Now then, 'How hard can it be' I hear you cry, 'to play an instrument with only two notes?' Bloody hard is the answer. I play several instruments to a reasonable standard including trumpet (grade 5), guitar and didgeridoo and I can say without a shadow of doubt that djembe is hardest thing that I have ever tried to do. When I first heard a djembe fola play the sound that they created was so far removed from my sound that it seemed like magic...those deep, dry popping tones (how do they get such a low sound out of such a high drum?) and those sharp, melodic bell-like slaps. Really, listening to a good djembe fola play is like listening to a song...even the Maninka word for 'to play' is the same as the word for 'to speak' ('Ka Fo')
After a year or so of practice I could get some difference but I was acutely aware that I was not making the correct sounds. So I started focusing on my sounds. I moved to West Africa and lived there for three years. I played with Maitre Samsou in The Gambia for a year and I played for three hours every day. After five years of playing the djembe the real sounds were still a mystery to me.
When I moved back to the UK in 2005 I started practicing hard. I simply refused to be beaten by two bloody sounds! I started taking lessons with Nansady Keita and Iya Sako. I hired a practice room, started running classes and workshops and tried to maintain an average of two-hours practice a day. I would sit on my own down the studio and play the same thing over and over again. Sometimes I would play for two or even three hours without stopping, playing the simplest thing I could find...endless echauffements and simple combinations of slap / tone. I reckoned that without slap / tone there is no melody and without melody there is no beauty, so all the solo phrases in the world were useless until I could achieve those two sounds...
Slowly, achingly slowly my sounds started to improve. Sometimes, after an hour or so down the studio, a bit of magic started to happen...my tones started singing and popping and my slaps became more melodic...I felt that for the first time in six or seven years of playing....I was playing for the first time and sounding like a djembe fola. Once, when a friend was coming to the studio to meet me, she thought there had been two drummers playing...my slaps and tones had been so distinct it sounded like two drums!
The trouble was if I stopped playing for a while, or tried to re-create it in front of someone my sounds would just disappear. It was so frustrating! And when the sounds disappeared the harder I tried to get them back, the worse they got. Even worse, they seemed to completely dessert me when I was teaching, particularly when I was doing a school workshop. In private my sounds got better and better over the years but in public they were shaky at best.
I thought long and hard about why this was happening. I used to be a very shy child and would often feel the pressure of a strangers' gaze building up until it erupted, leaving me bright red, shaky, sweating and flustered. Over the years, as a musician in various bands, I have had to cope with this crippling self-consciousness, but I have often struggled to be in the moment like I am when it's just me and my instrument. And that was my revelation: In order to perform well I had to stop trying to perform but rather play like I do when I'm on my own!
Of course it wasn't that simple, but this little revelation did start making a difference. I stopped trying to perform so much on stage and tried to just play well. In workshops I'd do a demonstration of the sounds, and use that as an opportunity to get in the zone or be in the moment. In fact I consciously tried to make sure that every time I sat with my djembe I approached it like a practice. Of course in schools I had to teach, get the kids to pay attention and generally control the workshop, but I made sure that every time I sat down with my drum I took 10 seconds to make sure my body (relaxed shoulders, straight back, elbows low, use the wrists) and mind (focus, relax) were in the right place. It's amazing what a difference this small exercise made to my playing!
Over the years my consistency has improved. In private I am well up in the 90 percents, but I still sometimes have a problem when I'm sat in front of my advanced djembe group in my regular evening classes...with them touching distance from me, and expectations very high, the pressure is often palpable. And sometimes there's a particular left-hand tone that I just can't seem to get, and as I try again and again, under the pressure of their gaze, it gets worse and worse until it completely disappears, only to return a little later when I'm not thinking (or worrying) about it. Sometimes I think I will never achieve my goal...
What I need to do when this happens is, paradoxically, not think about it. The reason is that thinking about it makes me self-conscious and that takes me out of the moment. If I can avoid thinking about it but rather create that finely-balanced, focused yet disinterested state that I know leads to good technique then I'll have cracked it! It really is like a meditation.
It is for neuro-scientists to study what happens in the brain when musicians go into this state, and philosophers to debate if this can achieve different states of consciousness...but from a drummer's perspective I need to be able to switch it on like a light whenever it is needed. 14 years in and I'm still practicing. Sometimes I think that I'm really close, but like Achilles and the tortoise, that last little bit seems infinitely far away...but I hope one day I'll achieve my goal. And on that day, maybe, just maybe someone will call me a djembe fola...
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