Brian Jawara Gray.
Halfway through Brian Jarawa Gray and the Healing Drum’s set at Best Video on Saturday night, the musicians had settled into a deep set of rhythms centered around three big beats. Drummer Michael Mills looked up and out into the audience. “Heartbeat! Heartbeat!” he began to chant. “Heartbeat!” The audience joined him as Mills set up a chair in front of him, facing the band, and put a drum next to it. He got someone from the audience to play it. Soon he had turned the semicircle of the band into a full ring, of moving hands, steady rhythms, and smiling faces.
That sense of inclusion and catharsis permeated Healing Drum’s performance from beginning to end, as Jarawa and Mills, backed by Paul McGuire and Mick Smith, in time made just about everyone in the audience into a band member, and the entire room, in a sense, into one large percussion instrument.
The set began with a tight piece from the four core musicians. Jarawa started off on the marimba, a driving, galloping rhythm that he worked effortlessly from the instrument. Mills responded in kind, his voice on djembe strong and clear. Together Jawara and Mills used their instruments to talk to one another and mold the music. In a second piece, Jawara took the rhythms on a journey by moving from instrument to instrument in the course of the song, from talking drum to congas to djembe, while Mills got up and established clapping parts among the audience that were integral to the rhythms.
“Let’s talk about healing,” Mills said to introduce the third song. “Let’s talk about loving. Let’s talk about living.” He added a little more emphasis to each last word. “We’re together — I call, you respond, you call, I respond. That’s the way we’re going to get along in this world.” He was talking about the music, but the connection to people’s lives outside the music was obvious.
As Mills got audience members to join the band, a younger person from the crowd, sitting next to a drum, gave it a small tap as the rhythms around him escalated. Mills was encouraging. “Do whatever you feel, man!” he yelled in a friendly voice. They ended the piece on a collective drum roll, and people broke out into spontaneous laughter.
Mills made another set of connections in subsequent pieces. The band was, he said, “traveling the world using our drums and our spirit to heal.” He offered aural proof in building pieces on backup tracks with basic sounds and rhythms from West Africa to India to Brazil. He led the crowd in a chant from Haiti for another piece. “It comes from the darkest night, yet it emits the brightest light,” he said, before belting out the chant at the top of his lungs, strong enough to be impossible not to join in.
Artist and poet Shaunda Holloway took the mic to intone a poem as the beat surged around her. Then she joined the band. This reporter failed to take notes after this point as he too was pulled into the music making. Soon half the room had a drum in front of them, playing a small part of the bigger beat Mills and Jarawa had given them, while Jarawa and Mills soared over the top of it all with solo after solo. Near the very end, Mills chanted again — “Heartbeat! Heartbeat!” It was clearer than ever what he meant.