Keith Terry is a rhythm dancer, or better, body musician. Onstage, at first glance, you might think this was a beat poet turned masochist, beating and slapping himself to delirium.
What’s true is this: He hears, and sees, the world very differently from most people. Such is his genius.
Terry is a percussionist, composer, producer, teacher, thinker, and all around booty-band man who uses his body, his being really, as a drum set, and as an archive of sound spanning from the caves at Lascaux to Lincoln Center. The Village Voice once said about him, “Terry lifts you to a philosophical plane of exquisite lucidity usually reached only by means of controlled substances.”
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From another angle, Terry, who lives in Oakland, is what you might think of as a synchronist, a made-up word to describe his instinct for bringing talented musicians together, but also for finding meaning in sound and in all the nuances of communication. For the last 20 years, he’s been interested in a relatively new scientific idea, entrainment, particularly as it applies to music.
The point of entrainment is to induce a synchronous response to some external stimulus, a rhythm for example. “It’s like empathy,” Terry told us when we spoke to him last week. He was in Texas on a family matter. “It’s the sensation of being with someone in a very synchronous way. Like taking a walk with someone and falling into step. I’ve found that when you do that, that kind of synchronicity makes communication much easier. People open up. It accelerates a relationship. Or, when you’re talking to someone and you pick up their breathing, the conversations are always more interesting. If I can entrain with someone I’m having issues with, I find I can resolve those issues much more easily.”
The man who pioneered entrainment was William Condon who, in the 1960s at Boston University Medical School, studied how couples respond to each other. “Communication is thus like a dance,” he wrote, “with everyone engaged in intricate and shared moments across many subtle dimensions, yet all strangely oblivious that they are doing so.”
An Uncanny Power
Terry has found the principles and techniques of entrainment particularly helpful when dealing with people from different cultures and when putting together ensembles. At one point he was co-teaching courses on entrainment, but as he began to understand its power he has put his fascination aside.
“One summer I was doing this and as I looked at the people taking the class, which included CEOs, I could imagine how people in the work could be manipulated.” Still, Terry has found positive ways of using himself as an outside stimulus to bring people together on common ground. He tells this story:
“I was in Columbus, Ohio some years ago and on the fly I did some work with an after- school program for young teens. This was in a rough part of town. I went in at the beginning of the week and drummed with them: Here I am, a white man, with these young African-American boys. Their experience with white men was largely with the police.
“On the first day I said, ‘I’m going to drum and if you want to join in, do.’ We had brought all these drums. So I started and not one of these kids touched a drum. I decided to go in again and the second day a few kids picked it up. Well, by the fourth day they were mostly drumming with me and then they started opening up to me, opening up about their community, their schools, their families. It was like a floodgate. But this is what can happen by understanding the effect of this kind of synchronicity.”
Deep Listening
At home, Terry plays himself, often without thinking. His wife may point it out. He goes into his head, he’s tuning in to some faraway, indescribable yet very familiar rhythm. And this has always been his way. “I’ve been a drummer all my life.”
“I’ve found that kind of synchronicity makes communication much easier. People open up. It accelerates a relationship ... the conversations are always more interesting.” - Keith Terry
In the late 1970s he worked with various clap dancers, including the likes of Charles “Cookie” Cook. “I had a series of light bulb moments,” and out of those moments came a respect for what he calls “deep listening” — “Really being able to hear the layers of music around me, being able to pick out polyrhythms individually and hear how a harmony is part of the music.”
“I hear things in the periphery. A car goes by. A phone rings somewhere. The tinkling of glassware, the rustling of clothing, even the sound of lovers touching each other’s cheek. Most people don’t notice those kinds of details, but to me it’s unmistakably clear and impossible not to hear. Sometimes, it can be very distracting. The sound of a dog barking down the street can drive me nuts. On the other hand, the combination of sounds can really move me. It’s a blessing and a curse.”
The blessing is realizing the connectivity of sound, but also the conviction that everything in life is, in a sense, at some point, synchronous.
The Universe in a Lightning Bug
“I once read about this strange phenomenon involving fireflies; how sometimes they’ll blink in unison. This occurs in just two places in the world, in Malaysia and in the Southern Untied States. And it happens for just one week in the beginning of summer. So I read about this and then forgot about it and three or four years ago I had an opportunity to actually go and see it.
It was in Virginia. So I went to this place and as it got dark all these lightning bugs started coming out. At that point, the blinking was completely random. And as it got darker it was like watching the Milky Way. But then, suddenly, they would go in synch and blink and pulsate together and then go out of synch, and start again. Order and chaos! I moved away from the other people and walked down this path. On one side they were pulsating in one way and on the other in another way…it was definitely psychedelic. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like the first time I saw northern lights. It’s so beyond your imagination …”
“I hear things in the periphery. A car goes by. A phone rings somewhere. The tinkling of glassware, the rustling of clothing, even the sound of lovers touching each other’s cheek.” - Keith Terry
“I don’t consider myself a new age kind of guy,” Terry offered, not a little defensively. “But that was one of those moments when you think, wait a minute. There’s so much more to this than I realized. ”
Making Ends Meet
At the end of our conversation, on a whim, we asked Terry if there was anything we’d missed, if there was anything on his mind lately, perhaps a mystery he was trying to solve.
"Well, yes," he said after a moment's pause. "My father died. We buried him yesterday." Terry was calling from his family home in Waxahachie, Texas, which is 30 miles south of Dallas. The land is as flat as the sole plate on a clothes iron.
“It’s been a strange week,” he went on. “And later after we buried him, around sunset, I went back to the cemetery. It was so beautiful. And you know what? All these fireflies came out. They were everywhere. It was magical.”
Keith Terry and The Crosspulse Percussion Ensemble will perform on June 21 at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival and on June 24 at the Santa Clara Library Central Park Pavillion. On July 9, their first CD for kids and families will be released: I Like Everything About You (Yes I Do)! For more information go to http://crosspulse.com. Terry is available for master classes and residencies, choreographic commissions, educational performances and workshops, at every level, from Elementary through Professional. Grade school programs are a part of the Crosspulse Educational Outreach