Local drummer brings West African rhythms to the Roaring Fork Valley

Jessie Lehmann, a member of The Know Bodies Band, discovered her passion for traditional West African drumming before she even visited Africa.

Through a drum club at her college, Lehmann, who had no prior drumming experience, found the artform that she would later spend decades studying. 

“That is what sparked, in a sense, my connection to drumming,” she said. “People got really serious.”

After West African drumming teachers involved with the club introduced her to the style, some of her friends and fellow drummers embarked on a journey to West Africa. They returned with rhythms they independently studied and shared with each other. It was then that she decided she, too, needed to visit West Africa.

Through donations and over 60 performances, the college drum group raised $25,000 — enough for 13 members to visit Guinea and the Ivory Coast in 2001. 

Although her degree was in environmental philosophy, Lehmann continued to study West African music after graduating. She returned to the Ivory Coast and Guinea in 2007. 

It wasn’t just the music that kept she hooked — it was also the community.

It takes at least six people to make a solid ensemble, she explained. 

“Everybody plays like their different drum and has a certain part that goes to it for a certain rhythm,” she said. “I’ve always liked that aspect. You’re in it with your team.”

Often, dancers are involved. 

“We would always have drummers and dancers and so there’s the whole art form of that connection and the conversations that you learn that have those go together,” Lehmann said.

“It ended up being so compelling because of how many pathways their music burns at once for your brain,” she added. 

Playing in a West African drum ensemble demands athleticism.

“You have traditional music that is played in a more relaxed style, and it still requires athleticism because with the dance you’re playing big drums, sometimes with a big stick in one hand and a bell in the other that you’re dinging with a little rod,” she said. “But you could be playing for dancers for over an hour at a really high speed.”

During her trips to West Africa, Lehmann focused on improving her musicianship. Her training regimen included almost daily lessons, evening performances, multiple rehearsals a week and dance classes. During dance classes, she drummed at a high speed for around an hour, building the endurance she needed to drum during long performances. At times, blood vessels in her hands burst from the intensity.

“A lot of it was athletic training within the music in order to be able to perform at a top level,” she said. “Now you can take drumming in all different directions and it’s not always like that, but that’s the area I ended up in for a while.”

She also learned how to repair drums.

“When you play a lot of drums you break skins — you have either a goat skin or a cowskin — and they breakn and so you have to fix them if you want to play your drum still,” she said. “I learned from watching people in Africa and (did) it since the beginning of our journey with other folks in my troops.”

West African drumming has opened many doors for Lehmann. She’s participated in various performance ensembles, run drumming events as team building exercises for large corporations, and of course, repaired drums and taught across the United States and internationally. In 2017, she even traveled to Lebanon for two weeks and taught drum classes there. 

In 2018, she moved from Nashville to Glenwood Springs. She continues to teach local beginner and intermediate djembe classes and repair drums. 

She’s also a member of the Glenwood Springs-based group The Know Bodies Band and regularly performs around the valley. 

“Everybody’s such a good musician, and we get along really well, and it’s really fun to play because (Ryan Roberts) is our band leader and brought all the songs and gets the people and got us all together, but he’s really open to letting everybody be themselves,” she said. “Basically, we just co-create all the songs together … not that many bands play all original music, and I do feel really proud about that.

“I feel good about what we create,” she added. “It’s really fun to do, and it’s only getting better and better.”