The Power of Samba

There are plenty of articles and various kinds of testimonials that speak to the healing power of music. There are branches of science dedicated to the study of its effect on brain waves and many other physiological effects on the body, whether the music is throat singing of Tibetan monks or the intellectually-stimulating music of Bach.

This topic is not new to me. Having been quite interested in health, having studied nutrition, herbology and various forms of body work, as well as being a musician, there was a time when I saw myself going into some kind of field related to music therapy. Of course, I hadn’t thought much about how music could or would heal my life. It was always in the context of others.

So maybe it’s kind of ironic (and yet, should be shockingly obvious) that music ended up healing me; and perhaps, it’s even more ironic that it never even occurred to me to seek out music as part of my healing. It just happened to me. It fell into my lap.

Within a couple weeks after my big arm surgery, my friend, Dan, offered to pick me up at my house (I couldn’t drive yet) and take me to shows and rehearsals of the local samba batteria. I think he said something to the effect of, “We’ve got to get you out- getting you out drumming will do you good…”

We’d talked about drumming many times before. He’d mentioned this batteria to me long before my accident since I’d done a fair amount of drumming in my past. But I hadn’t really touched the drums in years, having gotten preoccupied with other things. Heck, with all the things going on in life, I hadn’t actually played music in ages, hadn’t composed in almost a year. I didn’t know it yet, but because of the lack of music in my life, I was desperately malnourished. I didn’t realize how starved I was until I caught a whiff of music again.

Conveniently, since I couldn’t really use my left arm that much, there were plenty of one-handed instruments I could play in this ensemble. And after a little coaxing, I finally decided to show up for a rehearsal.

Having not picked up a drum in years, but having been a musician all my life, it was a strange feeling, perhaps like running into your best friend from primary school, or maybe bumping into a lover who changed your life but whose last name you can’t remember. It was a combination of blissful familiarity and a foreign emptiness. It was a little surreal.

The leader of the rehearsal, Mehmet, a person Dan had referred to previously, was a talented drummer and Ph.D candidate in engineering. We seemed to connect right away- he wanted to hear about my experiences drumming in West Africa, I wanted to pick his brain regarding samba.

By the end of the rehearsal, I had a permanent smile on my face and the familiarity had overtaken the emptiness. Every cell in my body had started shouting, “Yes!”

An insatiable hunger to keep at it appeared in my gut out of nowhere. It was almost like a dramatic love scene (“where have you been all of my life?!”), only I knew that drumming had always been there for me, I just hadn’t made time for it.

How did I manage to forget how powerful this feeling was, how much my soul needed to play music? How did I somehow just run out of time for this? I found myself saying in my head, “I’ve got to remember how much I love drumming, how much I need this. I can’t forget this again.” I repeated this over and over to myself.

Up until the last particularly miserable year preceding the accident, I’d always had my hands in some kind of musical cookie jar. For the last 5 years, it had primarily taken the form of composing for film. But once I got a taste of drumming again, the hunger to remember and get reacquainted with such a love of mine turned my focus very much towards not only samba but also towards getting back into conga and West African drumming.

Playing the drums was an entirely different experience for me than most of my musical ventures, which had generally involved classical or jazz music to some degree. Drumming was something I saw as a side-project of sorts; it had been one of the ways I paid for my college (accompanying dancers) and it had taken me to Ghana for private study. Still, it was not my primary focus. Not until my “elbow adventure.”

Over the course of the ten months from the time I fell until now, it absolutely became my best friend.

To risk stating the obvious, the simple ability to bang on something over and over- and loudly- was therapeutic in itself. It doesn’t take a musician to realize that. Secondly, an engineer could explain how the vibrations coming off of the drum being played also had healing qualities. Thirdly, giving my elbow and wrist a gentle workout by playing the drum (left hand muting the drum I primarily played with the right hand) also helped me recover physically.

But beyond that, it was something much greater than the catharsis of taking my emotions out on an instrument or getting side benefits from the sound waves and physical activity.

It was the gift of simply remembering something I was good at.

Slowly, happiness and satisfaction and pride started creeping into my life, subtly at first, but dependably. Remembering that I had an ear for this stuff allowed me to enjoy it, celebrate it and start celebrating the music in myself again. To remember and reacquaint myself with something I was good at- to follow that again- did wonders for my emotional healing.

And inside of reminding me of something I was good at, it did something even more profound. To put it succinctly, and at the risk of sounding trite, playing drums again simply reminded me who I was.

A feeling that powerful- to reawaken to yourself after having been so lost for so long in some deserted wasteland of depression, anxiety and complete mental and emotional exhaustion, having had severe identity amnesia- doesn’t come along often in life.

Reawakening to myself was a gift I didn’t take lightly.

And, just like so many other aspects of this journey, that always seemed to contain both the light and the dark, both the positive and the negative, both the rainy and sunny emotions, the depth and profundity of having remembered myself was surrounded ever so perfectly with lightness: I had made so many new friends. Among them, Mehmet, the rehearsal leader, had become a dear friend of mine. The way he tells the story is that by the second rehearsal, I was already correcting him and jumping in to point out inconsistencies. Being a fierce musician, that’s when he knew we’d have something to connect about.

So, after healing my body, my heart, my sense of self and my sense of purpose, on top of that, samba gave me a community of wonderful people. Through the simple power of music, I had gone from a barren, stripped down place of having lost so much to a place of awe-inspiring abundance overflowing with happiness, with a renewed sense of purpose and a new circle of silly, upbeat, musical friends.

Isn't there a saying about when a door closes, somewhere a window opens? Can I make up my own?

When life beats the crap out of you, then kicks you again while you're down, at some point, it's probably going to reach down, take your hand and somehow, try to make up for it.

Yeah. Something like that.