What they're up to: Fish and Young join the Rhode Island Philharmonic for a Jan. 30 family concert, at which they'll be unveiling Fish's Gateway to Eternity. That's at 3 p.m. at Veterans Memorial Auditorium.

Otherwise, you can catch Fish and Young at their drumming school in the Pontiac Mills complex in Warwick. The two musicians opened a studio in July on the second floor of a quaint brick building hugging the banks of the Pawtuxet River. About 40 students have signed up for lessons on drums and percussion instruments from India, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas.

Class act: The Young Fish School of World Drumming offers group classes and encourages families to take part in activities. A few minutes beating on a Middle Eastern dumbek or West African djembe, said Fish, is a great stress reliever.

"No matter how foul a mood you're in," he said, "after 15 or 20 minutes you feel like another person."

"It's extremely meditative as well as energizing," said Young.

Roots: Fish picked up traditional western drumming as a child in Cranston. He headed off to the Berklee School of Music in Boston in the late 1960s, then settled in New York, where he mastered the Indian tabla and Middle Eastern dumbek.

Young, a West Virginian by birth, has worked as a jewelry designer and ran Handled with Care, a Pontiac Mills gallery specializing in sculpture and jewelry.

She used to hear Fish drumming in a nearby shop and "followed the sound of the drum."

"I said to Bob, 'I want to do this.'"

Reaching out: Since then, the two have taken their show on the road to schools and libraries. They also work with handicapped adults from the Trudeau Center at their Warwick studio.

The idea, say Fish and Young, is to use traditions from many cultures to create a universal language through music.

Previous articles? Search Journal Archives