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Fabienne put drums right in front of us and we soon were part of the rhythm happening in that room.  That's all it took.

We started showing up weekly to take a new drum lesson and be part of this forming drum circle group.  We told friends and soon we had a contingent from Jay making the weekly drive to Wadhams for Fabiennes drumming classes.

Sue and I bought some drums from, "Everyone's Drumming", a drum making business in Vermont.  We sold them in our gallery for awhile. Then Fabienne arranged a workshop with her teacher, Joe Platz of Hadley Massachusetts.  Joe brought drums that he made for sale, and we bought our first drum from Joe.  Joe is a priest in the Yoruba religion of West Africa and an absolutely fascinating man to take a workshop from.

Joe Platz playing on his congas at a workshop in the gallery

As our interest in drumming and rhythm increased, so did our drums and the people getting involved.  Sue would video tape all the workshops with Joe and she would score the rhythms and all the parts of the rhythms, and we really questioned Joe about the clave patterns for certain rhythms, and the words that would go with it or the flute patterns.

In this June 2000 photo, Fabian is on the left, Sue is third from left playing a clay drum that she made and stretched, I'm third from right.

Sue would write all this down in her own kind of scoring.  We would then have an accurate read on the rhythm and would be able to continue practicing and improving our skill with the rhythm.

At some point we decided to start practicing the rhythms here in Jay, at our gallery instead of making the weekly trip to Wadhams, I think we were planning on going to Wadhams once a month or so, to touch base.  We were so integrated with that group because we had performed together several times in the Plattsburgh area, and as a group we were starting to gel.  But the driving through the winter was tiring and too many people were showing an interest in Jay.

So we began a drum circle group here at the gallery, sometime in 2000.   We met every week on Tuesday and sometime in 2001 I broke the group into two.  A more serious group who were putting the time and effort into learning the rhythms and a group who weren't moving at the same pace as the others.  I found out that the people in the second group didn't like being there and they stopped coming.  So there was only one group again and sometime in 2001 this formed into Mountain Drum

It was on July 28, 2001 that I performed  "New Digs"  for the first time, and that included a drum rhythm accompanying the poem, New Digs.

In 2002 Mountain Drum performed for the first time.  Over a five year period we performed about 40 times from Schroon Lake to Plattsburgh, from Saranac Lake to Keeseville.

Throughout this time we continued to take workshops, Djimbe workshop from David Hero, Udu workshop from the Udu Boy, Brian Melick, Dou Dou N'Dai Rose the master drummer of Senegal, and a host of others.  We videotaped and scored everything we learned, then integrated the rhythms into our own versions, enabling Mountain Drum to have a portfolio of over 50 rhythms.

We created two cd's that were great sellers, Mountain Pass and Adirondack Flam.
Adirondack Flam was a rhythm that we developed and most of the others were our own original arrangements.

We also played with local Rock Bands, the Plattsburgh State Gospel Choir, Martha Gallagher the Adirondack Harpist, we played in two weddings and for many parties.

In 2005 I offered a workshop over the winter in the gallery that was very successful, several members of that workshop went on to join another successful percussion group in Saranac Lake.

Mountain Drum last performed for 2007 First Night Saranac Lake, there were other priorities in all our lives at the time and so we didn't get together for nine months or so and the group disbanded.

In the Spring and Fall of 2007, Sue and I were part of the World Drumming Initiative workshops, a grant program for the schools administered by the Lake Placid Center for the Arts.  We went into every school in Essex County and worked with students on percussion.  Each school received $2,000 worth of drums.  We used the same scores that Sue created for us to teach the children.

In 2008 I began going over many of the rhythms we learned from Joe Platz.  Being in a band and playing just one part of a tune over and over again, didn't enable me to explore the other parts of the tune.  Once we established a song for ourselves we pretty much played the one part in each tune, there were sections set aside in some tunes for improvisation, but mostly it was drilling on one part of the rhythm.

In early 2009 I began writing rhythms about my Adirondack Experience. (Current Work)  I'm hoping to establish a portfolio of about 20 tunes eventually.  I have six at present that I feel very good about and two that show some promise.  As I visualize this writing process I'm re-visiting many places I've traveled in the mountains and I'm having fun translating that into percussion.

As of April 2011 I'm just as excited about drumming as ever, perhaps more. I've developed nine original rhythms and one old one that I've re-arranged.   I began writing pieces for some of my poetry and at present I'm very involved in this.  I have two complete pieces finished, Blueberry Picking on Jay Mountain and Into the Adirondacks. 

I had my first rehearsal in front of a small audience of 13.  I plan two more and then a performance in the gallery in late July.

I'm working on new rhythms at present and my goal is to have a one hour, very unique percussive art performance piece.  It will have 18 original tunes and 6 of them will have poems with them.  There will be two older rhythms from the MD days, arranged as a solo.