Newest from my Huffington Post Blog. Take it away....Andrés!
“I was always tapping, like the table, like the feet, like cucharas de madera (wooden spoons) on the living room sofa. This is true of all percussionists I know. There’s an internal drum beating. I started taking drum lessons when I was eleven. This was the one! With my first lesson it was instant love. In high school I got into rock and long hair. In college I moved to the Latin world of percussion, Cuban music through percussion, drumset, and Colombian rhythms like cumbia and mapalé.
“Actually the first plan was to go to Cuba for my studies. I’d asked my Cuban drumset teacher in Bogotá who guided me to ISA in Havana. That’s the Instituto Superior de Arte. You have to start at the lower level conservatory, he said, and then you have to be good enough to get into ISA. My dad took me to Havana for three days to get a sense of the schools. We did a lot of talking. That was so wonderful for me. How serious are you about drumming? He was the one to ask, Why not the US? That was some far away ivory tower for me...
