A Conversation with Layne Redmond

The Monthly Aspectarian: Layne, I usually like to start by letting people briefly tell their own stories.

Layne Redmond: My story is pretty unusual in terms of now often being described as a virtuoso frame drummer and a historian of the oldest known drum, which is the frame drum. It certainly was a circuitous route getting to this place. I grew up in a very small town in rural Florida, and there was not much access to any kind of music in terms of learning music or hearing it performed. So I didn't get to study music as a young child or teenager, but what I did do was study dance. There was a very good teacher who retired to my town . . . I studied tap and ballet and jazz with her, and jazz, particularly, was my early rhythmic training. Another thing that played into what I'm doing now, which is leading a lot of community rituals and celebrations, is that as a teenager, for many years I was a cheerleader. Later in my life, I realized that cheerleading is probably the only place that I would have been able to get the training to rhythmically rouse and shape group energies by chanting and clapping and moving in rhythm. Cheerleading actually played an important part in developing what I'm doing now.

TMA: Do you find that a little ironic?

LR: Oh absolutely, because later I moved to New York City and became a radical multi-media performance artist. I actually did a performance called I Was A Teenage Cheerleader, in which I was basically ridiculing the fact that I had spent so many years of my life doing that. Now I've completely re-evaluated it, because where else are you going to get experience rousing group energies for community rituals? And particularly in a really small town in the south! It was a very valuable training for me, and I've been comfortable being in front of large groups of people since I was very young.

When I moved to New York, I became a visual artist then a performing artist. Around 1980, sort of on a whim, I decided to take a drum class. I was taking a conga class and I just loved the trance union that we all experienced. You know the trance union, the experience of people playing together in rhythm. And this was back before all of the interest in drumming and rhythm that's going on now. So I was looking around for a conga drum -- it wasn't that easy to purchase a drum back then -- and before I could, my teacher actually moved. But in the last class, he brought Glen Velez in. Glen Velez was unknown at that time, but he was studying frame drums.

TMA: Just what is a frame drum?

LR: Frame drums are light and portable; they're hand drums based on the design of a woman's grain sieve.

Glen also played a pandeiro, which is a tambourine from Brazil. I was pretty amazed at what he was doing with it, and talked him into giving me frame drum lessons. Actually, he played a dumbek, which is a Middle Eastern hourglass-shaped drum which is more like a conga drum. I asked him to give me lessons on the dumbek, not on frame drums, because I thought I already knew something about that style of drumming. But when I went to my first lesson, he had dropped his dumbek . . . it's ceramic and it had broken, so he picked a tambourine off the wall and said "What about this?" And there I was with a tambourine in my hand, without ever having planned for this to happen. I had never decided I wanted to learn to play frame drums or Middle Eastern style tambourines or set out to do something like that. It seemed to be all by chance, that there I was, learning how to play this instrument.

TMA: You thought of yourself as an artist at that point?

LR: I was an artist at that point, and I was a struggling artist. I was doing whatever to make ends meet, and I wasn't selling a lot of art. But I started studying the drum, and it turned out to be a very serious instrument and a very serious discipline. I was really Glen's first student . . . I realize now that I was a very talented student, but at the time, I had no frame of reference for understanding that. But within a couple of years I was performing and recording with him, and I recorded with him for his first five recording projects.

I was just in the right place at the right time and had the capacities and talents to start to do this. It was a struggle for me, though, because it took so much time and energy to play and to learn the complex rhythms and the technique . . . and Glen's music is very complex. I was still trying to make my art and also trying to survive in New York. I just didn't know how it was all going to work out in the end. But at some point, I realized that more of my energy was going into the drumming than into anything else. I had started to research the history of the drum, and noticed that all the drummers of the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome and ancient Turkey, which was the Anatolian culture, all the frame drummers were women. And this drum, the frame drum, happened to be the predominant drum at this time in these cultures. It was the drum that was played most often, it's the one most often depicted, and it was played almost completely by women.

TMA: Well, that's interesting -- because in our time, drumming is seen by most people, I think, to be more of a male thing.

LR: That's right, and that's true, although at this point it's rapidly shifting. I wanted to figure out who these women were that were holding these drums and playing these drums, and why at that point in time were all the drummers women? And why are they not drumming now? That was in 1981-82 that I started to pursue trying to find out.

TMA: Do you think that the evidence is there that all of the drummers were women?

LR: Not completely. There's a few representations from that period of men playing frame drums, but over ninety-five percent of the representations are female.

TMA: Really.

LR: Yes. I have a book coming out in June with 260 images in it. The visual proof is overwhelming. It turns out that a lot of the depictions were of various goddesses holding the frame drum, so I had to find out about those goddesses and what they represented; what their attributes were, what their powers were, what people worshipped them for. And then I realized that a lot of the images were also of different priestesses, priestesses of the different goddesses. Also, Dionysus, a male god, is very connected to the frame drum.

TMA: The common thread that you found was that the drumming was trance inducing?

LR: Absolutely. As far as I can tell, drums were the earliest technology for transforming consciousness. I've traced the drum back to 5600 BC. It's painted on a shrine room wall in ancient Turkey, Catalhuyuk. That's the oldest depiction of any drum, and it is a frame drum. I've traced the symbols that were painted on the frame drums in the historical civilizations of the ancient world, and I've traced those symbols back as far back as into the paleolithic. I can trace the symbols back 30,000 years. Now drums, obviously, haven't survived from that period of time because they're wood and skin. The oldest surviving drum is from 1400 BC, and it's a frame drum from Egypt, and it was found in a woman's tomb.

