"My trip is basically a non-traditional style of drumming. I respect and learn from the traditional styles but I like to innovate and move on and take those things with due respect and make them something else," says Jarrod Kaplan of Seattle's Hanuman. This fusion philosophy pervades the band's passion-filled blend of roots based music. Intertwining sounds from around the world with various American traditions, Hanuman produces a seamless and enticing mixture colored by the sweet sounds of acoustic instruments. The band's inclusive and complex style is difficult to resist for anyone who appreciates well-crafted compositions and impeccable musicianship.

Hanuman features Paul Benoit on acoustic, slide, and lap steel guitar, Tige DeCoster on acoustic bass, Scott Law on mandolin and acoustic guitar, and Jarrod Kaplan on drums and percussion. The band originally formed in 1996 as a four-piece offshoot of the popular Northwest group Trillian Green. Flautist Ben Klein left in 1997 and the band spent a couple of years playing as a trio before officially adopting frequent onstage guest Scott Law in October of 1999.

These four musicians flawlessly combine a vast number of styles ranging from bluegrass, jazz, Americana, funk, Middle Eastern, African, to Indian music. The basis of Hanuman's sound rests on these various influences, but what results is a style of music all their own.

This is apparent throughout their vast repertoire of original compositions. Each song travels across multiple genre lines and traditional boundaries leaving behind a delicious multi-cultural blend. Intricate interplay fuels these excursions revealing another important element of Hanuman's style--the profound chemistry between each member of the group. Skillful conversations entice the attentive listener to step back from the magical whole to concentrate on the back and forth movement between each musician. Improvisation is another key element of each tune, although movement down explorational paths never strays too far from the solid structure of the tune.

Dubbed "acoustic free folk funk," Hanuman inspires movement with their electrifying grooves. The foundation of this danceable music lies in Jarrod Kaplan's diverse rhythmic style. While his considerable skill doesn't outshine his bandmates, Kaplan's liberal approach to percussion is a prominent component of Hanuman's richly textured sound. Kaplan plays several exotic hand drums, including a djembe and a dumbek, a stripped-down traditional kit, together with anklets and various percussion devices. Groovers around the Northwest are familiar with Kaplan's style as he is often invited to play with various bands at festivals in the area.

Over the past four years, Hanuman has graced the stages of the High Sierra Music Festival, The Oregon Country Fair, Seattle's Bumbershoot and the String Cheese Incident's Full Moon Dream Dance where the band played on both the main stage and under the tapestries of the Middle Eastern café, the Casbah. Hanuman has also performed with Dan Bern, The Zen Tricksters, Acoustic Junction, Joe Craven, Leftover Salmon, Tony Furtado, Vince Welnick, Calobo, Bela Fleck & The Flecktones, and Widespread Panic.

While live performances are at the heart of Hanuman, the band elegantly captures their sound on each of their three releases. Hanuman's original self-titled album includes Ben Klein on silver flute. In 1999 Hanuman released "Hanuman Trio Live," and this past spring Hanuman's current members released "Pedalhorse." Guest appearances from Hugh Sutton on Wurlizter keyboard, Bill Oskay on violin and viola, and Damien Aitken on saxophone add to the liveliness of the band's energetic collaborations both live and on this last studio album. Each album is available through Omnivine Records, Kaplan's self-created music label.

If you haven't yet experienced the intense energy of Hanuman, get yourself a tour schedule and find out when the band is coming your way. Hanuman plays extensively throughout the Northwest and recently extended their tour to include the East Coast. Their mesmerizing performances inspire free-from movement that parallels the adventurous quality of their music, so prepare to let your body melt into their flowing acoustic sounds. Hanuman truly captures the magic of dance and the spirit of song.

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jarrod Kaplan before his performance at the Wild Duck, in Eugene, OR.

What inspires/enables the band to draw from so many diverse musical contexts?

Each of our personal tastes in music and individual performance histories contribute to the band's diverse repertoire. We all enjoy a wide variety of musical styles and between us have played in all sorts of bands, performing rock, funk, jazz, bluegrass, African, Middle Eastern, and experimental music. I think I can safely say that we all come from similar roots in rock and roll, but as we developed our skills as musicians, we each grew interested in branching out into other realms.

