Mario Garza - Mridanga drum

>>Mario Garza: This is a traditional Bengali drum from India. It’s called a mridanga. It’s been around since the 1400s. I was never a musician or musically inclined. However one day, a friend of mine tells me these are Indian drums and I want you to learn them, I’m pretty sure you can pick them up. Just by the suggestion, I picked up a drum, and just laying my fingers on them- it took about a month - I became very fluent with it. It just expanded from there. Indian music, like other Eastern music, is very different than Western music that we hear in the US or even Mexico. When I first heard percussion music with different mathematics and different aesthetic sounds like (bangs drum) that, you never hear it. So when I got introduced to it, it immediately grabbed my attention. I though, I got to learn this. I learned simply by YouTube videos and internet. There is groups of people I practice with. This is the new age: new technology, new lifestyle. So since I’m learning it from the internet, I’m playing with people who bring in other electric instruments – American instruments like a guitar or a drum set. I add in the other types of cultures with this new culture I’m learning. I get to walk around this beautiful campus. I walk from class to class. I carry it with me. I’m a student and the title in itself just grants me to not have anyone question me like Oh, you keep carrying that drum around. Well of course, I want it to be my trade. I want to learn it. I want to appreciate it. People come up to me all the time. >>Martin Castanon: When I walk to my morning classes, I see him walking and he has the drum and he’s playing it. It’s pretty cool. >>Mario Garza: Since it’s so foreign, it grabs their attention by sight. But since the music and the sounds are so aesthetic, it grabs them. >>Martin Castanon: I actually like the music a lot. I don’t really hear anything like that around here. I want to learn to play that drum. >>Mario Garza: This could be a trade in itself: the making, the music, the education behind it, and the knowledge, especially with all the celestial education you can learn from it since it touches very intimately with religion. I can follow this drum and make it a lifestyle. I’m submerging myself into another culture, whole new diet, whole new lifestyle. And it’s a potential occupation as well. You get to turn other people on to everything else, like I am. So if I introduce them to music and they get pleased and any slight interest is ignited, then it’s reason to celebrate. This drum encompasses culture. The drum itself is culture: the make of it, the sound of it, the style, the mathematics behind rhythms – everything is embodying a culture. So how it found its way over to South Texas and found me is amazing.