TMA: At what point did you start the Mob of Angels?

LR: I was performing a lot with Glen, and also with Steve Gorn, who is an amazing flute player who played with us. And at the end of the concerts, I would talk about the history of the drum and the fact that women played it in the ancient world. People started to approach me and ask me to teach. At one point, when I was living in Manhattan, I had up to 50 students a week, and out of those 50 students, I formed a group called The Mob of Angels. For three years, we did a lot of seasonal rituals, celebrations of the winter and summer solstices and of the equinoxes.

TMA: What is the name of the album that you did with The Mob of Angels?

LR: It's called Since the Beginning.

TMA: Right, which I have, and when I had my radio show, I played cuts from it.

LR: Oh, great!

TMA: Do you have any other recordings in the works?

LR: Well, we're releasing one in June. It's called Being in Rhythm, and it's more breathing and rhythmic meditation that I do in my workshops. We did the guided meditation, I think it's 20 minutes long, and then we also had just the music without the meditation. That's being released by Interworld, the same company that put out Since the Beginning. And I have an instructional video with Interworld also.

TMA: What's on the instructional video?

LR: The video has been released for a number of years now, and it was called Ritual Drumming, but Interworld is now a subsidiary of Warner and they're repackaging all of the videos. They've renamed it A Sense of Time. It shows the technique on the Middle Eastern tambourine, which is the frame drum that I start everybody on and that I sort of specialize in. It also has about 11 minutes of the slides that I show in my lectures, so you see a lot of these images.

TMA: Do you work only with women, or do you work with men as well?

LR: No, there are now men in The Mob of Angels, and my primary musical group now is a group called Mad Honey, and that's with the percussionist Tommy Brunjes.

TMA: What are you doing?

LR: Well, the music is still predominantly based around frame drums, but we also have incorporated acoustic 12-string guitar in some of the pieces, and sometimes Steve Gorn plays with us. That's the next record I'm going to have.

TMA: Is it soft and new age-y or do you break a sweat?

LR: I don't think I would say soft and new age-y. It's more groove and dance oriented at this point. That's definitely what I'm interested in. I've been going to Brazil quite a bit, and that's really influenced what I'm doing. I was actually invited to be a soloist in a world wide percussion festival in Brazil, which was an amazing event and really was transformative for me. This festival in Brazil is the remnants of the ancient Mediterranean festivals. The Portuguese women brought their frame drum there. The festival had amazing fusion with the rhythms and the music of the African slaves and the indigenous people. I went back the next year to a remote area where they have a frame drum festival, and I've just written an article about that that's going into Percussive Notes, which is a journal basically for conservatory percussionists.

TMA: Tell us a little bit more about your book.

LR: Well, the subtitle is A Spiritual History of Rhythm. It's really about women's spiritual past that's sort of been lost to us. It's been buried, and this is the first book in existence about the frame drum. There's no history of the frame drum. If you go to a library and look up "frame drum," you're not going to get any listings. What I did was give a brief overview, and then start in the paleolithic, and wrote some about shamanism, because shamanism uses the frame drum. I believe that's the roots of our oldest religions as human beings. Then I wrote about the neolithic, where we find the first frame drum represented. And then India and in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

And then there's a chapter on what happened and how this -- sort of disempowerment came about. There's a couple of direct quotes from the early Christian fathers. With the rise of Judaism and Christianity, women were barred from being priestesses, and they had been priestesses for thousands of years in the pre-Christian religions and religions that were focused on both goddesses and gods. But as Christianity became very powerful in Rome, women were barred from any position of spiritual authority and there were commandments after commandments, and decrees. Here's one: "Women are ordered not to speak in church. Not even softly, nor may they sing along or take part in the responses, but they should only be silent and pray to God."

TMA: Boy, that pesky patriarchy.

LR: (laughs) It's pretty serious. That was in AD 375. But the more severe one was, "Christians are not allowed to teach their daughters singing, the playing of instruments, or similar things," because according to their religion, it is neither good nor becoming. And that's the commandments of the fathers superior in AD 576. There are many decrees against women being musicians and as Europe became Christianized, this is what eventually barred women from becoming professional musicians or composers. They had been connected with the drum for so many thousands of years, and connected with the drum as a sacred instrument in the pre-Christian tradition, basically focused around different goddesses. So the drum, in particular, was banned.

TMA: As we move into a different age, I think you're doing really good work.

LR: It's very exciting. What's happening across the country with this sort of incredible burst of enthusiasm and interest in learning to play hand drums of all types is really amazing to me. We just drove down to Florida and back, and we did events in Pennsylvania and Georgia and North Carolina, and the response is very powerful all across the country. I've been working in the northeast for a long time, and in California, but things are happening in the midwest and in the south. It's very interesting. There's such a return to rhythm at this point.

TMA: Is there an essential statement you'd like to close with?

LR: There is something I'd like to say. The book really explores the connection between blood as a sacred fluid -- a lot of the ancient frame drums are painted red to represent that concept -- and the sound of the blood, which is what you actually hear in the womb; you hear the pulse of your mother's blood, not her heartbeat. "In the pulse of the drum and the beat of the blood, we are all one."

Visit Layne Redmond's Website

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