Sara Gilo, left, and Sophia DeLuca, fourth-graders at Warwick’s Norwood School, get into the spirit of a recent African drumming program at the school.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

WARWICK It wasn’t exactly the African countryside, but there were moments when it came close.

In the cafeteria of Norwood School, Mali native Sidy Maiga, the master drummer in residence at Providence’s Black Repertory Company, sat in the center of a circle of second-graders and tapped out a beat.

Huddled over too-big congas and djembe drums, the students followed his lead, or tried to.

It was a headache-worthy combination: 56 children and a fleet of drums.

But under Maiga’s tutelage, there were moments when the chaos subsided and a beat emerged.

“I’m getting it!” Kayla Chamberlain exclaimed, her small hands playing across the drum.

“Yeah you are,” her teacher Lisa Rzemien said, crouching beside her.

For more than a year, Maiga has performed and taught drumming at the Black Rep, but he’s also made a point of getting out to local schools to teach the youngest Rhode Islanders about the art of drumming.

“Drumming is my life, so anytime and anyhow, I only want to play drums,” Maiga said between sessions, his accent heavy. “With children, the drums help them understand other cultures.”

In Africa, he told the second-graders, drums are more than instruments. They’re tools for communication and celebration; in the good times they bring joy, in the bad they bring sorrow. “If something happens in your town you play the drums to let people know,” Maiga said.

Norwood parent Rachel Nguyen, who helped organize the event after taking a class with Maiga in Providence, said his visit and others like it can help enrich children’s musical experiences at a time when arts curriculums have been sliced at schools around the country.

Despite the drizzle that fell the morning of the event — there were several at Norwood throughout the day for various grades — Nguyen and Maiga hauled the drums, many of them borrowed, from Providence to Warwick in the back of Nguyen’s minivan and Maiga’s truck so that every student would get an instrument.

It was well worth the effort, Nguyen said.

“Drumming shows them that we all live different kinds of lives, but when you all play music, it’s a common denominator that makes other things go away,” she said.

Maiga said it can be hard to teach a youngster to follow a beat. Children, he said, tend to follow their hearts and when it comes to drums, their hearts tell them to do one thing: bang loudly.

But when Maiga approached the youngsters one by one that day in the cafeteria, the result was different: They watched and repeated, watched and repeated until they too picked up the steady beat.

“It amazing how kids respond to him intuitively,” Nguyen said. “These beats would take me days to pick up, but for them, watching him, it’s intuitive.”

cneedham@projo.com