Entrain: On the Beat From A World’s-Eye View

Posted in: Entertainment
By Melissa Roberts Weidman
May 29, 2008 - 11:51:43 AM

Seeing the band Entrain play is an experience like no other, not for the faint of heart or feet. Sitting quietly in a chair somehow does not seem to fit the bill. Despite your best intentions to take it easy, you likely will find yourself tapping your toes, then bopping your head, then getting sucked into the mad dance vortex created by the band’s rhythms cascading back and forth across the stage. When they played last month at the Cotuit Center for the Arts, about half the audience was seated in neat rows—at first. But, by the end of the night, nearly everyone (including one couple in their 80s right up front) appeared sweaty and elated from dancing their proverbial you-know-what’s off for more than two hours straight.
After all, that’s what its name, “Entrain,” is all about. As band founder Tom Major details on the band’s website, www.entrain.com, “In 1665, Dutch scientist Christian Huygens described something which is now called the law of entrainment. This law holds that if two or more rhythms are in close proximity, they will always fall into synchrony (or, as we say using slang, get in sync). Huygens observed that pendulum wall clocks, when placed next to each other, would become “entrained” and beat in sync with each other. This law holds true for all types of rhythms: biological, celestial, mechanical, musical, etc.”
It’s quite evident that Huygens’s law applies to this band of six dedicated and talented musicians, which presently includes Tom Major on drums, Sam Holmstock on percussion and trombone, Jeff Clark on lead vocals, guitar, and keyboards, Phillip Young on saxophone, Johnny Trama on lead guitar, and Lenny Bradford on bass. When I asked various audience members what they liked most about the band, the universal answer was “the beat!” (with a few of the ladies adding “and Tom is such a hottie!”).
The rhythmic concept the band was founded on 15 years ago has carried them through many personnel changes, career ups-and-downs, and changes in the economic and cultural climate. Throughout, Entrain has remained committed to its core vision (and an unfailingly loyal fan base) as a percussion-oriented band playing original live pop music with a global influence. Please underscore the word “live” in that sentence—yes, they’ve recorded CDs (seven of them to be exact), but their passion is playing their music in front of fans who can respond to it in the moment. They play for all kinds of audiences in all kinds of venues but, in recent years, have found themselves especially drawn to a new audience: young people.
Four years ago, Major had the idea of bringing live music into the schools so youngsters could be exposed to the energy and vitality only experienced when musicians play live before a real audience. He was concerned that most children only hear a narrow range of musical influences, often dictated by their peers and the limitations of top-40 radio. Major contrasts that with his own youth. “When I was a kid in the ’60s, we had artists like the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, beautiful souls who were a positive influence. Kids have more of a void in the music world today. They have less access to other styles.” Major and his Entrain partners want young people to hear their world beat style and understand the various cultural influences bridged by their music, from Brazilian to Caribbean to African to Asian to American blues roots.
“How great it would be if this could help bring kids together to share each other’s cultures?” Major wondered. This question motivated Entrain to bring their drums and other instruments to high schools and middle schools in both New England and the West Coast to play for assemblies and music classes, often followed by a performance for the whole community at night. The response was wildly enthusiastic. A New Hampshire junior high vice principal raves in a letter of recommendation that the students are still talking a year later about how the experience changed their perspective on music.
In the program, different world beat traditions are demonstrated using congas, timbales, djembe, bongos, cowbell, guiro, claves, maracas, djun djun, pandeiro, talking drum, frotoir, and shekere. Entrain band members engage school band members in improvising with them, which may be the first time these young people have ever attempted to play so spontaneously. The band performs several songs from their all-original repertoire, including, “Hear That Long Snake Moan,” a strong groove based on the Haitian rhythm known as Congo and Jamaican dance hall-style, as well as “Mother Street,” written with a beat they like to call the “Bo Diddley beat,” the most fundamental rhythm to come from Africa.
Entrain has definitely earned its Bo Diddley chops, mostly through Tom Major’s long tenure as Bo Diddley’s drummer. As the son of a Long Island jazz drummer, Major grew up listening to jazz greats like Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Miles Davis. He went on to study at the Berklee School of Music, becoming a teacher and performer himself. He played for years with bands like Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, and with Bo Diddley himself. When he was older, he would listen to the late night radio station WNYE broadcasting music from all over the world—for instance, a song from Senegal, then one from Lebanon, then the Philippines—one right after the other. It sparked his interest in world music and discovering how it would mix with pop.
“I was a chameleon,” Major recalls. “I could play all styles. But I suddenly realized I couldn’t answer, ‘Who am I?’ ” This quest for his own personal musical identity melded with his world beat influence to result in the first demo recording of Entrain. When Major gave it to Diddley to listen to, the legendary rock n’ roller advised him, “Whatever you do, be different. I’m here 40 years NOT because I’m the best, but because I’m different. Be unique and find your own niche, and no one can ever take that away from you.”
How much Major took this to heart is clear when he chuckles about the problem reviewers and record stores have with categorizing Entrain’s music. “Do they put us in pop? Or rock? Or world beat? Or blues? I don’t care! Why don’t they just put us under music?”
Which just goes to show how Entrain is, indeed, an experience like no other.
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Last night we rehearsed a bunch of our original songs we hadn’t played in a while. Now these are songs we wrote ourselves over several years, but it was like we were coming to them from a whole new perspective. Each felt like a fresh discovery - wow, there’s a weird chord change, hey, what a cool verse, hmmm, listen to that wacky bridge. It feels a little like when you sit at your kid’s graduation and see them with new eyes - suddenly they are very much their own selves, not someone who came from you. These songs feel like they have their own identities. They have stories to tell, and they are shapeshifting as time goes on. Some of it is that we are each singing better and better as we get more experienced and comfortable with our voices, so the phrasing is more relaxed and nuanced. But I remember Victor Wooten asking us at Bass Camp if music is alive. It was a hard concept for some folks to wrap their heads around. When I notice the ways in which our songs mature over time, I can’t help but wonder about Vic’s question.

