Some Kind of Magic

Chapter 1

In the Beginning…There was a dark basement in a church building on the west side of Milwaukee.

     …There were 50-plus people of all ages, some sitting in pews pulled into a circle, some standing, some dancing and most all playing some sort of percussion instrument.

     …There were Native American-style drums, drums with goatskin heads, Tibetan bells and seedpod rattles…

     But most of all, in the beginning, there was this music. A roomful of sound—percussive and melodic; a hum of instruments vibrating and bodies moving—all connected through a song that had never been written.

     And I was part of this song. I was not a symphony-attending-witness of the world premier of some new opus. I, who could not decipher the code of written music, was playing upon a borrowed African drum, helping create this never-before-heard musical masterpiece with dozens of people I had never met.

     The time was 6 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2000. The event was one of many unique celebrations designed to usher in the eve and first day of the new millennium. It was titled “DRUM 2000 World Wide Synchronized Drum Circle.” The epicenter of this event was Taos, New Mexico; its genesis was with an organization called All One Tribe Drum. Local versions of this worldwide event were coordinated by hand drummers and musicians throughout the country. The plan was for drummers around the world to create song when each of their respective time zones reached midnight on Dec. 31 1999.

     This event came to my attention via a newsletter for hand drummers called Hands On Drumming, edited by a Milwaukee hand drummer and teacher named Tom Gill. How I became connected to Tom is the topic of another chapter, but suffice it to say, something really grabbed me in one of the articles in this newsletter.

     The advantage of being lifelong packrat allows me to quote from the newsletter saved from that time. The notice read:

Taos, New Mexico: To All My Relations…YOU are the one to make peace happen. It’s not too late to join or organize a DRUM 2000 World Wide Synchronized Drum Circle for the Millennium. When all time zones have reached midnight, people across the planet, together will drum, pray and meditate on the heart rhythm for one hour. In the USA this time is 7 a.m. (Eastern Standard Time)—6 a.m. Milwaukee—Jan. 1, 2000. Picture it, at the beginning of the millennium, hundreds of thousands of people sharing one prayer and one rhythm simultaneously. How better to seed our good intention for the next century.

     Reading this newsletter in a bubble bath sometime in December 1999, I knew I was in. I didn’t ask why, but knew I liked the sound of a “heart rhythm” and knew I had to be there doing something—I didn’t know what—with a group of people I had never met. I knew it had something to do with celebrating and looking forward, and I wanted to be part of that.

     I started out by celebrating New Year’s Eve at midnight with my family in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I went to bed and awoke at 4 a.m. to leave the house at 5 a.m. so I could be in Milwaukee by 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

     I arrived a few minutes before six and found my way to the basement of St. Ann’s Church. In the dim light I found a spot on a pew and took my drum, borrowed from Tom Gill, from its bag. A song of sorts was in progress, a harmony of diverse sounds with a vibrant, underlying pulse. A man who I later learned was named Elijah Paul, garbed in a suede tunic with beads and feathers and holding a tribal-looking staff, was leading a chant. Several women in Middle Eastern dance attire shimmied to the beat playing small cymbals strapped to their fingers. I touched the spotted goatskin head of my drum and felt it vibrate to the rhythms in the air. Not caring that I had never played before, my hands joined the drumhead and I entered into the song.

     But wait there’s more—In the Beginning…there was also a Sunrise. After we officially welcomed in the last time zone—7 a.m. Milwaukee time—several people decided to drive over to the Lake Michigan shoreline to see if we could catch the sunrise. We packed up, piled into a few cars and drove quickly east. Those in our vehicle realized that the sunrise was imminent so we landed at the first lakefront spot and grabbed up our instruments. As we began to play, the red-orange sun rose over the gray-blue horizon and we greeted the new day of the new millennium.

     For the next two hours we beat upon drums, clanged bells and clacked sticks and even “blessed” a tree by tapping musical plastic tubes against its bark. At one point a man walking by the shoreline broke into a verse of an African song I later learned was “Fanga,” a song of peace and welcome from Liberia.

     After a coffee shop breakfast, our hearty and hardy band disbanded. I loaded the African drum into my van, telling Tom I was not sure if I was ready to purchase it yet. Graciously, he said he’d let me think about it a while longer. It didn’t take me long. The magic and the music of the day caught up to me as soon as I hit the southbound on-r