Getting the Rhythm of a Different Drummer

It must be Sunday night because a pounding as sure as your heartbeat is rising above a spray of squat commercial buildings off Colorado Avenue. If the night is throbbing and the palms are swaying to the beat, that can only mean one thing:

The natives are restless in Santa Monica.

Of course, the indigenous species there tends to favor white collars. Behind the unsuspecting walls of the Westside Academy of Dance, doctors, lawyers and accountants are, shall we say, getting down. They are thumping on African goatskins. They are drubbing away on djembe and boogarouboo, on sangbani and kenkenis. They are calling on prehistoric ghosts to pummel their 20th-Century Angst into submission.

If it feels good, whomp it.

“You feel like you’re in the middle of the Amazon,” says Suzy Pobor, who has just had the sort of day that makes the middle of the Amazon look good. Only hours before, Pobor, 34, had broken up with her boyfriend. She counted the number of times they’d split--five--then she counted the hours until drum class--four. Court reporter by day, African percussionist by night, Pobor will take her night persona any day.

“This is what I really am,” she says dreamily.

Pobor’s favored habitat is Paolo Mattioli’s African drum class. It’s among half a dozen drum classes in Los Angeles and a 6-month-old entry in the drum renaissance that’s paralleling the recent upsurge in world beat music sparked by such artists as Paul Simon and Sting.

It’s also accompanying the strains of New Age. But without the philosophical frills, it’s New Age for the spiritually squeamish. Sure, followers of Robert Bly are apt to beat the drum, literally, for the men’s movement and their new spiritual selves. But in Mattioli’s class, all you have to do is, well, drum.

“It’s really a magical kind of thing,” Mattioli says. “We don’t push that aspect of it because we don’t want people to be scared away by spiritual hoopla.”

Alex Shester, a Jungian psychiatrist and longtime drum enthusiast who has been attending Mattioli’s classes in Encinitas, talks about an actual fear of drumming.

“It touches something very deep and old in our psyche,” says Shester, who recommends drumming to his patients. “There’s something about the activation of those energies that frightens people. They think it’s a return to being primitive and savage, and they confuse that with being an adult and having fun.”

Paolo Mattioli is rangy and warm, given to ready smiles and epigrams.

“A tree doesn’t make a forest,” he likes to say to his circle of drummers, prodding on their community of effort that will blend and billow into one trunk of sound.

And this too: “The No. 1 rule of drum-making is you can’t rush a drum.” Mattioli, 35, is surrounded by the evidence that proves the rule. Scattered about the dance studio are two dozen drums that Mattioli has personally and painstakingly carved, chain-sawed, stretched and roped into instruments that would stack up quite nicely against the real Mali thing. Some of the harder-core drummers buy their own drums--$200 to $700--from Mattioli. (Fees for the hourlong classes start at $8.)

Mattioli is a walking illustration of his passion for African culture--around his neck are a string of cowrie shells, once currency in West Africa, and a gris-gris, a charm-filled leather pouch used to ward off evil spirits. Even his life has the flavor of myth.

Mattioli’s father was an electronics salesman who won free trips for big sales, and because he loved music, he brought back instruments from trips to Jamaica, South America and Mexico. When Mattioli was 6, he discovered the bongos.

“I picked them up and played a rhythm that I later discovered was an African rhythm,” he says mysteriously.

Mattioli studied ethnomusicology at UC San Diego and went on to open for King Sunny Ade and Sting. Needless to say, his field is not crammed with nice Italian-American boys from Madison, Wis., a discrepancy he acknowledges:

“If I can quote Yaya Diallo--he’s a master drummer and healer from Africa--he brought Europeans to his village in Africa. At first, the elders were skeptical about sharing their secrets. But he found strangely enough, it’s the Europeans who are most interested in carrying on the tradition. The youth in Africa are interested in the West, in Michael Jackson and James Brown.”

What interests Mattioli is the power of rhythm to forge healing and a sense of community, a power that persists from prehistory to the monotone of modern times. Whether you know it or not, you need to make music.

“It’s in our chemistry. It’s in our plumbing,” he says. You might not figure Charles Jordan’s plumbing to include a need to make music. Indeed, the 46-year-old litigator considers himself “a linear thinker” who generally doesn’t need his creative juices to do battle with real estate law.

“To be a rounded person, I want to expand that (expressive side),” he says, “and the drumming is one of the ways I do that.”

That’s no great stretch, if you consider that Jordan meets Mattioli’s primary criterion for those with rhythm.

He was born.

“Everyone has rhythm,” says Mattioli, “because everyone gets nine months of rhythmical training in the womb. You get 115 decibels from the heart, which is a very high level. And once you’re born, life is filled with rhythm--the rhythm of your footstep, the rhythm of day and night, the monthly cycles, the seasons, the train on a track, the fingers on a typewriter.”

Jordan is poised before a set of doundouns, drumsticks in each hand, and he’s intent on developing his less lawyerly side. He watches for a cue from Mattioli, who stands in the middle of a circle of 40 drummers. Mattioli divides them into three groups, assigns each a rhythm and orchestrates a blend that’s characteristic of West African drumming.

“Did any of you have the experience where after a while, it was just flowing?” he asks later.

Later in the evening, Mattioli’s partner, Charmain Renata, leads several dozen men and women in an African dance class. They make art out of the daily movements of agricultural life. Some of the drummers linger to accompany them.

By this time of night, Mattioli says, “things really start to cook. The drummers put out energy to the dancers and it creates this vortex that blows the ceiling right off.”

And everyone needs a little architectural redesign now and then, Shester says.

“It’s a natural, non-drug way of getting high,” he says. “That’s what we need to look for. People need to break through ordinary reality, the routines that people get hooked into that make them feel stuck.”

The drummers do talk about a feeling of joy and connection, of trying the class and getting hooked. When Michele Martin leaves class tonight, the adrenaline rush will keep her hopping until 1 a.m., even though her last few months almost make Suzy Pobor’s day look good. In a sliver of time, she has lost five friends to cancer and AIDS. But when she’s done drumming and dancing, she’s so up, down looks pretty far away.

“I’d like to get these thighs off before I die, but I’m going for the upliftment of the class,” says the 49-year-old pre-kindergarten teacher. “It’s exuberance, that’ll be the byproduct, but I’m going for the juice.”