conversations with the universe
hollin hills percussionist tom teasley, the power of rhythm, and the all-important james brown factor
by stephen brookes
In a small, dark theater at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Charlie Chaplin is dancing across the silver screen, trying to cope with a world gone mad. It’s a screening of the 1936 silent movie “Modern Times”, and as Chaplin grapples with runaway machinery and complicated women, a single percussionist — sitting below the screen in a soft pool of light — is moving deftly among an array of drums, bells, rattles and woodblocks, conjuring up an almost orchestral range of sounds. The music is propulsive, a virtuosic tour de force — it feels like the percussionist is not just accompanying Chaplin, but dancing with him in a wild duet. And as the film ends and he sets down his drumsticks, the audience leaps to its feet — and bursts into rapturous applause.
Welcome to the imaginative world of Tom Teasley — a Hollin Hills percussionist and composer who has emerged over the past few decades as one of the most interesting figures in modern American music. For Teasley is more than just a modern-day film accompanist. Once described by The Washington Post as “a multi-instrumental genius,” he’s been a pioneering figure in cross-cultural “world” music, released over a dozen CDs, served as a cultural envoy for the U.S. Department of State, been an artist-in-residence at the Kennedy Center and the Kreeger Museum, won three Fulbright-Hays awards, created sound designs for theater productions, and devised “healing sound” programs with psychotherapists — and that’s barely scratching the surface.
But what makes Teasley such an intriguing figure is not just his inventive music and eclectic career — it’s also his philosophy of radical openness and inclusion, and his conviction that music can connect (and maybe even heal) humanity. He’s spent much of his life traveling the globe, exploring everything from Sufi devotional music to Santería mysticism to avant-garde jazz, forging connections among different musical cultures and developing a style of “pan-global” music that builds on the unifying power of rhythm itself.
And now, at 70, Teasley is still exploring, still testing new paths for his music, and still discovering innovative ways to connect with audiences. Just in the past year he’s created a “Biorhythms” program that draws listeners into a healing, even trance-like state, and launched a bold new concert series called “Art of the Duo” — featuring completely improvised “musical conversations” with like-minded musicians, creating music as spontaneous as it is beautiful.
“My goal is always a conversation that brings people in,” says Teasley, sitting in his music studio on Whiteoaks Drive, where he lives with his wife, the soprano and music therapist Linda Teasley.
Dressed in a knitted cap, loose-fitting shirt and exactly the kind of goatee you’d expect on a jazz drummer, Teasley in person is as open and animated as his music — overflowing with ideas, curious about everything, and as quick to laugh as he is to talk about his practice of Nichiren Buddhism. A musical instrument is never far from his hands, and he’ll often pick up a drum or rattle to illustrate an idea, weaving sound and words together in a sort of beguiling meta-language. Watching him, you can’t help thinking that he sees the entire world as a vast percussion instrument, waiting to release its meaning through sound.
And for all his engaging humor, Teasley is deeply serious about the power of music to unite the family of man — and maybe bring us to a better understanding of ourselves.
“If there's any hope for us, it's building a profound shared experience,” he says. “Maybe you're just casting a grain of sand into the lake, but there’s a ripple effect. And the more that that happens, the more powerful it becomes.”
Teasley playing a hand pan, outside his Hollin Hills studio
from topless bars to global music
Teasley’s life in music began as simply as you could imagine: with a broken drumstick and a block of wood. As a boy growing up in Washington, DC, he’d tap along to songs on the radio, until he’d earned enough from his paper route to buy a cymbal and an actual drum. His family wasn’t particularly musical (although it included, in a bit of foreshadowing, a grandmother who accompanied silent movies on the piano), but they “encouraged-slash-tolerated” his practicing until he was good enough, at the age of 12, to join a rock band with some older kids.
“Nobody played the drums, and I didn't really either,” he says with a laugh. “But I had a drum, so I was kind of the default drummer. And by the time I was 16, I was working on 14th Street … in, you know, topless bars.”