Musically, as an instrumentalist, a person who is not really writing words, there is only so far you can go taking from the traditional American music. There is bluegrass and there is jazz, as far as rhythmically and melodically. However, from different cultures you take different melodic scales, different types of rhythms. All of a sudden there is something fresh and new to be harvested and brought into American music. It's definitely creeping in. And it's wonderful too because it raises people's awareness about where these sounds come from. Hanuman is a forum for all of us to express our individual musical styles and tastes, and as we enjoy many different types of music, we tend to play what we enjoy.

What kind of music would that be?

On tour, we listen to a lot of music and have a lot of CDs spanning many different genres. Tige usually brings a lot of jazz, classical, and Afro Cuban music; Paul, lots of roots rock, folk, and world music; Scott, mostly bluegrass and jazz; and my contributions are mostly Indian and eccentric world music.

I understand that compositional credit is given to the entire band. Can you describe this collaborative song writing process?

Usually individual members bring complete or partially complete ideas to rehearsal. Then the band runs through them or jams with the ideas and everyone winds-up contributing to the final arrangements. For example, together we work out how many times we play through sections before transitions happen, quirky endings, building bridges between sections etc. It varies. It's a democratic process. But in the end, the person who brought in the original idea gets the final creative word.

Have any of Hanuman's members traveled out of the country to study music?

We've all studied music with teachers from other cultures here in the States, but I don't think that anyone has formally studied music outside of the country. However, everyone is deeply influenced and musically inspired by our various travels. For instance, "Pushkar," the first tune on Pedalhorse, was named for a place Scott visited in India, and "Todra Gorge," found on our first two CDs, was written by Paul while in the Todra Gorge in Morocco.

Tige is currently planning to study Afro Cuban bass in Cuba this winter and who knows what Paul will pick-up during his upcoming trip to India. I'll be doing lots of drumming and singing on the beaches of Hawaii and am sure to bring back a few inspired ideas.

When did you first begin to study percussion?

I think my interest in percussion began when I was at the University of North Carolina. I was a percussion major for my first semester, studying classical percussion. I went with my class to watch Frankie Malabe and Kim Plainfield do a workshop on Afro-Cuban rhythms for drum set. I was completely intrigued with how the rhythms locked between the kit and percussion, the incredible variety of percussive sounds, and with how polyrhythms worked. I wanted to learn how different drum parts worked together to create such huge, groovy, complex rhythms. At the time, my focus was on Afro Cuban rhythms, but with each drum I acquired, my interest turned to the rhythms and study of those drums. I took a few private lessons with Frankie at Drummer's Collective, and he told me that if I learned the Afro-Cuban rhythms on congas, the drum set parts would be a piece of cake. I went shopping for congas, but couldn't find any that I could afford. Instead, I wound up buying a large, nickel-plated brass dumbek, with a tambourine built into it, and a book called, Dumbek From One Amateur to Another. I basically taught myself to play. I practiced improvising with other musicians at parties and began using the dumbek to perform acoustic sets with my rock band, Yosemite Quick. I later studied dumbek and Egyptian tambourine with Michael Beach.

While playing my dumbek upright in drum circles I saw what a djembe was and I had a friend who turned me on to how to work with the djembe. I got myself a drum when I got to Seattle, eight years ago. That is when my whole life changed. All of a sudden I started playing with my rock band on the djembe, playing harder rock music with the djembe.

At that point, I had begun to develop a style of djembe playing that emulated a drumset: I found my kick-drum at the center of the drum, the various tom pitches as the tones, and the snare sounds as the open and closed slaps. I also began using shakers on my left ankle, much like a hi-hat time-keeper, and brass bells on my right leg for accents and counter rhythms. My style gradually developed and became a lot more refined in the acoustic trio, Trillian Green. With TG, I began to express a lot more melodic sense through the drum. I found many harmonic pitches and began to think more in terms of relative pitch in accordance with the melodies the band was playing. I liked playing melody on the drum and Trillian Green's music was perfectly suited for it. Another perk at first, was the simple set up. I really enjoyed the concept of playing a single drum as powerfully as a drumset. Lots less to carry around to gigs! It was great in the beginning, but then as Trillian Green developed, my simple set-up grew to include a tree of percussion toys, a tower of gongs and cymbals, a talking drum, tabla, and a dumbek, as well as a cuica and a variety of other percussion toys. What had started out simple had grown to include more pieces than my rock drum set.

When did you begin studying tabla?

In 1990, a friend brought a set of tabla back from India for me and I began studying with Misha Masaud in NYC. I eventually wound-up studying more tabla in a group class with Zakir Hussain in Seattle in 1997.

