UNFORESEEN EVENTS – PART I 

Norma Kendall Robertson employed her characteristic patience with eleven year old Ethan Wells as he attempted to play a simple melody on her Steinway piano. After six private lessons she knew he didn’t have the aptitude of his older brother Mark, who at sixteen was a prodigy and budding concert pianist. At the end of the lesson Mrs. Robertson sent Ethan home with a note for his mother. The note suggested that Ethan’s time and energies would be better focused in other directions. 

“He’s not musical,” she wrote. “He’s a good boy and certainly tries hard, but his heart isn’t in it.” She would know. A concert pianist herself, she traced her lineage of teachers all the way back to Ludwig van Beethoven. Her lessons were expensive and she was exclusive about who she kept on as students.

Ethan was relieved when his parents told him he wouldn’t have to go on with his piano lessons. Six months earlier he had a similar outcome with violin lessons. So far in his young life he only did well with tap-dancing classes. But they also came to an end when the dance school closed down.

Ethan was in the middle of his sixth grade year when his teacher, Mr. Nelson, organized a class project with nine of the students who played musical instruments. For three weeks they rehearsed a song titled “Arapaho Warrior” for a performance at a scheduled PTA event. Four days before the show was to go on Jimmy Sullivan, who played the tom-tom, came down with appendicitis and was rushed to St. John’s Hospital for an emergency appendectomy. 

The next day Mr. Nelson asked the class if anyone else would like to take Jimmy’s place. Ethan was the first to raise his hand. Billy Beale also raised his hand but the teacher selected Ethan saying he raised his hand first.

He wasn’t sure why he volunteered to play the tom-tom. He never played any kind of drums before. But he had a sense this might be like tap dancing, which he loved.

At his first rehearsal, Ethan sat down on a chair at the end of the row of young musicians. He followed Mr. Nelson’s instruction to simply tap out a steady beat on the tom-rom with the small mallet in his right hand. The song began with two bars of his solo on the drum. Then the music began as he kept the beat going. At first he had difficulty maintaining a steady beat. Mr. Nelson stopped the music three times and started over after imploring Ethan to focus on the beat. 

Finally the teacher said, “Ethan I think maybe we should get someone else to play the tom-tom. Billy Beale’s hand shot up. 

“Teacher, teacher,” Billy cried out.

Embracing the tom-tom Ethan said, “Mr. Nelson I can do this. Let me try again.”

“Okay, but you have to get it right this time.”

Once again the little band played the song, and this time something happened for Ethan. He felt like he was dancing on the drum, staying in perfect synch with the music and not missing a beat. When they finished the song the class applauded. Mr. Nelson looked at Ethan, smiled and winked. That weekend they performed the song for parent’s night at the school. It was a success and Ethan was hooked. That same weekend, Elvis Presley released “Heartbreak Hotel”, his first hit song.

Ethan had discovered something that brought a whole new world into his life. He wanted to keep playing the drums. Being resourceful, he took a few empty cardboard boxes he found in the family garage and set them up like a drum kit. Using two screwdrivers for drumsticks, he began to practice with this setup. He didn’t care that it was crude or if anyone was watching. Time stopped when he was pounding out his rhythms. Everyday after school, he would hurry home, go out into the garage and practice his drumming on the cardboard boxes. Mr. and Mrs. Wells observed this and understood the connection he was making. 

A few weeks had passed when Ethan celebrated his twelfth birthday. He came home from school that day to discover a real set of drums in the garage. The vintage 1930s kit had a bass drum, snare drum, two tom-toms and a large cymbal. Mr. Wells had traded an old lawnmower for them. The white pearl surfaces on all the drums had yellowed, the drum heads were worn and dirty, and the cymbal was green with oxidation. Ethan didn’t care. Now he had real drums to play on. 

That afternoon his brother Mark helped him move the drums into the basement of their house. The basement doubled as the bedroom the two brothers shared. It was also a practice room where Mark kept an old, upright piano. The ceiling and walls were covered with acoustical tile. Up against one wall was a much used console record player. Next to the record player was a set of makeshift shelves with over a hundred LP record albums. 

That evening at dinner, Ethan’s parents presented him with a brand new set of drumsticks. Mark also mentioned that anymore he preferred to do his practicing on a grand piano at the local high school. Ethan would be able to play his drums every day.

From that day forward he spent most afternoons in the basement listening to a growing collection of LP records. He played albums featuring the popular drummers of the time. Louie Bellson, Art Blakey and especially Shelly Manne were his favorites. For three and four hours every day he would turn up the volume on the phonograph and accompany the music with efforts to imitate these percussionists. 

It was slow going, learning how to handle the drumsticks, beating on the different drums and tap-tapping the cymbal. Then there was the further addition of a “high-hat”, which are two opposed smaller cymbals on a vertical stand, controlled by a foot pedal. This and the base drum foot pedal kept both of Ethans feet busy. With some difficulty he learned to use his right and left hands independently of each other, like they were two different drummers playing a duet. And he had to do all this while sustaining a constant, precision rhythm. As for drum solos, that was in the future. 

to be continued…