What is "body music?" If you ask Keith Terry he is likely to answer, "clapping, slapping, snapping, stepping, and vocalizing." The first a-ha! moment for Keith came in 1978 while he was rehearsing with the renowned Jazz Tap Ensemble, which he co-founded. Always intrigued by the gray area that blurs movement, music, and dance, he suddenly realized that he could transfer the music he was playing on the drum kit elsewhere. "I stood up and moved what I was playing on my drums to my body. That’s how I came to it," remembers Keith.
Encouraged by Charles "Honi" Coles and Charlie "Cookie" Cook—great jazz tap stylists who recognized both the ingenuity of Keith's music and its similarity to the Hambone they'd performed in vaudeville—Keith launched into a boundary-breaking career now known as body music.
Keith's creations go far deeper than the occasional stamp or clap. Falling somewhere between danced music and audible choreography, he sees in body music the ability to tap into one of the oldest expressions of humankind. For the past 30 years, Keith has traveled the globe as a drummer and body musician, performing, teaching, and collaborating with body music virtuosos. These experiences helped to form his signature brand of body music performance and instruction.
One of the seminal moments in the development of Keith’s work was hearing Javanese gamelan music performed live for the first time. The experience forever changed the way he thought about music. "It was like my ears exploded. The gongs moved air in a way that you just don't hear in a recording. There's so much more to music than the notes and the rhythms." His subsequent collaborations with gamelan ensembles and Indonesian musicians led him to think more closely about the deeper implications of working across cultures and how music represents culturally embedded values that exist outside of music. There are many concepts in Indonesian music that have no parallel in Western music—such as "rubber time" (jam karet in Indonesian)—a musical term that comes from the perception that time is being stretched by those listening to the "shimmering" harmonics and complex rhythmic cycles of Javanese gamelan. The expression is used in everyday vernacular language in Indonesian society in non-musical settings as well.
The Guggenheim fellowship Keith received in 2008—the first awarded to a body musician—has allowed him the opportunity to explore these kinds of music-meets-life concepts in greater depth. Focusing on collaborations with body musicians from Turkey, Indonesia, and Brazil, the grant has provided funding for travel and research to explore some of the deeper cultural elements of body music performance. This travel and interaction has led to the first-of-its-kind International Body Music Festival, for which his non-profit arts organization, Crosspulse (www.crosspulse.com), raised funds through private and public foundations, corporations and individual donations. The Festival—six days of workshops and performances—took place December 2-7, 2008 in San Fransisco and Oakland, California. The second Festival took place in the Bay area and included human beatbox, flamenco, Pervian zapateo and more on December 1-6, 2009.
Keith sees the festival concept as comprising a larger vision, producing a new festival in the States every two years, with a Festival presented in other countries in between, plus a touring IBMF Concert which draws from the Festivals' participating artists. The festival will represent an annual cycle of rhythm, bringing a new global synchronicity to the continually emerging field of body music.
