TEACHING

My first memories of music come from my grandfather’s house in Caracas. Regino Martínez Lemus was a Cuban musician from Havana who moved to Caracas sometime in the 1940s, drawn, I think, by a city full of big bands, parties and artistic life. His house was full of instruments: a piano, an organ, batá drums, congas, bongos and, somewhere in a back room, a Yamaha drum kit. That was in the early 1980s. Eventually the kit was sold, and those afternoons became something you file away in your memory while life goes on.

Years later, at secondary school, a music teacher appeared out of nowhere to run a one-semester drum workshop. His name was Luis Mota, a cheerful, enthusiastic man. The school had never had a music department before, and it never had one again. All the cool rockers from the older years signed up immediately. I didn’t. I told my best friend I had no business being there. “Don’t be a coward,” he said. He is still my best friend.

So I asked my mother for a pair of 2B sticks and went. There were six of us, and one thing was missing: drums. We spent half the time playing a basic backbeat on our legs. Eventually Luis, a bass player himself, built us practice pads out of wooden boards, and even an improvised pedal. It was a mess, but it worked. We learned the names of the parts of the kit, how to count to four, and how to write down what we played.

At the end of the school year, we had to play a show in the auditorium of the Instituto Nacional de Nutrición, in front of the whole school and our parents. Three drummers sharing the songs, with three months of practice on our legs and on wood behind us. On the day, there it was on stage: a real drum kit, a Yamaha again. We played it for the first time in front of a full hall. It was far from perfect, but it was magic, and that day I fell in love with the instrument and with the stage.

I have often thought about that workshop since I gave my first lessons, around 2000. Luis had almost nothing to work with, and still he gave us what mattered: the basics, a reason to practise, and a stage to aim for.