TAMBOURINE TRADITIONALIST
by Rick Mattingly

Alessandra Belloni has become used to people not taking her instrument seriously. "Everybody says: 'Oh, you play tambourine: that's easy.'" Explains Alessandra. "But the tambourine is complicated in many cultures. And in the southern Italian culture it requires an amazing amount of strength."

Watching Belloni play, one is not so much aware of the strength involved as of her finesse and coordination. Even orchestral players with a full complement of strokes, thumb rolls, and shakes would be amazed at the multitude of tones she evokes from her ribbon adorned "simple" instrument. One is also impressed by the power of the sound she produces. Belloni plays the tambourine much in the style of a frame drum, and she can smack her thumb against the head with the crack of a snare drum rimshot.

One only has to spend a few moments playing one of Belloni's signature Remo tambourines to realize how much strength is truly needed to manipulate the instrument as Belloni does. It's especially obvious with the largest of the three models, the Tammorra Napoletana, which measures 16" x 3Y2 and has a double row of jingles. Merely holding a tambourine that size can quickly tire the wrist, but Belloni does a lot more than just hold it. "An important part of this technique involves moving the tambourine constantly, with the wrist and elbow going in and out," she says. "You have to develop a very loose wrist, while the forearm is very firm."

Many tambourinists hold the instrument still and move only the hand that is striking it. The resulting sound is a blend of the of the head and jingle tones. (For purposes of this article, we won't consider vocalists who bang headless tambourines against their thighs as "tambourinists.") When Belloni plays, the constant movement of the instrument causes the jingles to maintain their own rhythm, while the hand strokes provide counter-rhythms and accents. It's almost as if the jingles serve as a ride cymbal and the hand strokes on the head imitate snare- and bass-drum patterns.

The fact that the tambourine itself is in motion pays a big dividend in terms of the volume Belloni can produce. As everyone learns in high school physics class, if a car going twenty miles per hour strikes a parked car, the force of the impact is only half as much as if two cars that are each going twenty miles per hour have a head-on collision. Similarly, if the tambourine and the striking hand are both moving toward each other, the impact will be stronger and louder than if the instrument is stationary.

Belloni follows the ancient Italian custom in which women hold the tambourine with the right hand and strike with the left. (Men play the opposite way.) With her left hand, she uses a variety of techniques to produce a wide range of timbres, incorporating thumb strokes, finger strokes, and slaps. "The hardest thing to teach is the coordination of the holding arm, which is going back and forth, with the movements of the other hand, which is rotating up and down while the thumb strikes accents in the middle of the head," Belloni says. "Brazilian players move the tambourine forward and back a little bit to create the jingle sound, but I know of no other tradition that involves as much motion as the Southern Italian style."

Because of the volume at which Belloni can play, she has often been able to jam with musicians who play instruments that are typically louder. That hasn't always been an advantage, though. "Last year I appeared at Drum Mania for Manny's Music," she explains. "I was really proud to be the opening act for Terry Bozzio, Horacio Hernandez, and the Santana drummers. At the end, they wanted us all to jam together. I thought that was silly, because even though my tambourine is loud, it's not that loud. But I got pushed out onto the stage, and I didn't have earplugs. I'm pretty sure that's where I developed a perforated eardrum. What was really nice was that Terry and Horacio saw that I was in pain and immediately got up from behind their drumsets and stood next to me playing small percussion instruments. But it was silly for me to try to jam with seven drumsets, and now I'm more careful to wear earplugs in a lot of situations."

Although Belloni has appeared at various drum and percussion events over the past few years, including Percussive Arts Society conventions, the World Percussion Festival at the Berklee College of Music, and the PercPan festival in Brazil, her primary musical activities involve the folk music of her native Italy. Belloni was first exposed to Italian folk music as a child growing up in Rome. "My grandfather played snare drum, tambourine, and mandolin," she recalls. "On Sundays and holidays he would get together with his brother and play this music, and my grandma used to sing with him.

"At the time, I was embarrassed by it," Belloni admits, "because this was the music of the peasants. I was from the city, but my grandfather was from the mountains, and he never went to school. Living in Rome, I never saw any of the Southern Italian rituals, because the Vatican had put a stop to most of the festivals back in the 1800s.

"So I had this music in my blood, but I wasn't aware of it for a long time. As a child I liked to sing the songs I heard on the television and radio. And when I was a teenager in the late 1960s I liked the artists who were the Italian Bob Dylans and Leonard Cohens-songwriters who were also part of the folk tradition. I sang in a group in Italy, and at school I was involved in theater. My mother was happy about it, but my father didn't think that was something that women should do."