Where did the idea come from for the anklets?

My anklet started when I was in New York City at Washington Square Park. I watched a guy play in a drum circle and he had bells on his left leg. I went back to the same place I bought the dumbek and I bought myself some of those bells. When I started playing with other musicians with the anklets and with the djembe, the bells were just too loud on my left leg, playing with an acoustic guitar or a flute or a cello. Just the bells going ch ch ch ch was too loud. So, I found the shakers and I found some cocoon rattles from Swaziland. That produced a really delicate sound. So I started putting that on my left, and the bells went on my right.

What are the anklets and other percussive instruments you use on stage composed of?

The anklet I use on the left leg is made from a kind of Guinean seedpod rattle and the one on the right is made out of brass bells from Pakistan. The shaker/bell tree is composed of various brass bells from India, silk worm cocoon rattles, palm nutshells, Andean seed rattles, goat toenails, and Acasa nut rattles from Nigeria. The djembes I play are from Senegal and the Ivory Coast, and the particular dumbek I use with the band is from Turkey.

How do you incorporate the various ethnic traditions you've studied into your playing?

I don't think I could say that I incorporate other "ethnic traditions" into my playing, but rather perhaps, some traditional techniques and feels. I like to study various traditional rhythms to the point of learning how to get good, clear sounds from the drums, and an idea of how the rhythms feel within the music of whatever culture the drums come from. Once I've accomplished that, I have a tendency to move on, because I personally don't ever see myself performing the traditional music. Instead, I prefer to take what I've learned, and respectfully use it within any other sort of music I happen to be playing. I'm fortunate with Hanuman to be performing a variety of musical styles at every show. I mainly perform on djembe (and some drum set and dumbek), but use techniques and feels from many styles of drumming, playing everything from bluegrass to funk to Middle Eastern to African "feeling" music.

In traditional drum circles, I've actually been criticized for my "non-traditional" technique and even, I'm proud to say, have been given the title "The Controversial Djembe Player." Such is the consequence of stray-path navigating, I guess. With this in mind, I must say that I greatly respect and enjoy the traditional rhythms and techniques of all drum cultures, and I think that anyone who wants to learn to play should learn as much of the traditional music and technique as possible for the drums they're playing. However, I don't think that playing the instruments traditionally or playing the traditional music is the end all, or even necessary. As a matter of fact, I often find non-traditional musical playing more interesting and refreshing. My personal taste in music and in most everything else favors uniqueness.

What kinds of groups were you listening to when you were first exposed to world music?

My friends in North Carolina at Gilford College exposed me to Shakti with John Mclaughlin, Zakir Hussain and Vikku playing ghatam and I was completely blown away. We listened to lots of world and classical music, jazz, and funky obscurity. Everything from Ravi Shankar to Paganini to The Stick Men (a bizarre Punk band), to Ornette Coleman. We also listened to a lot of Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and more contemporary "outside" jazz like Bob Moses, Mike Stern, John Scofield, Danny Gatton, and Pat Metheney. Oh, and did I mention P-Funk, Gong, Om, Steve Tibbetts, old Frank Zappa, and Captain Beefheart, as well as the twisted country music of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant? My friends were real music heads. We'd spend a lot of time just hanging out and listening to all sorts of music. It sometimes seemed the more obscure the better. And it ALL had a big influence on me.

What inspired you to begin teaching?

I've always loved to teach. People's interest really inspired me. What you are putting into the music has to do with where you are coming from in your life. It is important to have a teacher that can really help you find out who you are and earn the confidence that you need to go in and play whatever it is you want to play and emotionally be able to feel open enough to put that into the music. The idea is kind of like a guru, a person who will give you little bits and pieces and clips of how life and rhythm are related and music is related and tie it all together.

But if you want to play music the idea is you just play. You just intuitively let your body do what it needs to do. Your sticking will come out the way it needs to come out. The more ways you train your body the more possibilities there are and the less you have to think about it. There are just lessons like that. The idea is give somebody some inspiration and they will make something beautiful out of it.

How do you conduct your lessons?

When I teach djembe, I don't teach African music at all, whatsoever. I am not a West African djembe master or a teacher of that music. I teach the general sounds that people usually learn when they study West African drumming. And then say, well okay, that is what you generally learn. Then you can do this and this and this and this. Here's something from tabla, here's something from dumbek, here's something from conga, here's something from drum set. These are different concepts, ways to approach it. These are different sounds, these are where you get the harmonics, and this is how you can get a sound by rubbing the drum or scratching the drum or doing it that way. These are the different ways you can use your foot to get different sounds out of the ankle. This is how you change the feel by playing the downbeat or the upbeat, making people want to dance, or making people kind of just want to sit there.