The obvious distractions nearly derailed him (“you grow up fast on 14th Street,” he says), but he soon grew serious about music, studying at the Peabody Conservatory and American University, and earning a Master of Music degree from Catholic University. But rather than heading for the orchestral pit, Teasley went to New Orleans to play jazz, studying with the great Joe Morello and throwing himself into the city’s vibrant international music scene. The experience, he says, was transformative — and launched him in a direction that would define his life.
“I was hearing all of this world culture, but filtered through Americana,” he says. “It had a huge impact on me. I began seeking out drummers from Africa and India and the Middle East, and I started to catalog what was similar and what was different in their playing. And it led me to create a pan-global approach to music.”
Drummer Tommy Teasley (left) in the 1960s, with his band, “Mystic Morning”
the language of rhythm
But pan-globalism wasn’t just some academic exercise for Teasley — it was a way to explore rhythm as a common human language. Drumming, of course, has been at the heart of human life for millennia, tied to religion, rituals, social ceremonies and even identity itself. A love of rhythm seems to be inherent to our species, and virtually every culture on the planet has its own distinctive drumming tradition, from the tambouriers of Haiti (who use drums to summon vodou spirits), to the story-telling “talking drums” of West Africa and the war drums of the Celts.
Teasley began exploring the connections between these different cultures, but not to just mimic them or create some sort of pastiche. Instead, he absorbed new styles and let them seep into his own jazz-based musical language.
He began experimenting, applying percussive techniques from one culture to instruments from another — strumming in an Afro-Cuban style on a Middle Eastern goblet drum, for instance. And as his collection of instruments grew (he has hundreds of them now, from gongs and handpans to djembes and cajóns), so did what he calls his “vocabulary of global sound.”
“I’m always listening for interesting things,” he says. “When I hear something, I try and relate it to something that's in my sphere of experience. So rather than something just ‘new’ or ‘different’, it becomes an extension of the language that I already have.” On a trip to the West Bank, for instance, he heard for the first time the muezzin’s call to prayer; later he played with the sound on a drum, coaxing out a lyrical, almost bluesy sound.
Percussion is everywhere, from Africa to Haiti to Indonesia to India
conversations with the world
Teasley’s musical language continued to expand, and by 2008 his pan-global approach was so well known that the State Department brought him on as an official “Arts Envoy” — a diplomatic gig that took him to China, Africa, India and beyond, performing everywhere from refugee camps to war-torn Baghdad. It was a kind of “soft diplomacy,” he says — and it often had a gratifying impact.
“The State Department once scheduled me to do an educational program in Baghdad, late in the war when there was still a lot of instability,” Teasley recalls. “So we pulled up to a school in an armored vehicle, and I was wearing a flak jacket and a helmet. But I wasn't carrying a weapon — I was carrying a Middle Eastern drum called a darbuka, which the kids recognized. And it was a diplomatic victory even before I’d played a note, because this was the first American they'd seen that wasn't armed. I was just there to play music!”
At other times, he found himself in places where he didn’t speak the language, and the indigenous musicians he was about to perform with spoke no English — and they only had minutes to prepare to perform together onstage.
“I’d find myself with an oud player, for instance, and we’d play a little to see what worked,” he says. “And the music became not just something for entertainment — it became something functional, it actually became a language. And then we would take that before the audience, which understood what we were doing. It wasn’t just a dialogue between two people, but between two cultures.”
The cultural encounters had their poignant moments, as well. No music is quite as “American” as jazz, with its emphasis on improvisation and personal expression. But when Teasley ran workshops in countries with more rigid traditions, he found students were often stymied by the very freedom that jazz offered.
“In South Korea,” he says, “a young woman came to me and said, ‘You talk about self-expression, but I don’t know how to start — my teacher says I should only work on technique.’
“So I urged her to go to her instrument, and just play like a child who’s never touched it before,” he says. “She said, ‘I can't — I don’t even know what that means!’ So I asked her to just play a scale, and then play it again with the notes out of order, and then play it with some notes soft, and some loud. And she started to play.
