For Milton Randall, the drum is not simply a rhythmic instrument but a teaching device.
Last week, he spent a few days teaching students at Brackendale Elementary the roots of rhythm on hand drums from places like western Africa or Brazil.
He also sells drums, but he spends a good part of his year holding workshops at schools through the province as part of ArtsStarts in Schools, a residency program that gets artists into classrooms in B.C.
Over the first two days, he spent time working with classes at the school, teaching them different patterns.
He kept things light and entertaining for the kids. At one point, he talked about starting with a solo, which the students were to pick up after he started, but then explained there is another reason he calls it a solo.
“I will also call it a solo because I will start it so low, you can hardly hear it,” he said.
For younger students, he often incorporates verbal phrases, with syllables to synchronize with each beat.
“Each call and response tells you to do something,” he said.
For example, he would call out “Do you think that you are cool?” to which the kids would respond, “Yeah, we think that we are cool,” each word responding to a beat on the drum.
With older students, he focuses more on the drum patterns themselves without using words as often, adding that the drum has a language of its own.
“In Africa, the drums are used as a communication tool,” he said.
On Thursday, the final day, he gathered classes in the school gymnasium to work on pieces as well as the performance, complete with cues for the students to get out of their chairs or form conga lines to dance around the perimeter of the gym.
He went over hand signals he uses with the students or directed them on aspects of the performance such as getting the kids to shout out, “It’s show time!”
For the students, the final afternoon provided a chance for the kids to show their stuff in front of the school before an evening performance.
For Randall, the sessions are not simply about teaching drumming techniques.
“It’s a way of teaching the history of contemporary music,” he said. “They understand where the rock beat came from.”
Originally, Randall had not set out to teach in schools. “This is all a big accident,” he said.
He plays a drum set and got his first gig at 13. Over the years he has performed classical, pop and jazz and studied music, getting a bachelors and masters from universities in Texas. He also studied with African drum master Godwin Agbeli in Ghana.
In B.C., he finished his PhD coursework at UBC but put his graduate studies on hold to start going into classrooms into Vancouver, which is where he now spends much of his time.
Randall estimates he has worked with more than 1,200 schools around the province, as well as in Alberta, the U.S. and Hong Kong. Over the course of a year, he visits 150 to 160 schools, and often goes back to the same school, usually two or three years later. He has covered most of B.C.
“There’s a couple of school districts in the province I haven’t been to,” he said.
