A few days ago I gifted away the ashiko hand drum I used on my records, going all the way back to the Walkingbirds in the 90s.
I don’t regret it but it felt right to mark the occasion.
I picked it up at (I think?) a Lentine's Music in Cleveland, and we used it extensively on the Walkingbirds EP. You can hear it on my favorite tracks "Wasted", written by Laurie, and "Brickyard Bend", written by me. I played it solo as the only musicial accompaniment during the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival's outdoor production of MacBeth, and the enclosing walls of the Mather Memorial Building made provided an echo that made this tiny drum sound massive.
Several years later in Seattle, getting back into performing, I used the drum on the lo-fi demo version of "Holding Back" which is still one of my most popular tunes, outranking the album version. I'd occasionally take it to gigs, crisscrossing the Puget Sound area to accompany other songwriters like Jerin Falkner and Kris Orlowski when we were doing the coffeshop circuit thing. Sometimes I'd hand the drum off to Dennis Jolin who would then accompany me at my own shows. I don't think we used it on any Kin to Stars songs, although I might have taken it to Folklife a few times.
In all that time it never lost its pristine tone and it looked and sounded as new as the day I got it. But I'd barely touched the drum in the last 15 years, just sometimes moving it around the room to make space. A few weeks ago it tipped over and banged hard against my bare ankle. I like to think of this as its way of saying "if you're not gonna play me, give me to someone who will!" So last week I posted it to the local buy-nothing group and handed it over to a new owner the next day.
So long, buddy! Thanks for all the rhythms!