INNER VIEW: The Grateful Dead’s
Mickey Hart pumps lifeblood
into Global Drum Project CD, tour

Mickey Hart, former drummer for The Grateful Dead and a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, leads an international ensemble of percussion masters in the Global Drum Project, a concert at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 16, in Eisenhower Auditorium. The performance, in support of the new Global Drum Project CD, features the same percussionists who performed on Planet Drum, the 1991 recording that earned the first Grammy Award in the world music category.

“This is just an extension of Planet Drum,” says Hart, speaking by phone from his home in northern California. “It’s just called Global Drum Project now, but it’s the same participants. Different music. This one has more processed percussion. It’s a little more extreme. It’s electronic. And it’s kind of like dance music. It’s just another evolution in our work in progress.”

Joining the Hart beat are Zakir Hussain, Sikiru Adepoju, and Giovanni Hidalgo. Hussain is a master of classical Indian music. Nigeria’s Adepoju, whose specialty is the talking drum (which mimics the human voice and was used in parts of Africa to transmit messages across long distances), is the protégé of Babatunde Olatunji, the man who helped to introduce African drumming to American audiences. Congo player Hidalgo brings the flavor of Puerto Rico and other Caribbean rhythms.

In the late 1960s, when he was already a Grateful Dead percussionist, Hart met sitarist Ravi Shankar’s tabla player Allah Rakha. Hart, who studied with the tabla master, soon brought Indian percussion into his rock and roll. Later, Hart teamed with Rakha’s son, Hussain, who went on to succeed his father (who died in 2000) as one of the planet’s leading tabla players.

In the mid 1970s, Hart and Hussain formed the Diga Rhythm Band, a percussionist collective. Riga, the band’s album, included the song “Happiness is Drumming,” which morphed into the Hart tune and Grateful Dead staple “Fire on the Mountain.”

“[Hidalgo’s] a conguero. He’s the best there is in the Latin world. He’s the Mozart of his instrument. Just like Zakir Hussain is in the Indian world and Sikiru Adepoju from Nigeria,” Hart insists. “So we have the representations of three powerful rhythmic cultures here. We have Africa, India, and the Latin spore. And, of course, I’ll add the backbeat and rock it back and forth.”

A technology guru joins the foursome for the fall 2007 tour. “We have Jonah Sharp with us as the fifth Beatle. He’s on computers,” Hart says. “We’ll be spinning loops and playing over them. Loops that we’ll be generating on the stage live. And so there’ll be sound on sound. It’s kind of an experiment of techniques that until now have been strictly reserved for the studio. But with digital technology, we’re attempting to do this live now, which is very exciting and groundbreaking.”

Planet Drum included a considerable amount of vocalization, which continues with Global Drum Project. Through the wonders of technology, the voice of Olatunji, who performed on the 1991 CD but died in 2003, is part of the new disc and will be heard in the Penn State concert.

“Both Zakir and myself are contributing vocals,” Hart notes, “and we have Baba Olatunji sampled—because he passed on a few years ago. We have his voice we’ll be triggering in the live performance, so he will be coming back once again. With digital technology all of this is possible. So it’s another adventure.”

Global Drum Project was about a year-and-a-half in the making. “But we didn’t work on it constantly,” he says. “…They all have solo careers. Getting them all in a room, that was the trick. And so you really had to pick your moments.”

The first step in making the new music was jamming. “It all came from improvisation,” Hart points out, “and then we decided on what part of that improvisation we were going to concentrate on to make them like songs. But they don’t have bridges and verses and choruses. It’s not like that. We were after the trance, and you can’t have a whole bunch of chord changes if you want trance. It evokes a zone that has meditation as part of it.”

The sixteen years between Planet Drum and Global Drum Project have brought about tremendous changes.

“Back then, the electronic side, the digital side, wasn’t really that important because it didn’t really exist,” Hart recalls. “…But now, technology has taken such great leaps and bounds we’re able to play with and dance with these machines. …We’re painting with a whole new palette of colors now. Much more sophisticated and much more fun, because now we can change and morph into any kind of percussion orchestra because of the processing. When you hear some of the instruments, you won’t recognize them. They’ll have been mutated into some glorious sonic wonder.”

Hart, who grew up in New York City in the years between World War II and the Vietnam War, was destined to be a percussionist. “I was coded for it. It’s part of my DNA. My mom and dad were drummers, so I was just kind of born into it. I just had the right genes,” he says. “I lived in the city, and I was always attracted to noise—rhythm and noise of the things that move, of culture. What attracted me were the trolleys and the buses and the cars and buildings being destroyed by giant balls, you know, all concrete, subways. The sound of the city was a symphony to me. That was attractive. And then by the time I was 3, I was no doubt playing all over the tables and pots and pans—the typical beginning of a life of rhythm.”           

Hart’s urban neighborhood was a patchwork of musical traditions. “You could walk out in the street and hear music playing from Africa…,” he remembers. “You could hear the strong Latin music of Tito Puente and Machito and Tito Rodríguez and all of these great Latin pioneers. And then, of course, what they called race music, Black music, Delta blues music. You could hear that being played.”

The young New Yorker was also schooled on world music through his mother’s collection of the now-famous Folkways ethnographic recordings.

“I was listening to Pygmy music when I was 6 years old. I thought everyone in the world was listening to gamelan music from Java and Bali and so forth,” Hart recalls. “My early exposure to the world’s music happened very naturally and in a place where those cultures were colliding, melding, and coming together and living together in peace and harmony actually. …Music was the major connecting rod between the Chinese and the Italians and the Irish and the Jews and the Christians…. Everybody had their own music, and they started to appreciate other people’s music, and that bred an understanding of their culture because music contains the history, thousands of years of history, of who they are. The songs are like talking books. Dreams, hopes, fears, our relationships are all spoken about in music. It became a lifestyle thing, as opposed to something that was just enjoyable.”

Hart’s research into the sociocultural history of percussion prompted him to write a pair of books—Drumming at the Edge of Magic, a memoir, and Planet Drum, a pictorial history. The latter included the now-famous companion CD.

Reunited sixteen years after Planet Drum earned critical acclaim and popularity, Hart, Hussain, Adepoju, and Hidalgo are more of a creative force than ever.

“It’s kind of like a percussion summit with these guys,” Hart says. “You’re not going to hear drum solos all night, even though they could play forever. It’s more like a groove thing and a group mind thing with these compositions.”

Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring a visiting artist or local expert, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.