Welcome
| Channels |
 |
LavenderPop Cards
|
An Interview with
Ubaka Hill
| Ubaka Hill (Ooo-bah'-kah) is a nationally-known drummer, teacher,
performer and visual artist. She began drumming professionally with a local jazz
group in 1974 at the age of 18 while growing up in inner city New Jersey. During Chicago's Windy City Pride - Prideindex.com had an opportunity for a brief one-on-one interview with this inspiring performer. |
|
| Tell us a little bit about where you are today, versus where you thought you would be. |
| When I was a little girl I wanted to be an art teacher - because I always drew pictures. But it turns out that I don't teach art, but I'm a musician and I teach the art of drumming, and I've been teaching professionally fulltime for over 15 years. I do music for soulful change. For years it was music for social change, or percussion, poetry and song for social change. Now I say poetry, percussion, and song for soulful change. |
|
| How would you describe the difference? |
| The way I got into drumming, or the way that drumming got into me, was over 25 years ago when I was 17 or 18 years old growing up in jersey city, and it was pretty much the tail end of the civil rights movement. By that time Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, Malcolm X was recently assassinated, JFK and all of that, and Angela Davis was on the scene. As a 17-18 year old growing up in Jersey City and seeing the race riots, and all of that in my face, I wanted to have a way to participate in social change and the civil rights movement. And I knew it had to be non-violent. I wasn't interested in rioting and doing any of the violent screaming and rage stuff - I wanted to do it another way. |
|
| In what other ways did those experiences influence your music and approach to music? |
| But I've been drumming and doing poetry and song for overt 25 years and also working for not-for-profit organizations parallel to developing my skills as an artist. So originally it was for social change - all about civil rights and addressing the political and economic injustices, ,racism, and classism. Now I say poetry, percussion, and song for soulful change, so rather than focusing on the external environment, it's about healing the soul. Addressing the internal self, because the self is the soul that is creating the external environment. So I feel that I can help people gather tools and understand how music can help us heal the wounds of racism, the internal wounds of sexism, classism, and homophobia, by healing ourselves. |
|
| That sounds like drumming as meditation? |
| In a certain way, yes, it's drumming as meditation, drumming as healing, because the vibration of drumming in itself, the physical vibration, physically vibrates our bodies. It can physically heal, transform, and shift our health condition. One way that it helps is that drumming releases endorphins, so drumming is actually a natural painkiller and it also releases joy. And when we are happier people, it's easier to heal. In fact people are now bringing drumming into healthcare facilities. Professional healthcare workers are bringing drumming into environments for geriatrics, Alzheimer patients, autistic children, ADHD - they're discovering how drumming can help focus the mind. It's an expanded concept of meditation, of focus and of healing. |
|
| Do you remember the first time that you touched a drum? |
| I do. I'm one of 13 children, and we grew up poor - not actually in the projects, but we lived across the street from the projects (laughs). It was a predominately Black neighborhood, some Latino, probably some Haitian immigrants, but mostly African-American, Caribbean, and Latino. It seemed like maybe every 5th house had a bongo, or some kind of conga, or some kind of beaten up drum sitting around the house. I'd visit my friends and I'd just gravitate to these drums that were just sitting around and I would just play them - never ever thinking that I'd become a professional musician, never ever thinking that I would become a musician that's a social activist. I was just making music, following my hands, making rhythms, not even thinking about what I was playing. And then my earliest memory is of tapping on the desktop in the 6th grade. I was the kid that when the teacher left the room I'd get people jamming on the desktops (laughs). |
|
Prideindex is in YOUR city!
Ubaka Hill Profile
| Name |
| Ubaka Hill |
|
| Profession |
| Musician, Social Activist |
|
| Age |
| 49 |
|
| Birthplace |
| Bronx, NY |
|
| Current Home |
| Upstate New York |
|
| Listen to Music Samples |
ShapeShifters 
|
Dance the Spiral Dance
|
|