
In case the students are making music tapping pencils on their desks, he reminds them, "There's a time and a place for everything, and during class is not the time to practice rhythm."
ETS Director Amy Anderson, a product of the program from Edwardsburg, and Eve Kelly, ETS middle school adviser, joined the rhythm circle on bongos.
Anderson chairs the Dogwood Fine Arts Festival's Cultural Ambassador Program, so Dogwood Executive Director Bobbie Jo Hartline came to listen and to shake a maraca.