I only recently became aware of Zakir Hussain, probably because my interest in drumming emerged only a few years ago when I learned to play the bodhrán. With a full-time job, I’ve had to keep my focus pretty much on the bodhrán so I could make progress. In fact, I became aware of Hussain’s passing through a social media post by a bodhrán player. Otherwise, I might still be deprived of knowing about him.
I will likely never fully understand the tabla and the traditions in comes from, though over time I hope to gain more knowledge of both. I did listen to Hussain play recently and it struck me that he was so at one with his instrument that a whole new being emerged – there was Hussain the person, playing the tabla and then there was this new being that emerged when he became really at one with the drum:
I noticed this after watching some very intense moments from some of Hussain’s performances, but what made me think of it again was watching this video of Ronán O’Snodaigh demonstrating a technique where he presses a pipe on the back of the skin to get a warped sound. As he warms up, he takes off musically, and that sense of the person and drum fusing into one being emerges:
Maybe these drummers can find this higher state because they started playing music at young ages, and after so many years of practice and performance they became more and more adapted to their particular instruments and musical traditions. The Indian tabla tradition is especially rich and has a long-established system of teaching and learning.
The bodhrán, however, is in many ways a new instrument that has continued to evolve and grow since it gained widespread popularity in the fifties and sixties when players like Sean O Riada of the band Ceoltóirí Chualann, Peadar Mercier of the Chieftains and Johnny Ringo Mc Donagh of De Dannan brought it onto the stage as a part of popular Irish music.
To play the bodhrán well, or even competently, involves improvisation, since the drummer does not play the tune in the same way as melody players do. This makes the instrument both easier and harder to play. This characteristic might play a role in Ronán’s ability to reach such heights in his playing, and insofar as the tabla also requires improvisation, it might play a role with Hussain as well.
I have listened to the Distant Kin album, which features Hussain and the bodhrán virtuoso, John Joe Kelly, couple of times so far, and will give it more spins on the virtual music app turntable in the future. Seems like a good place to learn more about Hussain’s drumming – from what I understand, he was fond of the bodhrán, which is an instrument that is often looked down on, or under appreciated.
The pandemic created a space in my life for learning and playing the bodhrán. I had virtually no previous music training. Added to that, I was born with a hearing impairment that led me to think learning a musical instrument wasn’t really possible.
During the pandemic, I spent hours and hours listening to tunes, learning to distinguish the different parts. Most tunes have two parts: A and B, but some have many more, like Kid on the Mountain, a five-part slip jig. Learning something while relying mostly on my sense of hearing was new to me.
It took me a year and a half, more or less, to be able to keep the beat. Luckily, we were in lockdown most of that time, so I wasn’t in a position to throw off other musicians. My husband has played music most of his life and took up the tenor banjo at the same time as I started the drum, so we played together. And I learned to use a metronome.
Four years on, I am publishing this recording of me playing along to the Lilting Banshee. I finally like how I sound accompanying a jig! I think my style is influenced by my teacher, who taught me online from Ireland while he was locked down and unable to gig and teach.
Having learned phrases and time signatures (3/4, 4/4, 6/8, 9/8, etc) that I can use to accompany music, I’m now starting to listen more deeply. I am paying more attention to pitch and how to mirror it on my drum through hand pressure on the back of the skin.
The bodhrán is considered to be a talking drum because so much of its potential comes from changing the pitch through handwork.
I added a few photos from a trip to Ireland to the recording:
I attended the Catskills Irish Arts Week this summer, a six hour drive southeast of Ottawa. It was the week that Donald Trump was shot in the ear during an attempt to assassinate him, and a week before Kamala Harris became the presidential candidate as Joe Biden stepped down.
We drove almost due south, passing by the Fort Drum army base, which covers more than 430 square kilometres in northern New York. I glimpsed it from the car window through tall chain link fences topped with barbed wire.
We passed through little towns on our way, and most were festooned in American flags, with many windows and porches decorated in red, white and blue pleated bunting. The occasional Make America Great Again sign appeared on the side of the highway.
A lot of the buildings in these American towns have wood siding and are painted white, but the paint was peeling on most of them, giving many of the towns a dilapidated air. Some of the houses were boarded up and empty.
It was a beautiful day when we headed south, but I felt a bit on edge. At that moment, it felt like the Democratic Party was on its way to losing the upcoming election, which could mean that the world’s only super-power would turn its back on fighting climate change and on women’s rights and welcome a dictator with open arms.
The town of East Durham is up in the Catskill mountains, which is dotted with resorts that prospered from the 1920s to the 1970s, when New Yorkers, especially those from Irish and Jewish communities, would escape the city heat into the mountains. Those resorts are now less opulent, but still fill up during the Irish arts week. The place where we stayed is also a popular vacation spot for biker gangs and even metal detectorists, who attend the resort’s annual Lost Treasure Weekend.
