A Minute With Sam: Short Music Lessons in Video Format

Sam is putting together a series of videos about various drums, percussion instruments, musical techniques, and more. So, want to up your percussion game? Stay tuned for these one minute videos, where Sam teaches basic beats from African and Afro-Cuban music, technique for classical and contemporary percussion, and other random bits of musical wisdom amassed over a couple decades of playing professionally, teaching babies, children, and adults, and just generally being a lover of all things music. Some videos will be in English, some videos will be in Spanish, but all videos will rely heavily on the universal language of music, so regardless of your native tongue, we hope you'll share our excitement about the one-minute videos!

And so we give you.... the first one! In Spanish, this minute with Sam (ok, so its a bit longer than a minute) introduces the kassa rhythm, which is a beat The Kassa is a harvest dance, and it is played while people do the hard work of harvesting- the music keeps people going, and you can probably imagine that, after harvesting to the beat of a vibrant group of djembe players, it feels impossible to harvest without this music to feed your soul and keep you in hopeful, forward movement.

The Kassa begins with a call to the drummers, which is then responded to with various beats. In this short video, Sam will introduce you to the call, and some of the beats. Happy harvesting, and happy drum playing!