Played a gig last night - such an interesting and bizarre phenomenon to be on stage dressed up under lights shining in front of a room full of people, play all night to applause and appreciation, then return home to a sink full of dishes and a bedroom piled with laundry. When I’m playing, nothing else exists except for the music, the other musicians, and the audience. It’s zen warrior training, being fully present in the moment.

Last night, I got completely lost in the emotion of our songs, living the stories of them in my bones. I sang and played to the rafters, forgetting who and where I was, captured by the spell of words and melody coming from the interplay of the two of us. I sang with no fear at all about making a mistake or missing a lyric. I love that feeling of being taken out of myself, beyond the limitations of my usual identity and becoming my performing persona, who is much more flamboyant and capable than my regular self. For a few hours I morph into my best me, the musician I have always dreamt of being, self-confident and adventurous. When it’s over, there’s the hard crash back to reality, confronted with the pile of unpaid bills and the need to be ready for work at the office the next morning.

I can easily see how folks like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison could get so crazy on the huge roller-coaster scale of this syndrome, which I experience at only the very lowest of levels. Still, it’s a microcosm of the same thing - the pull of the glamour of performance contrasted with the reality of being an ordinary human being. I find myself laughing at the dichotomy, embracing both sides. I am so grateful to get to taste the contrast, both salty and sweet.

Your reflective Buzz Blog Bunny

Hi Blog Buddies: Wanted to share this article with you, in case you missed it in the paper - it means a lot to me…

