The third number by Rick Bausman’s little ensemble of drummers has not gone so well. He turns off the recording equipment and addresses them. Tactfully.

“Well,” he says, “that had something.” Quick as a flash the guy who’s been playing the steel drum shoots back: “Whatever it had, it needs a cure.” The room breaks up laughing. Even the guard.

Guard? Yes, because these men are prisoners, although on this day the five of them, plus the guard, Rick, and I (allowed in only if I used no names, took no pictures, and joined in hitting something) are also recording artists. It has all come to pass because in the course of conducting his drum workshops with the inmates of the Dukes County Jail and House of Correction in Edgartown, the guys had laid down some pretty good grooves. The thing was, they needed some convincing of it.

So Rick, forty-two, has lugged in not only the normal array of percussion – bass drum, congas, snare, marimbas, chekere – but also a bunch of microphones and much of his home-recording studio, and he has spent a painstaking hour or so before the inmates arrived setting it all up. All to prove a point: that with a little cooperation and mutual support and self-belief, they can produce something good. “I want to teach them that something they do can turn out right,” he says later. “Yes, I want them to enjoy playing a drum, maybe even start thinking of themselves as having musical ability. But that’s really just the medium. What I do is really about community and self-esteem. It has particular applications for people with a special need.”

And so for twenty-six years he has worked with the disabled, with children in the hospital, with school kids and seniors, and now with prisoners.

“I’ve worked with everything from autism to incarceration to eighth-grade angst,” he grins. The aim is “to have a general impact on their lives as far as giving them a chance to feel what it means to be part of a community – a little musical community, where one part supports the other.

“See, a lot of people don’t know how to ask for help, don’t know the community is there to support them. So it’s a tangible sort of representation of how to support other people, and receive support, to feel the joy in that and learn to be available to it.”

Not that he would ever explain his mission in such terms when dealing with the correctional-facility band. He’s not a preacher. He prefers to let the results speak for themselves. And the results – the first take of the third number notwithstanding – are pretty good. You can see the realization on the faces of the guys as they listen while Rick mixes the sound, right there in front of them.

Nonetheless, as the jokester among the inmate band puts it: “This ain’t Entrain” – a reference to the fine band Rick used to belong to, with which he still sometimes plays. Which raises the question: why does a top-class musician spend so much time with non-musicians?

Says Rick: “I get as much out of working with beginners and intermediate-level drummers as I do out of playing with the best professionals. It’s just that I get different things.

“On stage with Tom Major and Sam Holmstock and all those [Entrain] guys, just letting it rip, I’m playing to the top of my ability, experimenting musically at a pretty high level. When I’m with a class of students, providing a situation that’s challenging for them, I can see in their eyes the same light that I feel when I’m up there playing.”

Rick Bausman says he first felt that joy when he was about three years old, living in Ithaca, New York. He was a pretty hyper kid, and his parents decided that if he was going to hit things all the time, it should be something meant to be hit. They bought him some drums. He took to them with a passion. That was almost forty years ago.

In 1980, he conducted drum workshops for Camp Jabberwocky, the Vineyard Haven summer camp for kids and adults with cerebral palsy and other disabilities. It worked, he quickly realized, because unlike melodic instruments, drums were instantly accessible. “I bring a roomful of drums, and people can immediately play,” he says.

In 1986, he moved to the Vineyard from Maine and continued his work. A Vineyard teacher saw a performance by the Jabberwockians and approached him to do a workshop with a school. It went so well, he says, that “it quickly became apparent this could turn into something.” What it turned into was a business – the Drum Workshop – albeit a pretty modest business, if measured in the usual, bottom-line terms. This twentieth year of its existence, Rick hopes, “will be the first year where the Drum Workshop has not at some point run out of money.”

But to consider it in just bottom-line terms is to look at it in too mercenary a way. Look at it in terms of social capital, and you see a much more significant enterprise. Rick’s work with the Jabberwocky campers, for example, went way beyond being therapy or education for the disabled and became part of the fabric of summer life on the Vineyard, integrating the camp with the community in an extraordinary way, through drumming on the beach.

