[Sidebar] The Worcester Phoenix
Nov. 9 - 16, 2000

[Rock/Pop]

| reviews & features | clubs by night | bands in town | club directory |
| rock/pop | jazz | country | karaoke | pop concerts | classical concerts | hot links |


Beaten path

Tara Greenblatt follows the rhythm

by Laura Kiritsy

Greenblatt Tara Greenblatt never could resist the call of the drums. Her passion for percussion started when she was a kid, and at Brookline High School she learned to keep the beat on a big old drum kit. As an Emerson College student in the early 1990s, Greenblatt found herself drooling over the goods at Jack's Drum Shop on Boston's Boylston Street, until she finally settled on a conga and taught herself to play. "I took it home and just sort of really drummed from my own core, my own being, just sort of hearing my own rhythms and doing it that way," she says.

Later, while pedaling through the urban jungle of Cambridge, the 28-year-old drummer was stunned and captivated by the hypnotic rhythms of the djembe, a traditional West African hand drum. "I rode my bike through Central Square and I heard the djembe," Greenblatt recalls. "It sounded like 50 djembes pounding against a wall -- the sound just coming through these windows and like whacking against the cement in Central Square, and it was one of those totally cheesy moments where I was like, `Oooh I've gotta turn my bike around!' and I just went toward the sound."

She ended up at the YWCA, where she found a big Senegalese guy surrounded by students. "I just fell in love," says Greenblatt, who signed up with teacher MaMaDou N'Daiye on the spot and studied with him for two years.

Greenblatt's been pounding the goat skin ever since, after ending formal study to march to the beat of her own drum, a djembe that N'Daiye crafted with his own hands.

"Drumming is one of the things that I know that I'm here to do on this earth. It's like the one thing I know how to do -- well" she laughs. "But it takes a lot of work. If I don't practice and expand and explore rhythmically, what ends up happening is I'll write 10 songs that have the same exact beat behind them and people will be like, `Okay, can we maybe have something different now?'"

Actually, drumming isn't the only thing Greenblatt does well. When she drapes her big soulful voice over her rhythms, it's no stretch to understand why the gal and her djembe have little need for sidemen. She can unleash a melodic mouthful from the depths of her gut and just as quickly bring it back down to a softly-turned phrase, without missing one of her own beats. It's all a big disguise, she let's on, but says it has begun to inform her song-writing style.

"I think because I don't work with a melodic instrument, my voice ends up doing all of the melody -- it goes through many different melody strains," explains Greenblatt, who studied operatic singing for two years as a teen. "It goes to intense highs and intense lows and everything in between to kind of cover up for the fact that there's no guitar."

Greenblatt doesn't always work alone. At some appearances, she's been pumping up her sound with the talents of guitarist Brian Potts and the harmonies of her older sibling, Wendy. Like they say, sisterhood is powerful. "That's been a big change for me," she says. It's enriched my own experience of my music much more soulfully for myself because I'm up there with blood, and it's incredibly powerful because we had been so far apart relationship-wise for so many years before that."

The trio's currently toiling away on Greenblatt's first full-length CD. The tentatively titled Medicine Songs is slated for a March 2001 release and will showcase Greenblatt's talents for storytelling and connecting with listeners through songs chiseled out of her own experiences. It'll include fan favorite "Ya Ta Hey," an epic tune -- and true story -- about what happened when Greenblatt spied a hottie on a Greyhound Bus and found herself sharing a six-hour ride with a convicted felon fresh out of the can. She recalls the incident with a mixture of amazement and humor. "When I finally asked him, `Where did you come from?' he said, `Penn State, but reversed.' And it took me a second, I said, `Oh. Oh my god.' I was so naive."

Underlying the song's mesmerizing rhythm -- and Greenblatt's humor -- lurks the weightier theme of how two people overcame racial, cultural, and social walls to form an unlikely connection.

Song writing abilities aside, Greenblatt continually steers our conversation toward the language of the beats. "I'm just turned on by rhythm. I'm turned on by it," she confesses. "It makes me feel driven, and it gives me a rush to just gel with the language. That freedom to drum and to just sort of let go, or just relax into the rhythm, allows this part of me that's normally inhibited to kind of crawl out to the surface."

Tara Greenblatt is the featured performer at the open mic on November 17 at 8 p.m. at the Center for Arts in Natick, 31 Main Street, Natick. Admission is $3. Call (508) 647-0097.

[Music Footer]

| home page | what's new | search | about the phoenix | feedback |
Copyright © 2000 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.