Atlantic Indoor Association

October 2011

MK: Now, let’s jump forward a little bit into your time at Quantico. There’s obviously, rudimental drumming has a military background, it’s become a very artistic endeavor. What do you think of the two, and that sort of thing? In other words, you were in high school but you’d done fife and drum corps, and that’s – I wish it were as popular as it had been but, again, there’s the two sides of that coin.

DV: Absolutely. And that was kind of big switch because in between leaving high school and going to college, and then getting the rings, I was a high school director for awhile, a high school band director in Virginia Beach. So when I went into the Marines, I knew that part of the gig was going to be more traditional and was not going to necessarily replicate my fife and drum, or even my drum corps experience in terms of its focus on percussion. Having said that, I got to do a lot of things symphonically. And even in terms of like, we had a really successful jazz combo there, and I got be a vibraphonist in the combo there and stuff. But militarily, I would sometimes be more bored, in terms of the marching aspect, because it was all very straightforward. And even though it was more rudimental, it was not focused on intensive vocabulary the same way that we had been in the fife and drum, or the same way that our percussion program had been at Lancers.

Now, what was nice is that the Quantico band would go each year to perform in this military tattoo. We’d go to the Royal Nova Scotia International Tattoo in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And even that was kind of interesting from the standpoint of being a ‘big fish in a little pond’ because they had been there several times before I’d been in the band and at those times they had leaned upon people that had some drum corps experience to write a floor show for the band to be performed in the arena down there, called the Metrocenter.

Those people had moved on and I was in the band, and they knew a little bit about my background and so again, I got called in by the commanding officer and he explained to me about this tattoo. And he said, “you think you’d be able to help design a show, and to go ahead and write the drill for the show.” And we had another guy who’d do the horns and then he asked me about writing for the drums and stuff, too. That was fun because even though I actually enjoyed all the traditional marches and things that we would do when we played the as a marching band for the Marines and all the military families, when we would go to the tattoo, we would actually highlight a drum corps-style show, which to the Canadian audience in Halifax was a real novelty. Apparently in Canada, there’s not as much of a relation with drum corps or that style in Canada, or at least the maritime states of Canada, up around Nova Scotia. So the audience would go crazy.

And so what I did at the time was, I actually – this is kind of funny, because my wife, Yvonne, she was a flag at Lancers and she continued for more years in the corps than I did. And at least one of those years helped clean drill at one of the sites of the corps for George Zingali, and then ended up being a marching tech for the drumline. And that ended up being her main thing but, as such, she – one thing I wanted to do when we did the drill, is, back at that time something that had been really successful that incorporated both military style moves, but with a drum corps ‘trick’, if you want to call it that, was the lancers had used this opening and collapsing box that they did that started out as a file, and then opened up into a box that hinged itself and closed back in on itself, like a couple of times. And so I actually got her to help me draft it out at the time.

I’d go design rest of the drill but then I would go back after the end of a day and go over some things with her, and then go back the next day. At the time, I actually kept it a secret from the band because I figured it wasn’t to go well if they knew that I was actually getting advice from my wife on how to do the drill for the band. And then I went and wrote a drum solo as well and so what was nice is, we went down to the tattoo and the whole show at that time was based on West Side Story, but in the middle of Mambo we launched into this drum solo and then the whole band formed this file lengthwise on, it was like a hockey floor, we did this drum corps trick which the Canadian audiences had never seen anything quite like that, and the audience just went berserk.

That actually plays into some stuff because when we come into the present, we have a veteran band and we’re going back down there. And since I’d helped developed what was kind of a formula that the Quantico band kept using from year to year, they asked us to put together a veteran band, and they asked us basically to be original but to follow the format that had come to be popular with the Canadian audience.

MK: So you get out of teaching at Princess Anne, and you get into Quantico. I’m guessing you were honorably discharged, and you get into Mars Music. Now this was a distributor, early on in the internet scene, so if you could talk about Mars and Remo, they were around the same time but I’m guessing they were distinct.