Is whether or not the audience is dancing integral to your enjoyment of a performance?

Ultimately drumming makes people move. I sometimes feel like if people aren't moving I'm doing something wrong. Put is this way. My favorite crowds are crowds that are dancing. I love playing funky stuff, get people moving and smiling and having a great time and clapping and participating in the music. My friend Tracy Thornton says that when he was studying with his teacher, they didn't put on performances, they did sharings. It was an intimate exchange between the audience and the drummers and the dancers. It wasn't them up on stage up presenting something. It was everybody participating. And that to me is my favorite kind of gathering. Because then everybody's into it, everybody's contributing, swashing energy around everywhere.

You are often asked to sit in with various bands at festivals. What bands do you enjoy most?

It's really hard to say which ones I most enjoy, because they are all very different. I mean I enjoy big crowds. So, when a group like String Cheese comes through and I can just show up with my drum and play with them and get in front of 3,000 people, it's a rush. I played with them at the Paramount and they actually featured me. They brought the whole band, way, way down and then they let me just shred. I had my moment in the limelight. It was awesome. And people still, to this day, talk to me and say, "Oh, man, I saw you with String Cheese."

I just love sitting in with everybody. The more diverse the music the more interesting it is for me to try to fit in there. I always learn something different. From every different type of music I play I kind of get a different feel or hear a different melody or rhythmic idea and that all helps me develop as a drummer and as a musician. There is really no favorite. I just love sitting in with people.

Tell me a little about Omnivine?

Omnivine really started because Trillian Green was playing with all of these great bands. And we also had to have a way to get Trillian Green's records out. Honestly, Omnivine is just another way of saying Jarrod Kaplan. Because I was the guy who was making all the calls and sending out all the packages and working with the distributor and getting everything set up. Instead of calling it by my own name I had this brainstorm one day when Hanuman was in the studio. I was thinking Omnivore, but that is kind of like ehhh. Omnivine seemed to work because one of the things that Trillian Green was also was into was this concept of Trillian Green, the definition of Trillian Green being when nature took over something manmade. Like Kudzu in the South grows like blankets over trees and buildings and everything and just wipes everything out. So I thought about calling it Kudzu, but when I looked it up on the Internet, Kudzu was already taken. And I just though Omnivine, cause omni is like everywhere, all encompassing, omniscient vine, vine growing all over everything and taking over. The greenery taking over. So I thought that would be a good name for the label. So, Omnivine came out of that. And I started meeting all of these great musicians and great bands that Trillian Green and Hanuman were playing with and nobody had any way to get their records out. Nobody knew how to do any of that. So, I was like, well I already got this thing set up. Omnivine isn't a record label in the traditional sense that it has money to pay for other people's recordings. At least not at this point. Eventually maybe. Omnivine right now is an Internet site where people can go to access all of that music of the Acoustic Revolution. That is what I called it. It's defined on the web site as music that brings together people of all walks of life, and bands who share our musical tastes and doesn't need excessive volume to get the point across. Right now, honestly, more than half the bands on Omnivine are extinct. They are no longer together but I do have a back catalog and some recordings left so people can still order those recordings. As Hanuman grows, there are other things that are going to get added. Scott Law's recording is going to get added. His whole set up. And then I'm going to start putting out my stuff, all through Omnivine. And I'm already set up through the distributor as Omnivine. I'm just going to continue to grow that. It's going to take some time.

What is on the horizon for Hanuman?

We have a promoter, this guy Vin Vransinc, in India who is talking about bringing us to India for two weeks to perform in Madras in late January, early February. If we don't go to India we are all taking the winter off. Then a six-week tour all around the country, hopefully coast to coast.

And for my last question. I often see you sporting a pair of fangs. Are you a vampire?

Hmmm... Well, I guess you could say that I surround myself with souls who are aware of the fact that we live forever. As for the fangs, well, those are from my wood-nymph ancestry, and I can't actually say I've ever drawn anyone else's blood with them. I occasionally bite my lips on full moons and at festivals. When inspired, I've been known to grant daring friends eternal life. But I wouldn't consider myself a vampire, at least not in any negative sense of the word.

Band website: http://www.omnivine.com/hanuman/index.html