In case it's not obvious, the origin of Orkest Asfalto owes a lot to Bahia, Brazil. I've never had any significant experience with traditional U.S. drum corps; my personal percussion training is mostly afro-carribean drumming on congas. But I had spent some time in Brazil and was enamoured with the Bahian blocos like Olodum and Ilé Ayé. These 150-drum-strong groups would rehearse every day all day, it seemed, and I would wake up from my afternoon nap in the hostel to hear distant drumming echoing off the steep 500-year old cobblestone streets. For a percussionist of any stripe, that gets under your skin. Olodum, the granddaddy of the lot, would host a free Sunday night concert in the main square, Pelourihno, amid a massive throng of people, beer vendors and pickpockets that was so much more intense than the closed off 20-person combos that performed for the "safer" paid shows.

Most of the percussion blocos would have a weekly "moving" rehearsal, where they would practice / perform as they marched around the old part of town. (The photo of Olodum's "youth" bloco is at the top of this post. You also get a good idea of what it feels like on this YouTube video.). You'd hear the drumming echoing down the streets, and it was impossible to tell where they were until they rounded the corner, 6 people wide and 30 deep, coming right at you. Everyone squeezed to the side of the street and they just banged through. It was difficult to tell exactly how they were organized, but I saw usually 2 "band leaders", one right up front for the bass drums (surdos) and one in the middle for the mid-sized drums. They would hold up their hands to signal a particular break, count it off, and then 50 drummers would all break at the same time - all while stomping through the streets.

The birth of the bucket group came on the heels of Balé Tech's first show in 2004, which featured congas because I wanted to incorporate hand-drumming. That show ended a few weeks before Day of the Dead, which in San Francisco features a long evening parade. I wanted to organize a marching drum group similar to the Brazilian percussion blocos and I knew a) lugging congas around was ridiculous, b) I wanted that sound you get with stick drums and big surdo bass drums. But I'll be damned if I had the couple thousand dollars it would have required to buy 5-10 Brazilian drums. In Brazil they jerry-rig them out of just about anything, but I didn't have the time or skill to build them. Instead, I went to Urban Ore, and looked for buckets and big round trash bins that could act as the bass drums. I knew the buckets would work - there's a long history of bucket drumming starting with Larry Wright and his famous Levi's ad in the early 90's, and he even shows up on the album Bahia Black which also includes Olodum, bringing us full circle - but the clarity and sound of the trash bin bass was the great discovery. This setup would work!

The next challenge was rhythm. I couldn't teach 10 new drummers how to handle samba in a couple of drop-in rehearsals. I wanted us to be authentic to what we were doing, not trying to do something else. Instead of samba or samba-reggae, I developed bass and bucket parts for a drum-and-bass rhythm, and added a few rhythm changes and breaks. This was much easier to teach and produced a lot of energy because of the tempo change between the slow part and the drum-and-bass section.

So a couple of weeks before Day of the Dead 2004, I collected about 10 people, we had about 2 hours of rehearsal, and the Bloco Techlorico was born. (Unfortunately, that was the same night Bush was re-elected, so our elation was amazing and abruptly curtailed.) The momentum and idea is what has turned into Orkest Asfalto.

Once I began expanding the idea of the drum group to include club rhythms, I realized we didn't want to be limited to traditional instruments anyway, since we weren't really playing traditional rhythms. We're a street-drumming group, and our process is what's traditional - we use what we have on hand, and create (or define) what has influenced us, what we hear and like and have learned, and that becomes our cannon. So we mix traditional rhythms with club rhythms, traditional instruments with buckets and trash bins.

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