DV: That was Christine Stevens and stuff like that. I’d referenced Mickey Hart’s whole movement that he was a part of but we can get to that. When I was honorably discharged from the Marines, I decided to finish my contract and move on because at the time they were going to send me over to Japan, and it was going to be what’s called an ‘unaccompanied tour’ which is when you go over without your family. My daughter at the time was a toddler, just getting ready to start preschool, and I had already traveled a lot because when I left the Marine Corps I was working at headquarters for the Marine Corps, working as the National Audition Supervisor and I would travel around a lot. It was pretty disconcerting to my daughter. So it was a pretty big decision, but I chose to get out.

It was in conversations with Mars Music…they’d been in existence for a couple of years, and they had a plan to have stores in all fifty states, and an initial public offering and those kinds of things. So I started out as a learning center manager for them in Springfield (VA), and then quickly became a regional learning center manager for Springfield, two stores in Maryland, and a store in Richmond. And my job basically was to hire private teachers and to help both coordinate and create different programs within the stores for everything from audio engineering programs, where we’d hire instructors and bring people in, let them have classes in professional sound reinforcement and audio engineering and things like that to having drum circles in the stores to promote not only mars, but different product lines like Remo.

Well, while I was in Mars, I had not really been a part of what I called the drum circle movement. But one day while I was doing payroll I got a phone call from a woman who’d worked for a corporate training company. And she was British. She called up and introduced herself and explained that her company had a type of event that they’d held at their branch in the united kingdom, and that they were going to be launching it for training more companies. What she described for me was that they’d go to corporate conferences and they would have percussionists that would facilitate different groups like corporate managers, even corporate CEOs, or maybe a sales force, that they would actually use Brazilian samba percussion as a vehicle. They would do these breakout groups, and they would teach these samba style, samba-reggae verbally first, and then teaching hand signals, signals for the whistle, anything like that and then once they’d gotten it verbally and everyone was ginned up they would actually associate all the verbal cues with the different instruments. The agogo bells, the surdo drums, tambourines, stuff like that. And then after these breakout groups they’d bring everyone together. You would end up at a place like the Ritz Carlton in Boca Raton, and we would start out where they would be introduced to 500 managers from a company like Accenture, or something – or Discovery Channel, we did all kinds of stuff – then we would breakout with our groups, by color or something.

So I would lead off with my 30 people or whatever, we’d have a whole group of percussionists there. We’d take them in and the whole idea was that we’d really keep them engaged, we’d get them clapping and moving and then teach them the different verbal strings with the instruments. I was amazed because while I was taught the protocol we used from this British gal, I was surprised because I’d never tried anything like that. People really got into it, and I found that I could grasp it pretty quickly. So that sort of got me towards the whole drum circle movement because then a lot of the guys I was working with – one guy in particular they had working with this company, his name is Mark Jacopec, his nickname was ‘Markman’, he is sponsored by Remo, he’s a Remo artist, he was into the whole drum circle movement. He had worked with different guys like Arthur Hull and Bobby Tunda la Junji, and of course that’s why I referenced Mickey Hart because he had a big part in kind of re-popularizing the movement in the united states because he really embraced it. So Mark turned me onto the whole thing, he’d told me there was a whole world out there. So I started doing more drum circle work at Mars, where I would have drum circles in the stores.

Then while I was doing that it is when I was introduced to Christine Stevens, who was a music therapist and a signature artist with Remo. At the time, Christine was working as a consultant with Remo for a research project they were doing called the ‘HealthRHYTHMS protocol’. I ended up going to train in HealthRHYTHMS, and also working with Christine at some corporate events, and I started going down and checking out events like will smith’s world music drumming, which is a trademarked method that will smith, who was a professor up at the university of Wisconsin and also the president of the educator’s conference, he published a whole thing. I went down to Lake Geneva in Wisconsin and I worked with this drummer that works with will, his name is Sila Mensa, and Sila is an African percussionist, I believe he’s from Ghana, West Africa.

And so I just really got into that whole thing, not just from the standpoint of liking the work with everybody else, but I found it to really be inspiring for me. And it was refreshing for me because it was a type of drumming that was much more free and improvised, where I could think with a different part of my brain. And that, I actually think, made me a much better writer for an ensemble later on, because then as I was writing books for pit and things like that, I had a whole different view of how to use a lot of the world percussion than I think I would have otherwise.

Do you have suggestions or submissions? War stories from the floor, questions or other interests? Email Michael Kirby at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .