From fifth grade through the end of high school, I was a percussionist in the concert bands, marching band, and jazz band. Picked up Middle Eastern drumming in about 1997, taught it since 2003, gigs weekly for years, and a decade of running large haflas four times a year.
Eight years of playing just about every kind of drum, the most known of which are snare, toms, bass, drum set, and tympani.
Until 2003, I sat in on Middle Eastern haflas about three times a year, on average. Then, in February 2003, the typical leader stopped leading, and I started a drum circle so that the group of us could learn and practice the variety of rhythms the dancers enjoyed. For just under eight years, those practices were weekly, with only limited exception.
For a couple of years toward the end of those eight years, our group performed at various venues around the Phoenix valley, sometimes just a few times; our longer ones were almost a year of weekly performances. At the peak, I was leading a group of ten drummers and musicians with half a dozen belly dancers.
It started as a solo thing playing the Middle Eastern hand drums weekly for the belly dancing class, but it didn't stay solo very long. Over a time of a couple of years, it grew to a small group that performed in various cities from northern to southern Arizona.
The largest of these had more than a dozen drummers performing for as many as forty different dancers during a multi-hour hafla. Folks half a mile away from the event commented later that the drumming was very enjoyable and sounded very together. (Large circles can descend into chaos without the proper drum circle leadership.)