“It started,” says Rick, “just because we wanted to get out of the basement to rehearse when the weather got good. So we started with Menemsha Beach, at sunset. We did that for a couple of years, but it got too big. One night they gave out 840 parking tickets.

“We started moving around. But it got too big for each of the beaches, including at one point State Beach. There were people parked all the way from Oak Bluffs to Edgartown, in the dunes, everywhere. Every Tuesday morning I would get four phone calls: the sheriff, the selectmen, the county commissioners, and the Oak Bluffs police. So we started letting people know by word of mouth [where we were playing]. It’s very mellow now.” But while it became necessary to shrink the beach drumming, Rick remains “a big believer in growth. If you don’t grow, you’re dead.”

About five years ago, Rick decided to expand the Drum Workshop off-Island. He did some curriculum packages, made Conga Cycle, a CD of kids’ songs (which won a national Parents’ Choice Award in 2001), attended some national conferences. Things “took off,” he says. He was working all over the country, from the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital to Peer Express in Charleston, South Carolina, to the Freeburg Early Childhood Program at the University of Northern Iowa, and other places.

Then his marriage ended, leaving him as a single parent. “Life threw me a curve ball, so I am less available now to go out nationally,” he says. Once again his business is at a critical juncture, as he tries to grow it in another direction. His work with the correctional authorities is one part of that, and a curriculum package is in the planning. Another part is a plan to franchise – for want of a better term – the Drum Workshop.

The first such project is earmarked for the Blackstone Valley region of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, with Rick’s longtime friend and Entrain drummer Sam Holmstock. The idea is to use his curricula to train people who already are accomplished drummers and send them back to their home communities, with the Drum Workshop as a parent organization, helping to find grants. “I’m thinking to bring two or three people here – I’m thinking Berklee [College of Music in Boston] graduates or people who are already musicians – for maybe a two- or three-month residency-training program. That would allow the Drum Workshop to provide more services here. Then they would go out to wherever they wanted: Boston, New York, California – it doesn’t matter – and we would find ways to fund programming there.” He’s thinking big. “In my lifetime I’d like to see ensemble drumming be as normal and culturally valued as activities like dance classes, soccer programs, Little League, community theater.”

The critical factor, though, is money. “I’m fortunate to have started this project on Martha’s Vineyard, because there are people here who are able and willing to fund community-oriented service programs,” he says. “I’m more grateful to this community than I can even express for the support they’ve given me so far.”

The Drum Workshop has always been a grant-by-grant proposition, until now. “This, hopefully, will be the first year it has been able to support me financially through the course of the whole year,” he says. “Right now, we’re at a really good place, financially, programmatically, in every way.” This year, for the first time, he has been able to find enough money to plan ahead, to fund some future growth. Those outlays include several thousand dollars’ worth of drums, which Rick has distributed among Vineyard artists to be decorated and then sold at auction.

“These will be serious works of art by serious artists. Some of the drums are actually antique, ceremonial drums brought back from Haiti in the 1940s, and I’m expecting to generate a pretty good amount of funding for programming here on the Vineyard,” he says. He drops some names: Allen Whiting, Peggy Turner Zablotny, Alison Shaw, Washington Ledesma, Dan Waters, Steve Lohman, Omar and Sheila Ryan. The Island schools also did some, and
Vineyard glass blowers Mark Weiner, Rob Phillips, and Harrison Neel also created eight miniature drums, designed by Jhenn Watts, director of The Field Gallery of West Tisbury. The works will be on display there from July 9, and will be sold through an on-line auction.

“I refuse to spend half my life applying for [grant] money,” he says. “The money raised by the Painted Drum Auction, I hope, will be a better way of funding my business. And my business is not necessarily trying to create a world full of good drummers, but trying to create a world full of people who appreciate one another, tolerate each other, support each other – through the medium of drumming."