By the end of the album, the drums no longer feel purely percussive. They sound vulnerable. Human.
Desafío Candente Records
Gustavo Cortiñas, Dave King, Isaiah Spencer – drums; Angelina Suyul, La Paula Herrera, Maryta de Humahuaca, Angel Bat Dawid – vocals (Bat Dawid plays clarinet on “Psalm 23”)
For most of its running time, The Drum Also Sings feels spacious for an album built around three drummers. Gustavo Cortiñas, Dave King, and Isaiah Spencer often sound less like a percussion section than musicians spread across a large open space, their rhythms ricocheting off distant walls before folding back into the music. Low drums rumble beneath ringing cymbals and sharp snare accents while hand percussion flickers around the edges. At times the trio settles into grooves that feel almost ceremonial; elsewhere the rhythms splinter apart into tense, searching conversations. Voices enter and disappear throughout the album — spoken word, prayer, chanting, song — pulling the music toward something spiritual rather than purely performative. Conceived during a period of personal and collective difficulty, the record carries a quiet sense of searching beneath its surface. The drums breathe, argue, mourn, whisper, and occasionally sound as if they’re trying to shake loose grief that words alone cannot reach.
What makes the album so absorbing is the way Cortiñas avoids turning virtuosity into the point of the music. The musicians leave air inside the rhythms. Cymbals shimmer softly, then grow heavier and more insistent, while low drums rumble beneath the surface like machinery buried beneath city streets. At times the trio locks together so completely that the music starts to resemble one enormous instrument with dozens of moving parts.
Woven throughout the album are the three “Dialogue with the Ancestors” improvisations, each built from phrases associated with Max Roach, Papa Jo Jones, and Big Sid Catlett. March rhythms fracture into restless syncopations while familiar swing gestures stretch into something looser and less predictable. Cortiñas, King, and Spencer constantly interrupt and answer one another, the music growing denser without ever fully breaking apart.
Elsewhere, Cortiñas allows the music more room to breathe. “Duraznito,” written for his daughter, moves with a light touch, soft cymbals and scattered percussion hanging in the air like wind through trees. “Mother Tongue” draws attention to smaller details: brushes scraping across drumheads, low repeated pulses from the bass drums, cymbals shifting from soft washes to harder strikes.
The vocal performances deepen the emotional pull of the album. Angelina Suyul’s spoken delivery on “Etinel skotol t’ixt’unel” begins with quiet drumbeats slowly gathering around her. On “Tu Resiliencia es Resistencia,” La Paula Herrera moves from delicate singing to conversational phrases and eventually something closer to a cry. “Añay Pachamama” finds Maryta de Humahuaca’s chanting rising through the percussion like another drum voice inside the rhythm itself.
Then comes “Psalm 23,” featuring Angel Bat Dawid, and the album suddenly stops feeling comforting altogether. Her recitation twists the familiar scripture into something raw, unstable, and deeply unsettling. Midway through the performance, Bat Dawid’s clarinet becomes the only horn voice heard anywhere on the album, circling above increasingly agitated drums like an air raid siren. By the end, the performance feels less like a prayer than an exorcism taking place in real time.
The Drum Also Sings stays with you because of the emotional space it opens rather than the sheer force of the playing. By the end of the album, the drums no longer feel purely percussive. They sound vulnerable. Human.
