Drumming Up Traditions From Africa : Musician: Francis Awe believes his talking drum has a lot to say to Americans. He and his ensemble will seek to prove it Saturday in Laguna Beach.

Francis Awe’s grandfather was named Adibulu, which means “somebody whose first opening of eyes saw drum first,” according to Awe (pronounced AH-way ). It seems to run in the family.

Even when he was a baby being reared in a Nigerian village, “any time the talking drum was played, I always would burst into an unusual cry, my grandmother has told me. So she, as an experiment, took me to where the drums were being played, and I would stop crying. She repeated that three times, and the third time she handed me over to them and said, ‘This is going to be a drummer,’ ” Awe recollects.

The 39-year-old is now a master drummer, specializing in the talking drum, an hourglass-shaped instrument whose twin heads are joined by leather thongs. When squeezed between the arm and chest, those thongs alter the tension on the drum heads, and hence its pitch, allowing the instrument to mimic the musical Yoruba language. Its sound has become the most distinguishing factor of Nigerian music, as promoted in the West by the likes of King Sunny Ade.

Like Ade, Awe was born into Yoruba royalty and was discouraged from playing music.

“They tried by all means to stop me,” he said. “Drummers were supposed to entertain the royalty, not the royalty entertaining the commoners. But I followed the drum.”

His grandfather evidently didn’t follow his muse and went on to become a king. But Awe did follow his, and wound up in Southern California. He is absolute ruler, at least, of a class in African drumming that meets in the Laguna Beach Recreation Center the first and third Saturday night of each month. (On Saturday, Awe’s performance group, the Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble, performs in Laguna’s El Morro Elementary School Auditorium.)

Awe, who is completing work on his master’s in ethnomusicology at UCLA, is a born teacher. He is passionate about his craft, infinitely patient and full of mirth, but unflagging in his certitude that there is a right way--his way--to learn the beguiling polyrhythms of African music.

Sitting on a bench enjoying the Laguna Beach night air before his class met last Saturday, the robustly rotund drummer explained, “When people come to register, the first thing I tell them is: ‘You may not have fun as much as you think.’ If I let you play anything you wanted to, then the fun you expect comes. But first you have to play what I want you to play, and if you like it, then the fun will come.”

Sure enough, when the class meets a little later, Awe begins by staving off some discontent from students who are tired of going over the same basic rhythms they have dealt with for months.

“You may know your beats,” he says, “but you have to know when to play them. That’s what is wrong in the world today: Everybody knows what to say and how to say it. Unfortunately, we don’t know when to say it.”

Then the class falls in on an intriguingly divided, lopsided rhythm. The students are beach-togged teens and retirees, world beat/health food devotees and curious library types. Some are reggae, jazz or rock drummers, while others are rhythm novices. Accordingly, some ride atop the rhythm while others founder in it; Awe comes to their aid, enthusiastically tapping out the beat on their drum until they get it.

Before the evening is over, he will have them divided into sections, laying different rhythms atop each other until there’s a thick forest of sound. Accompanying this, Awe’s wife, Omowale Orisayomi, leads a group of dance students in the other half of the hall.

There is nothing that could be called flamboyant in either the drumming or the dancing; rather, it’s the interplay that is essential to making both fly.

“The individual in this music is not what counts; it is all the individuals coming together,” Awe said, explaining why he devotes more attention to the weak-link students. “If one goes wrong, the rest of the music will go wrong.”

That knowledge is a given where Awe comes from. He was born into tribal life in a village of about 2,000 people; at the time it was an interdependent society decades away from getting electricity.

Instead of a formalized music education--which he has since acquired stateside--Awe said, “I just grew up with the drum. I learned automatically. There was no set rule to learning. I did it just by listening and following the music everywhere it went. And sometimes then the drummers would hold your hand with the stick and show you how to play.”

His father sent him to school, thinking it would make him forget drumming.

“But it did not,” Awe said with a laugh. “The drum affected my studies. If I heard the drum--if I was in class or anywhere--I had to jump out and go there. Because of that, I nearly failed.

“When I was a teen-ager, I wanted to hate the drum, because how could I be part of a royal family and play drum? So I left my home, thinking I wanted to leave the drum behind. But it didn’t want to leave me.”

Awe soon was entering and winning drum competitions, leading his own bands and teaching. One of his students--a Californian visiting Nigeria on a Fulbright scholarship--was so taken with his teacher’s talents that he paid Awe’s tuition for his first year at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. His abilities later won him a full scholarship there, and eventually he taught there for a year. He since has paid his own way at UCLA, a financial burden that has kept him from returning to visit Nigeria.

Having lived here for eight years now, Awe thinks there are profound differences between African music and Western music, yet he believes his music has something to offer America.

“The most essential thing, if you talked about only one thing in Africa, would be family extension. But I’ve learned that here people live a more individualistic life. This individual life extends to racial discrimination, you know? It’s all ‘for me first,’ then ‘for my family,’ then my relatives, then my race. But we are all one.

“It is my intention to reconcile people as much as I can with my music. The African drum is beyond ordinary drums. In the West they deal with sound, the patterns you play on drums and how elegantly you can play. Whereas on our drums, especially on the talking drum, it is ritual , it is the essence of humanity that we deal with. The drum communicates not only with living people but with our ancestors and the spirit world. I want to use it as a means to draw people together as a family and to use it as a healing source.

“Every African talking drummer is regarded as a psychologist. I’m using the drum to counsel with many of my students. Good music, it touches what nothing can touch. I gave a lecture two weeks ago at the UCLA ethnomusicology department, and I said every individual is two. There is one the eye can see, and I can talk to and recognize, but the other one I can’t see. And the one I can’t see is the one that controls the one I can see. And that is the one the music works with, and I have to play in a certain way to touch that place. This is our music.”

For Saturday’s performance, Awe will be accompanied by four other drummers on talking drum, congas and shaker. The performance also will feature Awe’s wife and her dancers. African-styled masks will be displayed and sold by local artist Laura Mercer.

Though Awe has played juju music and other Western-inflected Nigerian styles, it is the traditional unaccompanied drum sound that he prefers, and that he will be presenting.

In addition to his concerts and classes, Awe lectures and conducts workshops at schools. He looks at such work and his Laguna class as something of a mission.

“When the missionaries came to Africa, to win people to their churches, they would go and build a school or hospital, and later a church,” he said. “Once they got people to the school or hospital, they could talk with them. So I want to establish this type of drumming tradition all over the United States. What the talking drum plays, everybody needs to hear.

“I take note that our youths are now suffering. Nobody gives them example, and a lot of them are losing hope. This is a civilized state, very developed in education and technology, but all these kids are going out of school hopeless and therefore taking to violence.

“A child may be crying because he wants to hold a knife. And you as a father know this knife can endanger his life. You want to take the knife from him and, at the same time, you don’t want him to cry, so you give something that is brighter than the knife that cannot endanger his life. This is what I’m trying to do with my drum.”

Francis Awe and the Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble will perform Saturday at 8 p.m. in the auditorium at El Morro Elementary School, 8681 N. Coast Highway, Laguna Beach. Admission: $10. Information: (714) 455-3642.