THWACKS AND THUMPS Ten or so friends meet at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan twice a month from midnight until dawn, filling a gazebo with rhythms that they say mimic the beats of the human heart.While many people wake up on a balmy Saturday and decide it’s beach weather, Roberto Ferreira wakes up when it’s warm outside and declares it drumming weather.
He’ll fire off a text message to about 10 core members of his informal drumming circle, many of them former high school classmates who, like Mr. Ferreira, emigrated from the same small city in the Dominican Republic. “It’s like fishing,” said Mr. Ferreira, 34, who works for a Manhattan perfume company helping department store salespeople refine their sense of smell. “I throw out a text and everyone bites.”
During the week, these drummers are graphic artists, teachers, fashion designers and entrepreneurs. But on summer weekends they become Astrolabio: a self-described “bunch of Dominican kids” who believe percussion mimics the rhythms of the human heart.
Commandeering a stone gazebo in Fort Tryon Park in northern Manhattan, they form a drum circle that plays most Saturdays from midnight until dawn.
“This is the way we welcome summer,” said Annibell Lopez, 26, who manages the New York office of the architect Renzo Piano and has been a regular at the drum circle for seven years. “We hardly see each other all year.”
Yohel Espinal, 25, who works in customer service for the New York Philharmonic, has been toting his drums to Fort Tryon for six summers “because of the music and the people,” he said. “It’s like a nice little getaway from my week. I feel free when I’m playing.”
About 2 a.m. on a recent steamy Sunday, the drummers were well into their gig, setting off an eruption of percussion that split the air over the park. The thumping of congas lured curious observers from Broadway to the spectacle of some 30 young men and women writhing to the beat of drums.
The impromptu alfresco dance party comprised African drums, maracas, hand claps, cigar smoking, vodka swilling and profuse sweating. “We heard it from the other side of the park,” said Jilian Golding, 26, one of those who joined in the dancing. “It’s awesome.”
Like all of the core members of the group, Amaury Fermin, 29, emigrated from Santa Cruz de Mao, a small city in the northern part of the Dominican Republic. “This is very special for us,” said Mr. Fermin, who joined the circle in 2001 and is the founder of the New York Energy Conservation Group. “We come from all different fields, and we make this our escape.”
The group’s name refers to the astrolabe, an early astronomical instrument that located the positions of the planets and determined time. The name came organically in the early days: whenever a player went off the beat, someone would yell “Astrolabio!” to lure the errant drummer back. “Music is the instrument we use to achieve that human connection, to get in sync with each other,” explained Mr. Ferreira, the perfumer, whose nose is so keen he can decipher shampoo ingredients with a single whiff of a person’s hair.
The drum circle was born at a time when Mr. Ferreira, his brother Fausy, and half a dozen of their childhood friends were spending weekends at clubs like Tunnel, the Limelight and Twilo in Manhattan. The standard 4 a.m. closing time was too early for the group, who considered a night out a failure if it ended before sunrise.
One spring morning in 1999, the friends closed down a club in Hoboken and ended up in neighboring Weehawken, by the waterfront. Using whatever they could find — bottles, sticks, cans — they started tapping on benches, with the glittering Manhattan skyline across the water as their backdrop. A crowd formed and the performers and their audience ushered in the sun.
It became a regular gig. Some of the musicians bought drums, while others were content with soda-cracker tins.
After a couple of summers in Weehawken, the drummers wanted a more prominent stage. They cast about for a space in a park, and settled on Fort Tryon because they took their families there for weekend picnics.
No one in the circle is the declared musical leader, but the strongest at any given moment dictates the beat and the rest follow, improvising until someone else picks up a different beat and the others fall into sync. Sometimes they chant, sometimes they make music with their mouths, humming and popping and clicking.
This recent night, the drummers sat on the stone benches that ring the gazebo, eyes trained on one another as they conducted a musical conversation that ended with swollen hands.
“The music itself tells us what to do,” said Fausy Ferreira, 32, a freelance graphic designer.
The quality of the sound depends on who shows up. “Sometimes it’s a complete mess,” Roberto Ferreira said. “I have to be honest. That’s the beauty of it.”
The park officially closes at 10 p.m., but unlike an African drum circle in Marcus Garvey Park that has provoked complaints from neighbors in Harlem, the police seem to have left the Dominican drummers alone, perhaps because the gazebo’s altitude places it far above residential areas.
The owners of nearby bodegas sometimes stop by after shutting down their stores, bringing cases of beer, joining spectators and participants of “every nationality and every creed you can think of,” said Alejandro Nolasco, 33, a bilingual education teacher and one of the group’s founders.
William Santos, 39, another of the original drummers, said that their sound encompasses Latin and African rhythms.
“You’re combining New World and Old World,” said Mr. Santos, a carpenter who does home repairs. “But really, it’s all from Africa. With the slave trade, these sounds were separated. But they found each other again, like long-lost brothers, 400 years later. And once they click, it’s a magical moment.”
As the chirping of birds pierced the rapidly brightening sky, Mel Figueroa, 29, who works in marketing for Bergdorf Goodman and is another of the original drummers, contemplated this fraternity, which manages to reunite every summer even as its members marry, have children and go through other life passages.
“It’s been a good run,” he said. “I hope it continues.”For Multimedia and additional info: New York Times
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