The Nature of Music: A Week in the Wilds of Listening

By Melissa R. Weidman
May 2, 2008 - 10:49:51 AM

I’m in the middle of the woods, blindfolded. In the distance, a drum is being sounded, one slow beat after another. I’ve been assigned to find my way back to the drum through a tangle of roots, rocks, ditches, trees, and branches. Freezing rain starts to fall. I’m shivering, my footing is slippery, and I can’t see a thing. I begin to seriously wonder: what in the world am I doing in Tennessee in early spring, groping my way blindly through the wilderness? What does this have to do with music, specifically bass playing, which is what I came here to study for a week? Ouch! Hit my head! Can’t think about anything else right now; gotta pay attention…my only choice is to rely on my other senses and hope I don’t fall into a ravine or break a leg.
Somehow, miraculously, I find myself slowly making progress, sweeping my arms before me and lifting my feet high to make it over obstacles. The drum sounds a little closer. I trip, but don’t fall. I tune my ears to hone my direction. I can smell the rain on the leaves. My breathing slows down to match the drum. After what seems like forever, a hand gently takes mine, then a voice asks me to sit down and remove my blindfold. I am startled to find the drum right there and everyone in my group sitting with me. We have successfully completed the “Drum Stalk.” I realize with a sigh of relief that I can trust my senses beyond sight to find my way.
So begins Bass and Nature Camp, a five-day intensive session for musicians held in the wilderness west of Nashville. Bass players of all ages and places gather there twice a year to consider new ways of experiencing music. The camp was founded and is led by Victor Lemonte Wooten, the Nashville-based bass player for the renowned jazz-fusion group Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, who can be heard at the Cape Cod Melody Tent most summers.
Vic, as he’s commonly known, is considered by many to be the greatest bass player alive today, having won five Grammy awards and being the only musician ever named Bass Player of The Year by Bass Player Magazine three years in a row. He plays regularly with his own Victor Wooten Band, as well as with well-known musicians like Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke, Prince, and Dave Matthews. He’s the originator of the double-thumbing technique, which revolutionized the effect of the bass as a rhythmic instrument. As a master animal tracker, juggler, skateboarder, magician, novelist, and martial arts expert, Vic has developed a wide range of concepts and exercises designed to broaden thinking about music. Key to his model is the use of nature as a learning metaphor.
The camp’s faculty includes both nature and music experts. The nature group has trained under Tom Brown Jr., a leader in animal tracking and wilderness skills. The music faculty includes Steve Bailey and Chuck Rainey, both venerated session players who’ve played on endless hits from Aretha Franklin and Quincy Jones to Steely Dan and Metallica. The official faculty is greatly enhanced by the presence of Vic’s wife Holly, who handles many of the camp’s logistics, their four beautiful children, Vic’s mother, Dorothy, and his talented musician brothers; they include Joseph, keyboardist with the Steve Miller Band, Regi, a sought-after Nashville guitarist, and Roy, the drummer in the Flecktones known as Future Man. Special guests for this camp include young upright prodigy/ Berklee faculty member Esperanza Spalding and wilderness master Eustace Conway, subject of the bestseller The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert.
The overall atmosphere is welcoming and openhearted, supportive of taking risks and exploring new approaches. During camp, music and nature exercises are woven together into a unique synthesis that can have a deeply transformational effect on those experiencing it. On April 1, Penguin Books published Victor Wooten’s novel, The Music Lesson, which illustrates many camp principles worked into an imaginative storyline. As a Falmouth-based bass player, songwriter, and singer, I have been very fortunate to attend three of these camps over the past four years, the most recent during the week of April 12 to 18.
On opening night of the first camp, the group is asked to compile a list of the most important attributes of music. Common responses include notes, technique, pitch, tone, tempo, phrasing, emotion, dynamics, rhythm, space, and, especially for bass players, groove. Then Vic asks us to list attributes of nature. Responses have included: power, mystery, fear, life, death, energy, growth, source, creativity, danger, and love. We then swap the headings to explore the many levels of intersection between the two categories. Over the course of camp, we discover how the items numbered “2 through 10″ of the music list matter as much, if not more, than just “the notes,” which many of us have been conditioned to think of as most important.
“There is no such thing as a wrong note,” Vic says. “It’s how you use the notes that make all the difference.” This is an astounding concept to anyone who has put in years of practicing scales and getting reprimanded for mistakes by well-meaning teachers. Of course, notes do matter, but a lot less than we have been led to believe. A narrow focus on their accuracy as most important limits us in all the other skills that can make music come alive for listener and player alike.
Another exercise I found memorable involved playing a solo using just one note. Yes, just one note for the entire solo, but employing all the possibilities of “2 through 10.” I was given different scenarios to use in my head as stories to try telling through my playing. One such imaginary scenario was “Your first night ever been kissed.” The next was “Your first night in jail.” It was surprising to realize the difference in the way my playing sounded using different mental images, letting variations in tone, rhythm, and intensity tell the story. This drove home Vic’s point that music is a language. If we learn to play it the way children learn to speak, by listening and continually trying, it can open new levels of awareness in our playing.
This most recent camp was a reunion camp of 75 campers—everyone had attended at least one camp before. There were many old friends, as well as new ones from camps other than mine. We were from almost every state in the US, as well as Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Austria, Italy, and Turkey. There were six teenagers, including a blind 14-year-old boy and a jazz-playing 18-year-old girl. We were of many ethnic and musical backgrounds. Eight of us were women. Some of us played four-string funk, blues or rock, others five- or six-string fretless jazz, some upright acoustic. But we were all bass players, enjoying a rare opportunity to join in our devotion to the deep sound that anchors “the bottom” through rhythm and harmony.
We shivered together in unheated quarters through the unseasonably chilly weather, but were warmed with huge Southern meals of fried pork chops, grits and shrimp, biscuits and gravy, country ham and sweet tea. While we ate, we shared war stories of our lives as gigging musicians in our various communities. We endured a grueling schedule of both nature and music activities from before breakfast to late at night, hauling our basses from one cabin to another to study theory, sight-reading, performance, or improvisation, then putting them away to make primitive fires, shoot bows and arrows, or build a debris hut. We agreed that, as bass players, we were well-suited to the level of collaboration needed for such a camp. We wondered how lead guitarists might handle it differently. On the last night we were asked to improvise a group performance incorporating an assigned bird call and many of the concepts we had learned. Like all good campers, we came up with scathingly funny spoofs on our counselors, accentuated by our bird calls as the basis of intricately rhythmic bass lines that got the audience on its feet cheering.
By the end of the week, we emerged exhausted and elated, with a deeper understanding of what it means to listen and pay attention. We’d sat out in the woods surrounded by a wild symphony of birds, and suddenly understood how to listen not just to sound itself, but to the space around sound, the silence between notes. We’d walked blindfolded through the woods and realized how to use all our senses to overcome challenges in new ways. We’d studied musical theory and structure from an open-minded and playful perspective. We’d gotten up on stage to play with some of the hottest performers in the business and learned how to live fully in the moment, seeing how mistakes can become priceless opportunities for discovery, surprise, and joy. And we felt enormous gratitude for the planting of this seed of experience to bring to our communities back home—may it flower in our music for years to come.
For more information on the camp, visit www.victorwooten.com.