At seventeen Belloni went to New York for a one-month vacation with her mother and sister. She has lived there ever since. "I realized that I was in a place where everything was possible," she says. "I decided to stay, and I've never thought it was a mistake."

She got involved in avant-garde theater, did some film work, and sang in a Greenwich Village cabaret. In the late '70s she returned to Italy for a visit, and while in Naples she heard a group performing traditional Neapolitan folk music. "There was something familiar about it," she says. "But I didn't realize what it was right away. Then I remembered my grandfather playing this music."

Alessandra was especially enchanted by the tambourine playing of the legendary Italian percussionist Alfio Antico, and decided that she wanted to learn to do that. But it wasn't as simple as signing up to take lessons from a teacher. "Nobody sat down to teach me," she says. "They don't do that. You just have to pick it up. You follow people around and try to figure it out as you go. It's like a secret that they don't want you to know. In each town there is a different style and a different way of playing, and everyone is protective of their own tradition. Each one will tell you, 'This is the only way to play it and the others don't count.' It's great to keep a tradition pure, but it's unfortunate that people are so closed-minded and in competition with each other. I see the beauty in each style.

"What I think is great about the United States," Belloni continues, "is that the drummers are very open and want to learn. I've had a lot of professional drummers come up to me and ask me to teach them how to develop this kind of strength so they can use the tambourine in different ways. Glen Velez has studied with me, and so have people who want to use these techniques for rock music."

Back in New York, Belloni and classical guitarist/composer John La Barbera (who had toured -with Italian traditional-music group Pupi e Fresedde) founded an ensemble called I Giullari Di Piazza (Players of the Plaza). The group is devoted to reviving the ancient folk music of Southern Italy, and performs in the Commedia dell' Arte tradition. The group has recorded several CDs, including Earth, Sun And Moon (Lyrichord), Global Celebrations (Ellipsis Arts), and Dea Fortuna and Sulillo Mio (Shanachie).

Belloni was Artist-In-Residence at New York University for ten years, and is currently Artist-In-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. She has also formed a duo called Mediterranean Volcano with frame drum master Glen Velez. Her production, The Dance Of The Ancient Spider, premiered at New York's Lincoln Center in, 1996.

In the summers, Belloni returns to Italy to study and participate in festivals honoring various saints. Belloni compares the Italian religious festivals to the Brazilian Carnaval or Mardi Gras celebrations. Each village has its own festival with its own traditions, and groups of musicians compete-similar to the competition of Brazilian samba schools. Most of these festivals feature rituals involving percussion, singing, and dancing, which begin around 10:00 P.M. and continue until sunrise.

"The people live for this one night, this one feast," Belloni says. "In these villages, the music is the people's life. Most of the people are very poor and can't even write their name. But their voices are really amazing. They are ancient voices that come from the earth.

"In one festival, the main instrument is the snare drum. The drummers are only guys. They never think of toys when they are children; all they think about is getting a snare drum. And the ones who are too poor to buy one will rent a drum for the festival."

Belloni has frequently participated in the Tammorriata festivals-summer rituals (in honor of the Black Madonna or of different saints) that involve frame drums and tambourines. One of the first festivals she participated in was quite an ordeal. "When I started doing this, I was really ignorant of the ways of the people," she says. "There are a lot of unspoken rules, and if you want to participate, you have to follow those rules. This festival took place on top of a mountain, and the only way to get there was to walk for miles up a long, dark road. My shoes broke off and my feet got heavily' blistered, but I knew I had to get through it.

"Everyone gathers at the church. They go inside and light a candle, and then come out and start drumming and dancing. It's totally pagan, even though it's right in front of the church. The dancing is very sensual and the lyrics are extremely erotic. The drummers' job is to follow the voices, and the rhythm is amazing in the way the accents follow the lyrics. They dance and play drums for hours, and you have to keep going. My hands were bleeding, but you get into a collective euphoria and it becomes very trance-like. I had to go through this initiation, and when it was over I had to walk back down the mountain with no shoes.