“I turned away for a moment,” he says, “and when I looked back she was sobbing. Sobbing. She had probably been playing since she was six — and this was the first time she’d felt a connection to her instrument that was something besides ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’”
Tom Teasley with students and indigenous musicians in Ramallah; South Korea; the West Bank; and Oman.
conversations with friends
But when Covid hit in 2020, international tours and concerts came to a sudden halt. Teasley returned to his Hollin Hills studio to regroup, collaborating with other musicians online and working on his own music. He recorded a solo CD titled “The Breath” — a meditative album full of optimism and hope — and began developing an innovative new series titled “The Art of the Duo”, bringing virtuosos together for one-on-one concerts that would be completely improvised from beginning to end.
It was a daring idea. Free improvisation has been around for a long time — but it’s a bit like walking a tightrope in the dark, in a gusty wind. The players have to be completely spontaneous and utterly disciplined at the same time, constantly generating new ideas while also keeping the music coherent, and need to stay almost telepathically attuned to each other. When it works, it can be riveting. But improvising before a live audience is not for the faint, and few musicians can pull it off.
Teasley decided to take a chance. He invited three longtime collaborators — the Chinese hammered dulcimer virtuoso Chao Tian, the Indian bansuri flutist John Wubbenhorst, and the jazz trumpeter Dave Ballou — to join him, and the series launched in July at the Athenaeum art gallery in Old Town.
And the results were spectacular. All of Teasley’s partners were experienced improvisors, and the music ranged from edgy, jazz-infused duets between Teasley and Ballou, to gentler and more atmospheric playing with flutist Wubbenhorst, to an almost ethereal exchange of ideas with Chao Tian. In the intimate gallery, it often felt like you were sitting in on personal, even affectionate conversations between two exciting and imaginative thinkers, watching as they tossed ideas back and forth and delighting in the exchange.
“Few musicians can incorporate such a wide range of genres and styles into their playing as Tom can,” says Ballou, who opened the series with Teasley in July. “And that allows him to adapt to any situation as it happens. We constantly try to surprise the other, in ways that propel the music in interesting directions. But, as thought-provoking as the music can be, we always try to connect with the audience on an emotional, spiritual level first.”
Teasley’s improvising partners (clockwise from top left) John Wubbenhorst on flute; Dave Ballou, trumpet; and Chao Tian, hammered dulcimer.
conversations with the universe
And in a kind of counterpoint to the adventurous “Duo” series, Teasley also launched this year a series of quieter and more inward-looking performances, called “Biorhythms.” Held at the Radiance Yoga studio in Old Town, the performances are described as “immersive sound journeys,” designed to put the audience into a deep meditative state. Teasley himself meditates regularly — chanting the mantra Nam Myoho Renge Kyo as part of his Nichiren Buddhism practice — and believes that music can be a pathway to deeper states of consciousness; a conversation, in a way, with our truest and most unbounded selves.
“All cultures use sound and rhythm to tap into some energy that we don't necessarily tap into otherwise,” says Teasley, who has worked with psychotherapists to create sound designs for guided meditations.
“It's been a driving force for me,” he adds. “Music has always been a way to get to different spiritual planes. There are very specific rhythms that can induce a trance state; they massage your brain in a way that, if you allow it, can take you to a different place.”
the all-important james brown factor
And yet, for all its spirituality, for all its global inclusiveness and avant-garde daring, there’s one final thing that Teasley says is at the heart of his music: a kind of joy-filled rhythm that, he hopes, will make his listeners just get up … and dance.
“I’m very groove oriented,” he says, with a laugh. “I call it ‘the James Brown factor’ — that feel-good rhythm that just cuts through all the bull. It doesn't care what religion you are, what your politics are, what house you live in. Rhythm brings a kind of electricity when you’re performing before an audience. You can see when you've made a connection — people are moving or smiling, and there's a sense of … bliss, I guess.”
He pauses, and a grin starts to spread across his face. “I mean, that's all I'm going for at this stage of the game — sound bliss!” he says, laughing and throwing his hands in the air. “Why not? And everybody’s invited to the party!”
— Stephen Brookes, November 2025
Stephen Brookes is the editor of The Hollin Hills Journal. He’s a journalist whose work has been published in The Washington Post, Newsweek, Asia Times, the Chicago Tribune, Architectural Digest, Modernism Magazine and many others.
