I got my first drum set when I was three years old. A tin set and I look very serious playing them in the photos I have seen. When my father drove me to pre-school we listened to the Police. He thought that Stewart Copland was the best drummer in the world and he told me to pay special close attention to the drums. My father showed me how to do paraddiddles on the steering wheel and I practiced on the dashboard.

I asked for a black drum set for my birthday when I was 9 or 10.  My dad woke me up on the morning of my birthday and told me that my drum set was down stairs. He said he had gotten me a pink set and I was enraged because I had asked for a black one. When I got downstairs I saw before me my very own shiny black drum set! I had NO clue how to pay such a HUGE instrument!

I began taking lessons every Wednesday from a man named Ken Battat in Albuquerque. It was NOT easy! But he taught me how to read and play and we started on the snare and worked are way up. He would record every lesson on a tape so that I could go home and have the same lesson, which I never did. But then in middle school had a reason to practice when I somehow became my middle school jazz band drummer. Though it was always a struggle with the other drummers who where of course boys. I was given all the complicated and really jazzy stuff while the other boy drummers where given all the fast loud songs. In high school I wanted to join drum line but I felt discouraged, something witch I look back on and wished I could have believed in my ability as a drummer and as a girl. I didn’t play for 2 years after that, only occasionally when I had my girlfriends come to my house once in a while and we would play shitty covers of blink-182 songs but I was like this secret drummer.

Photography: Leonidas Oxby
Hi-Res Images: www.leooxby.com
© All rights reserved

When I moved to Montclair NJ when I was 15 it changed me entirely and I became confident about drumming! I made amazing friends, mostly boys, and all we did for fun was drum.  Moving to the east coast was amazing for me creatively and it was a huge part of my developing confidence in who I was through my talent.

When I started college my grandmother got me a conga drum and my mother a bongo drum. And something amazing happened to me. I could grasp all the stuff I have ever learned from my lessons as a child that I just couldn’t get at the time and it was like a whole new world opened up to me though drumming and every aspect of my life were better because of it. When my grandparents died they left me some money witch allowed me to purchase my Rolland v-drums. I got an electronic set not necessarily because I like electronic sets better but so I could play at any hour day or night. I do really love my v-drums because they have mesh heads and if I close my eyes is really does feel like an acoustic set, expect for my cymbals but you know sometimes you have to use a rubber….cymbal….

I began playing drums live with my old band Tayisha Busay and I played along to an electronic track with the other members on their midi controllers or keyboards or computers. Or it would just be them dancing and singing and me on the drums doing gang vocals or rapping.  After Tayisha I got a txt from Carol Sharks of White Diamonds who had known I was a drummer and asked me if I would come in a play because “a band with out a drummer is a bummer.”

Photography: Leonidas Oxby
Hi-Res Images: www.leooxby.com
© All rights reserved

Becoming a part of White Diamonds was a unique experience and I am still getting acclimated with it.  It was the first time I really had to learn other people’s music and come in to a band that had already been together for a while. And being their 4th girl drummer too! But they seem to really like what I bring to the band. Because of my past experiences I am definitely not a straight rock drummer, I love to get really funky! So we have created this new sound we like to call “Disco Punk!”  And I am in LOVE with it! I get to get down and sleazy with my disco beats in one part of a song and then get right back into hitting the shit out of the drums doing straight 8th notes. A perfect example of this is the song “Dead by morning.” I have so much to learn as a drummer and a performer; I want to bring it to the next level, to be a professional.  I want to be this like amazing force known as Hope Bowers.  But most of all I want people to DANCE!

Photography: Andrew Strasser
www.andrewstrasser.com
© All rights reserved.

Our next show will be this Friday Come!

White Diamonds 10/2/2009

8 PM at SILENT BARN

915 Wyckoff Ave @ Weirfield | Ridgewood, Queens

Love, Hope Bowers & Tom Tom Magazine

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