Melissa Weidman plays with Flipside, a local jazzy-blues group appearing at Liam Maguire’s Irish Pub on Main Street in Falmouth from 7:30 to 10:30 PM on the first and third Wednesdays of May and June. Visit www.flipsideduo.com or e-mail her at buzzback@gmail.com.

© Copyright 2008 by The Enterprise - Upper Cape Cod News and Information

Okay, I have a terrible secret I must get off my chest. Up until last week, I had never seen “American Idol”. Yes, hard to admit, but true. You see, I haven’t owned a TV for over fifteen years now, and I don’t miss it at all (I never saw “Sex and the City” either). People ask me all the time how I manage to do everything in my life, work a majorly demanding job, play in two bands, write and record music, write a regular music column and two blogs, be in a writing group, go to the gym. Well, folks, here’s the answer - don’t clean your house, and don’t watch TV. Suddenly, vast reservoirs of time will open up to enable you to take up the instrument of your dreams and be as likely to play your local bar as anyone. (That is what you dream of, no?)

But I digress - back to “American Idol.” Everyone in my office had been talking about it for weeks. Every morning as they came through the hall and did the morning pleasantries, after the talk about weather and the commute there was head-shaking and exclamations about who got voted off last night. Clueless, I took that as my cue to sit down to my computer and get to work.

But they know I’m a musician, and told me I really should see it, the singers are so great. SO great, in fact, they couldn’t come to my gig on Wednesday because they had to watch the season finale. Okay, one of these days I’ll check it out, but that sure sounds like kind of a lame excuse to me.

