We recently connected with Clifford Koufman and have shared our conversation below.

Clifford, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I learned what I know from reading, listening, watching, and most importantly, from my teachers.

Early on, lack of information was an obstacle. When I first became interested in the drums in the late 80’s, there were magazines such as Modern Drummer. I loved reading the interviews, and I learned so much from them. You could also find notated rhythms, but nothing beats hearing and seeing what you are learning firsthand. At the time, where I lived in Winston-Salem, a small city in North Carolina, that was not usually an option. I did get some VHS tapes with some of the great drum set players of the time. Those were gold—they were super exciting.

For many years I was mostly self-taught. A huge obstacle to my playing was overcoming all the bad habits I had developed over years of figuring things out on my own. It wasn’t until I found a great teacher of drumming technique, Bruce Becker, that I saw major progress in my playing on the drum set.

I believe people can teach themselves, but we can save ourselves a lot of time by learning from those who have been there before. Nothing replaces learning from professionals working in the field. Even better, studying with a master is invaluable.

It was when I began to learn African Drumming that my musical world really started to open up. I’ve been fortunate to have spent significant time learning from master musicians from West Africa, the United States, and other cultures. I’ve studied with the grandmaster Djembefolas (djembe drum players) Mamady Keita, Famoudou Konate, and Bolokada Conde, from Guinea, West Africa, and American Jazz great Ra Kalam Bob Moses.

Learning aurally, in person has many musical benefits. I think that listening is an essential skill in music, as a teacher, and in life.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I became a musician, drummer, teacher, visual artist, interviewer, and music/content creator as a result of many failures of trying to fit into other molds. My goal was to find a way to spend more time playing the drums and to be happy. I was stubborn and didn’t want to do anything else. As a visual art student in college who also played in a jam band, I naively thought that it would be easier to make a livelihood out of visual art and music together. I had always heard it was hard to make it in the arts, so I thought, if you do two different arts, you could add the income together. But what I began to realize was that I needed to focus on one thing to become proficient.

As a young adult, I was a temp, I worked in the office at an arts center, I waited tables, I filed away auto parts for Toyota, and for a year I was a claims assistant in the workers’ compensation department at AIG. I was miserably unhappy. Around this time I had a health scare and was having a lot of anxiety. Then I got an opportunity to manage an African drum store. The owner, who was also a teacher of mine, was going back to Ghana, West Africa, for several months. I took this as an opportunity to leave my current job (with benefits) and to build a teaching studio. This was the beginning of Sound and Rhythm Drumming School.

After many years of focusing solely on music, I’ve realized that I have many interests and passions and they can all connect. My goal now is to be my best self and bring the most joy to the world by expressing myself creatively as much as possible, using the vehicles of visual art, music, and video.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The pandemic was a time for so many of us to pivot. Before the pandemic, most of my work was in person, facilitating school drumming programs, running leadership development programs for companies such as Mars Inc. and Malmark, and teaching community drumming classes. All of that came to a halt.

I had a handful of online students who had stayed with me from my early teaching days in Portland, Oregon, as well as some from Nashville. But I had a very simple setup. As the effects of the pandemic and quarantine were being felt by all of us, I started Clif Chats—a live conversation show. The goal was to connect with creative people through conversation and to broadcast live to social media as a way to offer insights and enjoyment to listeners. I’ve been able to interview some of the most inspiring creatives in the arts, including one of my heroes, Herlin Riley of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra (Wynton Marsalis), Evelyn Glennie (Scottish Percussionist and Educator), drummers for Zac Brown, Jason Aldean, and Brad Paisley, and many others.

I also began offering a variety of online drumming programs: stick drumming (rudiments on a practice pad), drum set, African drumming, and drumming with objects found in the kitchen. I also began Tuesday Drumming with Clifford, a free weekly drum lesson that can be found on all my Sound and Rhythm Drumming School social media pages.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of working in the arts is the intrinsic nature of creativity. I love both collaborative and solo creations. It could be making music in my studio, making music in a group, drawing, or creating videos.

The most exciting part of creating something is when a person appreciates what I’ve created. It could be a student grasping something they didn’t before or a person taking in the beauty of a piece of music or art. Creativity has a unique ability to bring us together. At the end of the day, it’s all about how we connect with each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.soundandrhythm.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soundandrhythmdrummingschool/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Soundandrhythmdrummingschool
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/soundandrhythm
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SoundandRhythmDrummingSchool/featured