Mickey Hart Interview
from Sound & Spirit program "Drummers' Circle"
Sound & Spirit host Ellen Kushner : A heartbeat, a pulse...The first sound of live, from inside the womb. The beat of the drum follows us...Connects us to the past and beats the rhythm to the future.That is the spirit of the drum.
Pictures of women holding frame drums, found on cave walls, over ten thousand years old, tell us that since the birth of time, the pulsating rhythms have been an integral part of human culture...of it spirit and daily life.
Hi, I'm Ellen Kushner. This time on Sound & Spirit, we enter the Drummers' Circle for the rhythm, the craft, and the spirit of the drum...
Mickey Hart has made the world his drummer's circle. Known for over twenty-five years as a percussionist with the Grateful Dead, he embarked on a personal quest to find out why drums embody not just what he does, but who he is. He has traveled extensively, recording drummers everywhere from the Nubian Desert to the Artctic Tundra. The book, "Drumming at the Edge of Magic" is a diary of Mickey Hart's search for the lore of drums, drummers and drumming. We spoke recently. Being somewhat rhythmically challenged myself, I asked him to start simply, and he gave me a quick introduction to "the backbeat."
Mickey Hart: Well, a backbeat is, in numerical terms, the two and the four, as opposed to the one and the three.
(He demonstrates)
So it's the beat that is the next beat before the front beat. So it goes from back to front, back to front, front to back, front to back. This rocking movement gives you rock'n roll, and the backbeat becomes a signal, a guidepost for everything else to roll around. So the backbeat is what we dance to, and that's what American music did, you know, with Duke Ellington and Count Basie and all the big bands of the `20s and `30s and `40s and `50s, and the 60's and then we electrified and then, you know, so it's the backbeat that's beendriving American music and that comes directly out of Africa, and also the three over four.
(He demonstrates)
All that syncopation comes from Africa, comes right directly from the slave trade from Bahia and Brazil, up through the Caribbean, New Orleans and the United States, mixing with the blues and native instruments of the South and, well, that's a few hundred years in about twenty-five seconds, but I mean that's a real quick rundown of how it went. But it was a fascinating transmission of instruments and people and cultures and meeting, and, you know, I mean a lot came out of that, like, the drum set, a strictly American invention came out of all of that.
This interview was part of the Sound & Spirit program "Drummers' Circle".
For more of Ellen's conversations check Interviews in the section Above and Beyond.
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