Artist teaches drums at MCPL

Inside the Monroe County Public Library conference room, the slaves were being relocated from Africa to the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

MCPL invited returning guest performer Tom Berich, a professional steel drum musician, to teach kids the history and uses of percussion instruments in “Steel Drum Fun.”

Berich engaged the children and parents of the library with a story of the history of the production of steel drums.

“Bringing only the clothes on their backs and their drums, the drums, built from trees and hides, became a form of communication,” Berich said.

From one end of the island to another, marriages, birthdays and rebellious ideas were messaged with each pound on a drum, Berich said, a style titled “call and response.”

As children volunteered to act out certain styles, Berich continued with his story, explaining how steel instruments were used once all organic instruments were destroyed by the slave owners.

“You can make music out of anything with sticks,” Berich said while holding up a trash can lid and a drummer stick. “There are no machines. Steel instruments either from 1940 or 2012 were made with a man and a hammer.”

While draped in plastic garbage cans and holding long white PVC pipes, the young volunteers helped Berich demonstrate the call and response method, along with other musical techniques created for communication.

“Tamboo-Bamboo,” a pleasant name and the favorite part of the performance for 5-year-old Tessa Perotti, was the term for the sound produced by pounding thick bamboo poles on the ground.
Her friend, 6-year-old Cecilia Wolf from Bloomington, disagreed.

“I liked when I saw him play the steel drums,” she said, gesturing to the instrument crafted in 2012. “It was fun.”

Though it was not love at first sight, Berich fell into the art after a requirement of joining the steel drum ensemble while attending West Virginia University.

Berich plays for the Bloomington band “Steel Panache” at local venues and on the IU campus.

Lisa Champelli, an MCPL Children’s Services employee, presented the event.

“We had a nice response the last time Berich was here,” Champelli said. “We try to have different music performances with types of instruments that the children do not usually encounter in their daily lives.”