Path of the Panamanian Drums.

• Author: Taylor, Melanie
• Position: MUSIC - Critical essay

Drums have "always seemed magical to me. Three years ago at the Jazz Festival in Panama, I felt that magic as I watched an eight-year-old girl move her hands over the drums so skillfully that what emerged was a deep and moving rhythmic conversation. The beauty of that moment could not have been captured by photographers or even videographers. The magic materializes in the energies present in a particular space: the energy of the earth below, the energy of the drum's own living wood and leather; the energy of the drummer; and the rhythmic energy of the music that envelops the drummer, the listener, and the listener-dancer. It reaches a point where you don't know whether the drumming is following the dancing, or the dancing, the drumming. The ability of drums to make time stop for a moment and bring together these different levels of energy is wily the drum is consistently present in so many cultures, times, and places; and why it is often considered a sacred object. As it happens, the girl I was watching that day in the Cathedral Plaza in Panama was named Milagros (miracles).

But this isn't just a story about a little girl and her drum. It is a story about drums and their energy and how this energy has been present in Panama since before the isthmus appeared on ally European map or was ever a country or a homeland in the collective imagination. When I was young, there was a TV spot with a catchy line that said, "Panama has nine provinces. Nine provinces has Panama." And they played it so often that our entire generation learned our geography by rattling off: "Darien, Herrera, siguen Los Santos ..." to the tune of that music.

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Darien was at the beginning of that list but it was, and continues to be, the least known province for urbanites like me. It is the place where two drumming traditions converged: that of the Embera-Wounaan peoples and the Afro-descendent peoples. In the seventeenth century, the Embera and the Wounaan were migrating inside Darien province, moving from the Chocoana region in Colombia to the space left behind by the Kuna. At the same time, Africans were arriving in the area as slave labor. The Embera-Wounaan used very few musical instruments, but one of them happened to be the drum.

People who arrived voluntarily or involuntarily to this land had to survive using the natural elements they found in the jungles. One of the things they did was to reproduce rituals from their home countries that would...