The weather was sunny but sweltering for most of the week, overwhelming the air conditioning in East Durham’s Irish pubs and taxing the window air conditioner in our small motel room.
I had learned to play the bodhrán during the pandemic over Zoom. The classes in East Durham were the first time I had a chance to learn in person in a group setting. I was so excited about it, I attended both the advanced and all-level classes.
Learning the drum has allowed me to feel what it’s like to be in the music, surrounded by other players and connected through a shared tune. It takes many years to play well enough to really connect with others during a session, but there are times when the music extends around everyone in the circle, as if weaving a golden rope and tying us into its knot.
Most nights there were sessions in the pubs, and we attend one led by teachers, which in this case means some of the best players from Ireland and New York. There were about 100 students in the pub, I think. The air was very humid and warm—the teachers at the front set the tunes and the pace, spinning out reel after reel as everyone tapped their feet to the rhythm and played their instruments, including fiddles, banjos, bodhráns, whistles, accordions and uilleann pipes.
Our collective effort made the wooden floor reverberate and the walls hum. The people around me were glowing with perspiration but also with a hint of inner light. The beer and whiskey glasses shimmered, and the tables swung back and forth slightly. The whole building seemed to shift and shimmy a little on its foundations.
When we left the pub, we looked up at the stars in the dark country sky and the world felt a bit sweeter, more peaceful. The feeling of powerlessness faded a bit—these days I see fires in my mind’s eye, burning through forests and towns, as temperatures go higher and higher. I find myself wishing for the winter months to come and damp down the searing heat. But that night, colder air flowed down from the sky and drifted after us as we drove along the road back to our room, where we dropped into the cool darkness of sleep.
Grange stone circle, the largest in Ireland. The cave entrance to Tir na nÓg is nearby.
“Tir na nÓg means ‘land of youth’ although ‘na nÓg’ is probably better translated as ‘the ever-young’ because it refers to a world beyond time in which events occur in a non-linear sequence much like how time was defined by Einstein or Heisenberg in the early twentieth century. Tir na nÓg is the land of youth because without time, aging is not an issue. Everyone is young or at least ageless there.
Some accounts describe [such realms] as consisting of forested wilderness while others describe flower clad meadows buzzing with bees. There are tales of cities and fortresses made of precious metals and feather thatch, while other tales home in on a sacred well at the heart of the land, surrounded by a grove of nine hazel trees or a single dominant tree with a bloom on every bough…
For each element of Tir na nÓg and its other sister lands there are key concepts that must be communicated. For instance, its sacred well was sometimes regarded as the birthplace of humanity, even of the entirety of existence. The tree that looms over the well is considered the axis of the world. It is the central tent post of this circus realm we inhabit and also the central tenet on which the druid’s power is based. The part of the sacred tree known as the silver branch is a metaphor for a concept that is beyond my ability to communicate – a concept as vast as any ocean.”
– Manchan Magan, Listen to the Land Speak
I’m sitting alone on a wooden chair, under an awning that shelters me from the summer sun. I’m surrounded by green cedars, oaks and a garden of flowers and grass. From within, I sense the earth’s opening heart. It unfolds, as if decompressing from being held under an enormous weight.
The old myths seem to tell us that the heart, when finally able to unfold, opens into an infinite space, a place that was present before the heart pumped blood through its vessels and will remain after it has stopped beating.
The weight holding down the heart comes from the time when men began to look at the rivers and lakes, trees and fields and all the animals as a means for their own ends. Not enough to grow food to eat and have water to drink. They wanted riches for themselves.
In the face of this, we need reminders of the deeper reality within the everyday. Sometimes we find it in the intensity of the blue sky. Other times, in the sound of someone making music. I encourage my son to create whatever he can – he’s made trebuchets out of reclaimed wood and carved faces into sticks. He’s printed 3-D figures in resin and built whole armies of fantastical creatures, painted in vivid colours. I’ve found him reading a huge novel, in a corner of his room. I hope that the forces of life and creativity are forming powerful struts within him that will hold up and protect his inner life when he goes out into the world. When he has to deal with the stresses of fitting into the workforce somehow. I don’t want him to lose his inner spark.
I was very interested in Indigenous cultures and stories of Turtle Island for many years. I’ve spent time at Mohawk spiritual gatherings and read books about Haudenosaunee culture and politics. But these cultures are not my own and I will always be outside of them.
During the pandemic I learned the bodhrán from an Irish percussionist who also introduced me to modern Irish culture and the notion of the Irish diaspora. I never really thought I was part of the diaspora because my family has been gone from Ireland for such a long time. But ironically, when I turned my attention away from exploring North American Indigenous cultures and stories, I actually found that I have an ancestral culture of my own that seems to have claimed me. Maybe it’s just that I have claimed it, but it’s a bond that’s undeniable and existed before I became consciously aware of it. Sometimes things really are right under your nose and you don’t see them.