"I was invited to the festival in Montemarano by some friends from New York who were originally from that town. It was way up in the mountains and it was freezing. This is a lot like Carnaval, and they have different teams that compete. When I arrived, my friends were already playing with a team, and the leader was dressed like the character Pulcinella and had a cane. My friends called out to me to come and play tambourine with them, but when the leader saw me standing there playing, he started whipping my knees with his cane because he didn't know me, and they don't like outsiders. So I started cursing him, and then my friends came over and told him, 'She's with us.'

"So then I had to prove myself. I was in a lot of pain from where he had whipped my knees. But when he saw that I could actually handle it, he turned completely around and had me come up front. It was an amazing experience. We spent hours going up and down the mountain, playing and drinking wine."

Yet another festival is based on the folk dance called the tarantella. "That was used to cure women who they thought had been bitten by a tarantula and who were having fits," Belloni says. "But research has shown that they were suffering from a mental disorders form of hysteria. The music and dance were therapy, and the tambourine was the most important instrument.

"I used to think it was just a myth, but last summer I had an experience that makes me wonder. I was driving around Puglia, which is the part of Italy where the myth originated, and even though it was August and was very hot, everyone was staying inside with the doors and windows shut. The way the towns are connected with each other, I started to feel like I was in a spider's web. It was very strange, and I got into a state of mind where I could identify with the women who went through this disease. I knew that the women who lived here were very repressed and had a lot of depression in their lives. I really started to feel this weird sadness, and I knew I had to get out of there.

"And then I was stung by a bee, and I found spiders in my bed. They were not tarantulas, but I had a lot of bites. It was very painful and the swelling would not go down. I had cortisone shots, but the swelling got worse and I was feverish. Then we decided to do the tarantella dance, and within twenty minutes the swelling went down. So now I'm wondering if it's a myth or if it's real."

This experience led Belloni to get involved with music therapy. Lately she has been doing volunteer work at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, working with mental patients. "I work with groups of women who are studying the tambourine and dancing, and it helps them release a lot of things," she says. "We all have different types of anguish or repression in our lives, and playing tambourine and dancing can relieve a lot of stress."

She also developed a percussion clinic/dance workshop called "Rhythm Is The Cure," which introduces tambourine and frame drum rituals to everyone from professional percussionists to people who have never played drums before. She has conducted this workshop at schools such as Berklee and CalArts, as well as for women's groups. The repertoire of Southern Italian healing chants and drumming used in these workshops appears on her new CD, Ave Mama E Deu (Interworld/Warner Bros.). "The 6/8 rhythm that is used in dances like the tarantella creates a lot of good energy," she says. "At the beginning of these workshops, a lot of people are very uptight and are resistant to the idea of participating. But by the end they are not inhibited at all. The effect with women has been very deep. Connecting with the rhythm of the drum can be very helpful in overcoming depression."

In many of the Italian festivals that Belloni has participated in, she is the only female percussionist. "The only women I've met who have drummed at the feasts were between sixty and ninety years old," she says. They are peasants, and they are very strong. The young women are beautiful dancers and singers, but none of them pick up a tambourine or frame drum. I think the main thing is that women don't want to go through the pain that is necessary to develop the proper strength. I personally don't feel that men have stopped women from doing it.

"There has been a complete change in what women are supposed to be like," Alessandra continues. "Years ago, the peasant women worked the land with incredible strength. They would give birth and be right back out in the fields. And this drumming tradition is directly connected with the earth. The tambourines were made from grain sieves and the heads were made of goat skins. So when the women were still in the fields, they learned about that from their mothers and grandmothers.

"But that tradition isn't being passed on to the young women who go to school and then get jobs in the city. It's very sad because by losing that strength, they lost a lot of power-the power of drumming. Women are not in touch with the earth any more.

"Some women might be offended by what I am saying, but I really believe it has to do with our image of ourselves and how much a woman is willing to be strong. Look at Sheila E. She has an immense amount of strength. The first time I saw her, she was an inspiration to me, showing me that I could do this on another level."

Belloni admits that although there was only one occasion where a group of men flatly refused to let her play, she has always had to prove herself before being totally accepted. "At first the guys will look at me like, 'Yeah, you want to do this, but you really can't.' So they sort of disregard me. I have to prove that I can keep going. And once I do, everything is fine.

"Because there are not that many women playing percussion, I have developed this feeling of being like everyone's sister. I love to go to the hand-drum jams at PASIC and spend the evening playing with all my 'brothers.' I believe that drumming has male and female energy. It's like the right hand and left hand, or yin/yang. When women and men are malting music together at the same level, it's magic."

Originally published in the March 1999 Issue of Modern Drummer