by A. David Dahmer
February 08, 2012
Article from The Madison Times
Yorel Lashley, founder and president of Drum Power
After more than a decade in New York City, Yorel Lashley is back in Madison, in part, to share his creative musical talents and his highly acclaimed Drum Power with Wisconsin youngsters.
Lashley is a professional West African, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian percussionist and member of the Kankouran and Harambee West African Dance Companies. He has more than 10 years of experience as both a teaching artist and youth, teen and arts program developer and is the founder and president of Drum Power.
Although he has been in New York City for about a decade, Lashley and I recognized each other right away as we sit down for coffee and an interview at Victory Cafe on Madison's near east side — we had gone to college with each other in the ‘90s and shared some of the same friends and classes back in the day. Lashley earned a bachelor's degree in history and Afro-American Studies in 1995 and a master's degree in Afro-American Studies in 1998, both from UW-Madison. He would soon move to New York City where he embarked on an interesting career founding Drum Power, a youth leadership program that provides young people with an opportunity to learn West African traditional, Afro-Cuban, and Brazilian drumming.
“Drum Power started in New York City in 2001,” Lashley says. “I wanted to pull together my musical interests and working with young people to do something meaningful and I came up with the idea of Drum Power thinking about my own training as a percussionist.”
Students in Drum Power also learn about the cultural and historical significance of African drumming in order to build self-esteem and self-confidence through discovering the rewards of discipline, team work, creativity, responsibility, and self-respect.
From 2002-2010, Lashley started Drum Power in a variety of New York City schools including East Harlem Tutorial Program, Forest Hills Community House, Future Leaders Institute Charter School (FLI), Cross Roads Charter School, Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizen’s Council Youth Center, the Harlem RBI Real Kids Program, Bronx Community Charter School, Phipps Development Corporation, and Mott Haven Charter School. At the Future Leaders Institute in Harlem, Lashley was also the program director where he developed the curriculum, budget, structure, and evaluation strategies for youth-leadership focused arts afterschool program.
“I had the luxury to be there for quite a few years and to see how if you started kids in first grade how well they could develop with the [focuing on the] arts approach,” Lashley says. “I feel that a lot of difficulties that children have are brought on primarily by poverty. It tends to make them risk-adverse. Usually if they are impoverished, a lot of times the parents are struggling and not always able to be as attentive, sensitive, or nurturing to the children. One thing affects the other. So, they come to school not very confident academically. They might then act out but that's because they are risk-adverse. They are afraid to take chances and afraid to give effort in school. They don't want to fail.”
So, a lot of what Lashley has done through the years at Drum Power is building those relationships and getting young people to start thinking that they can take some chances by giving them something to do that they might find exciting. At Drum Power, youngsters learn to express themselves as individuals through music and performance while developing unique creative skills.
Yorel Lashley has been performing since he was very young. He has brought his Drum Power to five Madison-area schools since relocating to Wisconsin from New York last year.
“Drum Power is designed specifically to reach students who don't necessarily have regular success either academically or behaviorally by hooking them with the power of the drums,” Lashley says. “We get them to learn the rewards of hard, but fun, work, discipline, self-control, self-respect, accountability, and teamwork.”
Since he's been back in Madison the past year or so, Lashley has started Drum Power at Lowell and Falk elementary schools and Sennett Middle School. “Last year, we were also at Wright Middle School and we're about to start it at O'Keeffe Middle School,” Lashley says. “At Falk, we saw a lot of young, African-American males who were going down the wrong path in life and I purposely wanted to work with them. It's the same thing that I saw when I was at the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center [in the 90s]. I knew that there were kids here that should be succeeding that weren't succeeding. It was clear that the connections weren't being made that needed to be made to help inspire these kids to do better than they were doing and take some responsibility for their situations.”
Basically, Lashley has been doing community events with young people and working in the community since his freshman year of college at UW-Madison. “I had a work-study job at South Madison Neighborhood Center (now the Boys and Girls Club on Taft Street) and went on to the Wil-Mar Neighborhood Center as a youth program worker and then a counselor working with high-risk kids,” he remembers.
“I swore I'd never do that work again,” Lashley laughs. “But I came back again year after year after year. It’s so rewarding.”
Today, Lashley tries to meet young people where they are and take a flexible approach to teaching.
“It's criminal if you are aware of all these problems that we are having with young people today and do nothing about it,” he says. “I'm sort of a 'by any means necessary' [person] when it comes to the kids.”
Lashley has a four-year-old daughter, Nia, and a 19-month-old son, Nelson, and they inspire him further to make a difference in the community here in Madison.
“Working in Harlem, I could tell with from my kids what home life was liked based upon what the kids said and were thinking and showing,” he says. “But the importance of pre-schools wasn't clear to me until I had my daughter and I was looking at her and her development. It's definitely more tangible and real to understand where things are and how they set up having seen it in your own child.”
Drum Power starts with a safe, clean environment and high expectations. The program is all about consistency, but there is flexibility. Participants develop discipline (defined as the ability to use energy along with self-control to achieve positive outcomes) by working and practicing to gain drumming skills. They develop self-reliance as they focus on their own growth and choose to employ their own energy.
While he was leading Drum Power in New York City, Lashley has also developing himself professionally as a musician. Instruments that Lashley has played include the djembe, dundun, congas, surdu, timbao, bass drum, bongo, bata, cajon, claves, bells, guiro, shekere, and voice.
He has performed as a percussionist in New York and abroad with groups including: Groove Collective, Mambo Macoco (Latin Jazz), the Sugar Tone Brass Band (New Orleans second line), Harambee West African Dance Company, Kankouran West African Dance Company, Chris Washburn and the Syotos Band (Latin Jazz), La Onda Va Bien (Latin Jazz), and Grupo Latin Vibe (Salsa). He also led his own band Melee performing throughout New York City and serving as a resident band at the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, the birthplace of spoken-word poetry.
This upcoming week, Lashley will be a big part of the Feb. 14 Faculty Concert Series at the School of Music as they present Mark Hetzler, associate professor of trombone, in Mills Hall. Hetzler's concert will include four works, one of which is “Sonata” by Jack Cooper, for which he will be joined by Lashley on congas. “I'm playing on two pieces here as part of Mark's Latin music presentation that night,” Lashley says. “They are a pretty straightforward, traditional Latin big band, but we're doing it as a trio. The arrangement style is close to Afro-Cuban big band that you would have seen arranged in that way between the late ‘60s to the mid-’70s — during the golden age of salsa.”
Lashley grew up all over the world residing in Bonaire, Netherlands Antilles, Liberia, Botswana, Senegal, Costa Rica, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico. He was born in Chicago and his parents encouraged and created his love of music through their travels and their own musical exploits at an early age. Yorel’s mother, Marilyn, an accomplished dancer, and his father, Lester, a charter member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (the AACM) and jazz musician, made music a central part of his life.
“I've performed a lot all my life. I started out in Liberia and lived in West Africa for two years when I was young. I started drumming there. I sang in the Chicago's Children's Choir for a number of years,” Lashley says. “I've always been performing in one style of another. I definitely enjoy performance. I enjoy playing so much that I don't need an audience to do it.”
Lashley's future plans revolve around his furthering his musical career, but his real passion is working with the children.
“The work that I do is really about trying to inspire and at times to push students to use the power they have. I find that the students that are the most disruptive often have the most aptitude for success and the potential to make powerful contributions to the world,” Lashley says. “I take it as a personal challenge to get these kids going in the right direction.”