Different drummers
The women of Offbeat have found the power of rhythm
Wednesday, January 7, 20091
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Even in the falling darkness, it was hard to miss the women who were walking toward St. John's Episcopal Church in Northampton. Like everyone else out and about on a recent Tuesday evening, they were muffled in parkas and hats to keep out the cold. But these women were also carrying drums. Big drums.
They gathered in a meeting room in a building in back of the church. An outsider, watching, could pick up on the easy camaraderie among them as they said their hellos and settled in. Some of them have been coming here for years.
Ellen Clegg, who instructs them, was unpacking toys she'd brought in hopes of keeping her 1½-year-old, Lucia, entertained for the next hour. Whether she's dealing with a squirmy daughter or demonstrating a technique on the drum, or both at once, Clegg has a calmness that keeps things loose.
"Life is really hectic and people are at different phases of life," she said later. "For me, it's important that the class members feel like it's an open door, that they're part of this community even if they don't come every week."
The pulsing rhythms they play originated long ago in Africa or Brazil. To listen to them for the first time is to hear beats you can feel in your chest, rhythms that make you forget everything else, that make you realize you've spent your whole life vastly under-rating the power of drums.
Group identity
Though the 15 women in this class are still learning, they also perform in public. No one planned that, but some years back they began getting requests to play at local events such as Northampton's annual Pride march, or the city's First Night celebration.
"They needed a name to put on the First Night flier," Clegg recalled. So the drummers got together, batted some ideas around, and settled on Offbeat. "Then we thought maybe we should look more like a group," she said, so they bought red jackets to wear.
Several Saturdays ago, three of them - all in their red jackets - were stationed at the corner of Main and Pleasant streets during the Hot Chocolate Run, a fundraiser for a local nonprofit that aids battered women. As crowds packed the sidewalks, cheering on the hundreds of runners and walkers, the beat of the drummers reverberated up and down Main Street. As they came within range of the infectious music, many of the passersby spontaneously boogied, sashayed or just smiled.
A man jogged by, giving the drummers an enthusiastic two thumbs up. "Good job!" he called out.
Sheer joy
Kim Pinkham, 37, of Shelburne, one of the three Offbeat members there that day, says she likes to think that the drumming helps "psych people up." Asked what's in it for her, Pinkham says that it's hard to describe that without sounding "all New Age-y ... You become the moment, you give energy and you get it back." Then, with a laugh, she added something less New Agey: "Lower blood pressure!"
With Clegg guiding them, Pinkham and the others have learned the techniques of striking a drum to produce different tones and sounds. They've started with simple beats and progressed to complex arrangements. They've learned how to focus on their own parts while listening to the group as a whole.
Pinkham, who has been playing with Clegg since 2000, says learning the drums involved "convincing my hands to make the sounds I wanted to make." It takes concentration, she says, but paradoxically, you can't think too much "or you'll find yourself tripping up on your own hands."
Carol Vincze, 57, is an architect who lives in Huntington. For her, Offbeat is about friendships and fun. "I just think it makes me happy, simple as that," she said. "I'm always so glad when Tuesday comes around."
And beyond that, she added, "we've slowly learned to be pretty darn good, at least in our own eyes."
The women in the class talk of drumming as something primal, something tribal. However you describe it, said one, "there's a great feeling of joyousness" that comes with playing together.
Their ages range from 20-something to 60-something. Some are working, some are retired. Some came to the group having already played music. Some never had, but deep down - oh, deep down, they knew they wanted to.
Way back in high school, said Carol Vincze, "I always wanted to be in a marching band." But she never was. And then about five years ago, she happened by Clegg and a few other drummers who were playing at an outdoor fundraising event in downtown Northampton. She stopped, listened - and was taking lessons not long afterward.
Gretchen Courage experienced her epiphany years ago at a memorial service in Brooklyn. A group of women drummers played at the service and as she watched and listened, Courage says she just knew. "I want to do this," she remembers thinking. "It was the power of it, the voice the drum has that expresses your own."
Courage, 60, works in a large public school in Springfield. "At work, I'm pulled in so many different directions," she said. "Drumming puts you back in touch with yourself."
Ann Sirignano of Northampton, a 52-year-old physical education teacher, showed up for her first drumming class about five years ago, bringing with her a fascination with African drumming but no previous musical experience. What she found, says Sirignano, was a welcoming, stress-free environment in which she could challenge herself to learn something totally new.
"You cannot possibly think of anything that bothered you during the day," she says, "or about what you're going to cook for dinner."
Sirignano says the progress she's made and her desire to keep learning is all about Ellen Clegg. Her gift, says Sirignano, is her ability to create a nonjudgmental, noncompetititive environment, and to do whatever it takes to bring each student along: "She doesn't give up on you and there's nothing you could do that she would cringe at."
At least outwardly. "Ellen tries her best to get us in shape," said Amy Cohen, "but it must be a nightmare sometimes to listen to us." Cohen, a retired social worker who describes herself as "reasonably talentless" when it comes to music, claims for herself the title of "Most Improved" member of the group. And it's absolutely true, she says, that Clegg is its "real spark. She is music."
Not just for boys
Clegg, 36, grew up in Connecticut, where her mother was a concert pianist. Her father worked in the insurance business, but was also musically inclined - he played the organ. Clegg was barely past toddlerhood when she says she became captivated by the snare drums and the xylophone she'd hear when she went along with her mother to orchestra rehearsals. By the time she was in elementary school, her mother's orchestra colleagues were giving her lessons. When she was 16, her father gave her a djembe, a skin-covered hand drum. And that, she says, "was the beginning of a whole other world of music that opened up to me." Over the years, Clegg says, she sought out drummers to learn from, even traveling to Brazil to study there. During her years at Oberlin College in Ohio, she played with a steel drum band.
But Clegg says she always knew that making a living through music would be hard. After moving to this area in 1999, she worked as a pastry chef at Whole Foods in Hadley and at the Blue Heron restaurant in Montague while offering drumming lessons on the side.
From the beginning, Clegg says, she focused primarily on working with women as a way of reversing cultural stereotypes that tend to encourage more boys than girls to bang drums. Some of her women students over the years have told her, Clegg says, that they always wanted to play the drums but thought it just wasn't what girls did.
Over time, she parlayed her passion for drumming into a business she named Found Sounds. In addition to the class at St. John's, Clegg teaches groups of beginners and offers one-on-one lessons. She also has done drumming workshops at conferences; in area schools and colleges; in nursing homes; with cancer patients and those with Alzheimer's; and with health care workers and caregivers.
Drumming, she says, is both "energizing and relaxing," contradictory as that may sound. It offers the chance of feeling "like you're part of something greater than yourself," she said, and it lifts the spirits of drummer and listener alike.
She has been able, for instance, to coax an Alzheimer's patient far enough out of his shell to join her in playing a drum. The nurses told her later that until then he had been so withdrawn that he hadn't been able to feed himself. And once, when she was playing for patients in a nursing home, Clegg says she looked up and saw several nurses out in the hallway dancing to the rhythm of the drum. Clegg smiled. "That's got to be a good sign," she said.
Suzanne Wilson can be reached at swilson@gazettenet.com.
