Look around you, and you see rhythm everywhere. Your sleeping pattern is the circadian rhythm; the rhythm of nature is seen in changing seasons. Everything seems to march to a beat. Philosopher Susanne Langer, wrote that the “life of every individual is a highly articulated rhythm.” Glen Velez and Loire Cotler couldn’t agree more. While Velez is a world-renowned frame drummer, Cotler is a rhythm vocalist.
Velez’s journey on frame drums began in 1977 with Ramnad Raghavan. Seeing an orchestral tambourine on the wall in Velez’s apartment in Manhattan during a mridangam lesson, Raghavan said, “We play a drum like that in South India.” Velez handed the drum to him and Raghavan started to play it in ganjira style. Velez was fascinated and said, “Let’s study that!” And that became the defining moment of Velez’s career as a musician.
How has his teaching method been influenced by his study of Indian percussion? “My ‘Handance’ teaching method uses solkattus as a primary tool in the learning of any frame drum. No other teaching method in the world uses such an intensive drum language as solkattu,” says Velez.
The South Indian drumming techniques that he learnt have a deep influence on him, since those wrist rotations form a major part of his style. “The ganjira is my favourite Indian percussion instrument, because it is such a simple instrument with great expressive possibilities,” he says.
In Carnatic music concerts, the ganjira is only an option. It is the mridangam that is the default percussion instrument. Why does he think it is so? “In ensemble usage, two handed drums are usually dominant over one handed drums.”
Frame drums
What historical records do we have of frame drums being played in ancient cultures? “One of my main inspirations has been such research. The history of frame drums is the most well documented of any drum. It has been a favourite subject of artists in the ancient world. There are wall paintings from Egypt, vase paintings from ancient Greece, relief carvings from ancient Rome, wall carvings from ancient Parthia and the Indus valley cultures. All of this visual material plus written examples from the Bible and other sources makes an intensive survey of the history of these drums possible. I am glad I am playing an important role in re-introducing this drum to western musical culture.”
Were there female frame drummers in the past? “In the ancient Mediterranean world, it was the most popular drum and most often it was played by women, especially in connection with the female goddess cults popular in those times.”
What is the date of the earliest frame drum? “The earliest dating is 4th millennium BCE, over 5000 years ago.”
Has he heard the South Indian frame drums parai and thappu ? “The worldwide array of frame drums is so extensive that I am always learning about new frame drums and new techniques used.”
Cotler was first introduced to scat singing by trumpeter Dave Burns, who taught her jazz scat. She later learnt konnakkol from Subash Chandran.
Konnakkol can be very demanding on one’s voice. Did she tire out easily in the early years? “I can practise for very long periods without tiring and discover the value in singing the syllables and phrases at a very slow tempo. Then when I take it to warp speed, it just feels like I am flying!”
Has she done fusions of different kinds of scat singing? “My primary inspirations are jazz scat singing, Indian drum language syllables and wordless improvisations inspired by Jewish mystical chant, called Niggun, as well as a hybrid of other syllabic sounds used in melismatic traditions like Takism from the Mid-East, or syllables used in overtone singing from Central Asia called Hoomi. I make up a lot of sounds too during my improvisations and often create combinations of phrases. For example, there are some up-tempo medieval instrumental pieces that I have performed, which were not intended for the voice. In order to do justice to the melodies, I figured out how to float seamlessly between jazz scat and konnakkol, which had a startling effect for wordless storytelling.”
Has she done konnakkol for a Carnatic concert? “I have been part of many projects with Carnatic musicians, but these were typically based on cultural exchanges to highlight our unique musical backgrounds. If one day I become proficient enough with the repertoire, then I would be honoured to perform in a traditional Carnatic concert.”
Vocal rhythms as therapy
How does she use vocal rhythms as therapy? “I worked for many years in hospitals and clinics in New York as a certified music therapist. When I work with people who are aphasic, I use simple Indian syllables like ta ka di mi, as well as scat syllables. These purely musical syllables encourage the patient to re-discover his or her voice. In the next stage, I introduce the patient to singing actual words very slowly like ‘hee-l-looo’, and little by little compress the word into the speed of speech to get ‘Hello!’ The results are remarkable. I have also worked in the fields of psychiatry and autism. I have learnt through my clinical work that when words fail, you should let rhythm take over.”
Looking back, Cotler says that she has come a long way from the time she started to learn Indian solkattus. One of her early konnakkol teachers told her that since Caucasian tongues were weak, she should put some peanut butter on her tongue every day to strengthen it! Cotler’s demonstration at the Music Academy showed that her teacher’s worry was unwarranted in her case, for her tongue certainly didn’t come across as weak, as she handled solkattus with ease.
ta ki ta Trio
Velez is a four-time Grammy award winner, and was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society’s Hall of fame in 2014. Cotler has been a soloist with many orchestras, and also collaborates with Ravikiran and Velez in ta ki ta Trio.
Talking rhythm
Glen Velez and Loire Cotler gave a lec-dem at the Music Academy, where there were interesting rhythmic exchanges between them. One of the pieces was Tel Halaf, composed by Velez, in which he has used the idea of hocketing from medieval music. The rhythmic sols were split, and so initially one heard one part of the rhythm from Velez. Then Cotler responded to it, giving the whole performance a stereophonic effect. After this came a composite of the rhythm.
The next piece was a solo by Velez on a frame drum, with overtone singing. He explained that overtone is basically a slow movement from one syllable to another. Normally in language, we move fast from syllable to syllable. In overtone singing, you take a deep breath, and see how long you can take to move between one syllable and another. This slowness causes the sound to refract into its component parts. Velez gave an analogy to explain this. When white light passes through a prism, it gets separated into its component colours. In the same way, when you slow down the voice, the sound separates into its parts. Velez demonstrated how the overtone goes up with the nasal sound and goes down with the more open sound. He said overtone singing wasn’t difficult to learn, and asked the audience to join him in trying an overtone, which the audience promptly did!
Velez and Cotler then explored the story and lyric of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird,’ (written in 1926 by Mort Dixon and Ray Henderson) through rhythm, Cotler’s solkattus embellishing the effort. Trichy Sankaran, who was in the audience, said efforts like Velez’s and Cotler’s showed the world-wide impact of our solkattus, and their role in understanding rhythm. He said in African drums, the individual parts of the rhythm are very simple, but the configurative patterns make it complex. He said rhythm can be looked at from various angles-straight rhythm, cross rhythm and split rhythm.
Ravikiran said that there are two aspects to laya — laya as an abstraction and laya as architecture. Velez and Cotler had showed the architecture of laya, through their demonstration. Syncopated rhythms require special skills. Programmes like these help us appreciate the depth of our music more, and show us the heights it can scale in world music, he said