At times when I hear Irish people speaking, I hear my own relatives talking. My grandmother and grandfather had very strong Irish accents and my mother does to a lesser extent. It is uncanny how when I hear those accents, I’m transported back to the kitchen table in my grandparents’ house, where I would sit with my granny. An echo within. The sound of their voices almost entering the present.
My drumming is humble and so is my writing. I am not sure I am connected to the sacred tree that towers above the holy well, where it forms the axis of the world. Empire building and profit making have damaged the beauty of the world and those who fear rivers that run wild and forests that harbour hidden holy wells have done everything possible to destroy any entryways to such realms.
But it may be that simply being open to the possibility of such places by listening and looking for them is enough to be a part of them. Connection to the deepest aspects of living is not restricted to the richest or the wisest or the most talented. Knowing this is the key to undermining the empire builders, I think.
So, back to the heart. For me, the working life weighs down my heart and makes the space I need to be able to create harder to access and inhabit. Yet if I am any good at my job, it’s because it’s fed by creativity. Ability to write and to make connections between concepts are the basis of my working life.
So, the heart opens, and the flowers and bees of golden summer celebrate that fact by their mere existence. Within my heart the infinite realm unfolds and expands. I need do nothing but observe it. Like my son, I tuck myself away in the corner of a room where it is quiet, and I can listen. There I sometimes play my drum, and I hear my heart reverberate throughout the whole house.
When I was in Ireland in September 2023, my bodhán teacher set me up for a lesson with another teacher who plays both bodhrán and drumkit in a band. We were staying in a village in the west of Ireland and the drummer lived 2 doors down from where we stayed while we visited.
The lesson was a bit of a turning point for me. It reinforced the idea of developing a really strong motor rhythm, where your basic playing is really even and you control the dynamics–loud, soft, slow and fast. I have been told before that the most important aspect of playing is the basic down-up stroke. It should both be even and almost perfectly timed.
So when I got back home, I set up my metronome and I’ve been practicing that basic down up pattern along with a few other basic patterns. After many hours of down up down up down up, my playing is much better. I feel I’ve lifted it up another level through that practice.
I have also watched Ruairi Glasheen’s documentary on the bodhrán, which talks about Ringo McDonough and how he developed a motor rhythm, which is what I learned from the guy 2 doors down. Now I really get how important it is. McDonagh’s style was an innovation at the time and his clean, simple driving rhythm is all you really need to play well at a session. Maybe the triplets and fancy fills aren’t really the point. Anyway, it’s obvious but maybe not so obvious!
For most of my life I’ve been a writer. And over time, I’ve learned that all creativity, whether it’s writing, music or something else, is an adventure.
Over the years I’ve seen many Irish music groups, and watched bodhrán players moving their sticks over their drums, performing rhythms and patterns impossibly fast. And they even played with both ends of the stick! I’ve always wanted to learn this instrument.
Just before we were all sent home in the middle of March, I picked up a cheap bodhrán at Long and McQuade and signed up for lessons through the Online Academy of Irish Music (OAIM).
By nature I’m an extrovert and usually find staying home for days at a time pretty hard to do. I like to be out and about, doing things with friends.
But suddenly I had more free time and all of it had to be spent at home. So I began to play the drum, doing online lessons and practising, sometimes for several hours at a time. The first thing I learned is how to pronounce bodhrán. It’s “bow-rawn.” Hard to say!
The OAIM drum teacher, Brian Fleming, was very good. So I thought I’d see if he gave lessons online. Sure enough, he does! We started meeting via Zoom in March—connecting County Kerry in Ireland with Ottawa for an hour or so every week.
Since then, my learning has accelerated and I can even play the stick doubled-ended on the drum.
Bodhráns are made with goat skin and they can be finicky things—if the drum is not tuneable, you have to wet the skin every 15 minutes while you play. So, after a couple of months of dribbling tablespoons of water, I was ready for a tuneable drum.
Brian recommended bodhrán maker Ben March who lives in Country Clare. I gave Ben the specifications, he made the drum and FedEx delivered it a couple of weeks ago.
I was able to have Ben put an inscription on my bodhrán: “on the adventure.” I can’t wait to see where this drum takes me. Already I’ve visited the seaside in Ireland and discovered my favourite bodhrán player, Ronán Ó Snodaigh.
My husband plays the mandolin and we are learning jigs and reels so we’ll be ready to join an Irish session at our local pub when we can all finally get together in person again. Check out a video of us playing the Ashplant Reel together on our front step.
In the meantime, my wonderful drum will be my portal to a new kind of creativity and way to connect with others both at home and far away.
