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WINDSOR -- On Saturday, July 7, the second annual One Drum Festival will taking place at Path Of Life Garden.
This all-day celebration of drumming aims to bring together drummers and musicians of all levels of interests and abilities. The event will feature drumming workshops with professional artists, an evening concert and interactive community drumming sessions for children and adults. Highlighting the drum’s deep history, the Ofestival will provide opportunities to learn about drumming traditions from Brazil, West Africa and the Middle East.
Artists leading workshops will include: Marcus Santos (Brazilian), Sayon Camara (West African), Todd Roach (Middle Eastern) and Otha Day (Family Drumming Circles).
After a day of workshops in the Path of Life Garden, the evening scene will shift to the outdoor beer garden at the Harpoon Brewery. The concert will feature performances by the workshop artists Marco Santos, Sayon Camara, Todd Roach and guests. Multi-instrumentalist Mac Ritchey will again accompany Todd Roach at this years show. Attendees can expect a high-energy presentation highlighting traditional and contemporary grooves drawn from and influenced by Brazilian, West African and Middle Eastern music.
Activities for the day get started at 1 p.m. and will continue until 10:00 p.m. For a full schedule listing, visit www.onedrumfestival.com or check it out on
Participants will be able to purchase full day and evening only tickets. Camping is available. There will be food and craft vendors.
For more information, call 802-345-5616.
About the artists:
A contemporary percussionist and educator, Marcus Santos is a native of Salvador city in Bahia, Brazil. After studying music and business at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, he obtained a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he received a bachelor’s degree in the performance of hand percussion, and the Outstanding Musician and Community Service Through Music awards. His has performed on NBC (U.S.), MTV (Thailand), TV Globo (Brazil), as well as numerous venues around the world, including the Hard Rock Café (Orlando, Fla.), Kouen Mae Dori Classics (Tokyo, Japan), Rock In Rio (Brazil), Buddha (Mexico), Lincoln Center (New York), Parco della Musica (Rome, Italy), Holland Festival (Amsterdam, Holland) and the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston).
Sayon Camara was born in the village of Kouya Sidia in Kouroussa in central Guinea. After drumming in the village for 31 years while cultivating rice and working in the diamond mines, Camara left his village as a master djembefola, to work in Conakry with the world’s foremost djembe player, Famoudou Konate. When Konate heard him play he was amazed by the clarity of the sound Sayon produced on the djembe. For the next eight years, Camara worked intensively with Konate, teaching at his workshops, and playing at his concerts and on his CDs. Eventually Camara began leading other workshops for people from all over the world, both in Guinea and Japan.
Todd Roach has studied the world of Middle Eastern and North African percussion instruments since 1989. In 2008 and 2009 he performed and taught at the international frame drum festival Tamburi Mundi, in Freiburg, Germany. In 2010, Roach appeared at the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston with violinist Beth Bahia Cohen. During this time, he also had his debut Flamenco performances as part of a New England tour with dancer Ines Arrubla, singer Carlos Denia of Barcelona and guitarist Tino van der Sman of Sevilla. He released an instructional video in 2000 with Carl Fisher Publishing, "The Quick Guide to Playing Doumbec."
Otha Day leads Drum and Rhythm Circles for corporate and business events,colleges, libraries, summer camps, community celebrations and religious groups. Day teaches on the faculties of several schools in Massachusetts and Southern Vermont. He has taught courses at Williams College on "Rhythm-Based Communication and Creativity". He has also taught courses on "Music of the Harlem Rennaisance," music theory and jazz history. He has given many concerts as a solo pianist performing both the standard solo classical repertoire and in the classical piano music of Black composers.