Well, that day came last Tuesday - I was at my mother-in-law’s house and she was channel surfing for her favorite British comedy. Suddenly “Idol” came on the screen. I asked her to stop there - it was the last night of the two finalists. I was curious to see how talented these survivors of a whole season would be, expecting to be amazed and impressed.

Instead, I was horrified and perplexed, like a Martian suddenly arrived on earth trying to figure out the make-up aisle at Wal-Mart. The first thing I noticed was the huge bloated scale of the thing - the ridiculous size of the audience, band and theater, the over-the-top hype of images of boxers fighting it out, the blatant product-mongering of Coca Cola products conspicuously placed in every shot, the absurd pimping-up of Clive Davis and Andrew Lloyd-Webber as evenly remotely hip. Okay, okay, that’s TV these days, I was willing to forgive it all for the music. I was excited to discover some new talent. The finalists were introduced.

Two scrawny white guys with bad skin and even worse hair came on stage. They sang a couple of retread half-hits from the sixties or seventies, going through motions for which  they’d obviously been heavily coached, voices barely able to sustain, no passion, no dynamism, no authenticity whatsoever. There are karaoke singers in most small-town bars who can do as good or better. Just throw enough money, hype and hair-gel at some of them and they could be these guys. Inexplicably, the judges praised them each as if they were the hottest phenoms to ever grace a stage, all the while sipping their Cokes. 76 million Americans cared enough to actually dial their phones and vote for one of them.

My 88-year-old mother-in-law turned to me and said “Those boys can’t sing. And they look like slobs!” I had to admit, she was absolutely right. As the commercials came on for the umpteenth time, we switched back to her British comedy, shaking our heads in astonishment.

So, I am no longer an “Idol” novice. Tell me if I should give it another chance. But from this slightly-experienced eye (or should I say ear), I would venture to say you could do a lot better going down to your local coffeehouse, nightclub, community hall or bar. You’ll be surprised how much talent, energy and excitement flows from real people on the stages of your own home town. Even wIthout the hair-gel or the Coca Cola.

Your Buzz Blog Bunny

Hello world! The kids grew up, the dog and cat died,  I have a great day job, an enduring marriage,  live in a peaceful little town on Cape Cod, and yet…I  still harbor this nagging desire to be, of all things, a musician! I have discovered that I am not alone in this crazed idea, and suspect if you’re reading this you too may occasionally imagine yourself a musician adored by the masses, but only confess to it in the smudged privacy of your rear view mirror or soapy echo of your shower. This blog will chronicle my middle-aged attempts to keep the flames of fantasy fanned,  the actual sweat, tears and joy of the creative process and the reality of being a moonlighting local musician.  I will bring in some of my columns on the local music scene that will expand on my experience to share what other musicians around here are doing to enact their own forms of this madness.

Case in point: It has been nearly two years now that X, my musical collaborator,  and myself, have been working on our second CD of all original music. Why in the world would it take two years to come up with ten songs and get them down on plastic? (As we have been pointedly asked by other more…ahem…professional musicians.) Ahhh, a long and complicated answer, especially if you factor in day jobs, families, gigs, musicians who don’t return phone calls (you KNOW who you are!), and the usual mess of life as we know it. It’s a complex process.

First, you have to be inspired to come up with a concept for a song - it could be a melodic hook, set of chord changes, or a line of lyrics. It could be a character, a story, a strange sense just before falling asleep. Surprisingly, I find this the easiest part of the process. It’s more a matter of timing - just being open to the signal that provokes the chain reaction - “Oh, that’s a good idea for a song”, and you’re off. Inexplicably, it seems to happen most frequently for me when I’m driving. Yes, hands on the wheel, well, one hand anyway, while the other is jotting down lyrics. Fortunately, my years of training as a community mediator holds me in good stead - I had to learn to maintain eye contact with both parties while taking notes, so now I can keep my eyes on the road while writing. My husband doesn’t believe this is possible, but honey, you just have to trust me on this one. And Officer, it’s only a little blues, not the great American novel.

Signed, The Buzz Blog Bunny