Beaten path
Tara Greenblatt follows the rhythm
by Laura Kiritsy
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.