Isaacs Vaughn Band

I’ve always loved the drums, I’ve been drawn to them really.  Whether it’s a blazing flurry of a solo by the great Buddy Rich or a slick and slippery groove from Jeff Porcaro or Steve Gadd- I love it all, the groove just calls to me.  Lately, I’ve been learning a little more about why that might be.

It may appear that I’m changing the subject when I bring up Shamanism, but stay with me- it relates more than you might realize.  Something that saddens me is that these days if someone knows the term “Shamanism” they usually think of it in terms of a euphemism for dabbling in hallucinogenic substances.  While the Shamans of someancient tribes (in Mexico among other places) used hallucinogens such as peyote or Salvia d., anthropological research shows that only 10% of shamanic cultures actually used such substances to commune with the spirit world.  So, this begs the question- what did (do) the other 90% use to journey to the spirit world?  The answer is a DRUM! That’s right, a drum played at approximately 180 beats per minute for approximately 30 minutes can actually help one achieve an altered state of conciousness- a trance of sorts.  It was in this state that the shamans would travel to the spirit world to do healing, talk to spirits guides, etc.  From my research there seems to be a bit of controversy regarding what constitutes a Shamanic drum.  In some of my studies I discovered that some Shamans prefer a two headed drum because it represents a microcosm of the universe with one head representing the masculine and the other head representing the feminine (you can kind of think of it as the “yin and yang” as well).  On the other hand, there is a fairly well known myth about how the Shamans drum came to be single-headed.  It seems that years and years ago there was a very powerful Shaman who could save souls from anywere- heaven, hell, anywhere.  One day God decided he would get one over on this Shaman guy.  God took a soul and put it in a bottle and put his thumb over the bottle.  In an effort to rescue this soul, the Shaman rode his two headed drum far up into the heights of heaven.  When he found God he saw that he had the soul in a bottle with his thumb over the top of it.  The shaman turned himself into a huge fly (some myths say that he turned into a bee) and bit God.  Because of the pain of the bite, God moved his thumb off of the top of the bottle- at that point, the Shaman flew down into the bottle and swooped the sould up and headed back to earth.  Realizing he had been tricked by the shaman, God threw lightning bolts at the shaman as he rode away on his drum.  The story says that the lightning bolt hit the drum and split it into two parts, what the shaman was left with was the single-headed Shamans drum that is used even today.

This story speaks of the Shaman “riding” his drum, essentially, this refers back to achieving that altered state by “riding” on the monotonous 180 bpm beat.  It’s interesting that this type of use of drums has been noted by anthropologists in tribes ranging from Siberia (where the word “Shaman” comes from ) to the Americas.  So, we see that playing a steady pulse of 180 bpm is indeed the DEEPEST groove!

How does this relate to rock and roll?  Well, its interesting that many rock tunes are played in the area of 90 bpm- about half the speed of that DEEP 180 groove; however, the pulse that is felt is actually the subdivided 8th notes of that  90 bpm groove, which gives us something closer to the ultra deep 180 bpm- interesting!  Maybe if more rock and pop songs lasted 30 minutes we would find ourselves in that altered state just from listening to music!