THE VALLEY CREATIVE
By Karissa Masse
Cultural Arts in the North Country Highlighting Local Artist, Musician, and Author, Dave Kobrenski
One doesn’t expect to hear traditional African drumming in New Hampshire. But that has been changing over the last few decades, thanks to local artist, musician, anthropologist, and author, Dave Kobrenski, a New Hampshire native who recently transplanted to the Mt. Washington Valley.
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t’s not your typical blend of talents, but Dave somehow manages to incorporate art, music, and culture into his unique melting pot of inspirational and educational ethnic soup. Dave’s journey to his current profession can be traced to his college years. While in school at Syracuse University, he developed a passion for the complex polyrhythms of West African music and began intensive study with musicians from Mali and Guinea. Before long, he had started his own West African drumming program and was teaching classes and workshops in schools and colleges all over New England. One night during this period, he was awakened from sleep by a phone call he first thought must be a prank call. It turned out to be a man named Nii Tetteh Tettey, a musician and entrepreneur from Ghana. The 3 a.m. call was an invitation to help build a cultural center! Dave’s reputation had spread across continents. He enthusiastically accepted, and in addition to helping develop the program, he literally helped “build” the cultural center, even finding himself perched aloft and thatching roofs! Dave spent the next two decades traveling back to Africa nearly every year, developing deep meaningful friendships, studying music and traditional instruments, and embracing the culture— so different from his own the West. His experiences there include numerous wild adventures, some of which rival Indiana Jones! On one trip to the remote interior of Guinea, Dave describes a terrify16
ing crossing of a dilapidated bridge suspended over a river. He and his companions were driving in a rust-bucket 1987 Renault, piled high with luggage and supplies, and stuffed to capacity with five adult passengers … and a goat! “It was about 1 a.m. and we were almost out of gas, and trying to find a place to stay for the night after 20 hours of driving. We came to this dilapidated bridge that hadn’t been repaired since the French left the country in the late 1950s. The bridge was totally falling apart, and was lashed to a tree with heavy rope, but it was falling into the river. It wasn’t a super long bridge, but our car was so laden down, we had been bottoming out on every pothole. As we started to drive over, we could hear the bridge straining beneath our weight, creaking and groaning. Our driver lost his nerve and hit the gas. And as we got to the edge of the bridge we became airborne, landed on our front bumper, and popped our front tire.” (The full story is in Dave’s book, Finding the Source.) Another adventure took place in 2007, when Dave was forced to flee Guinea after a violent coup d’etat sent the country spiraling toward civil war. “The city of Conakry had pretty much disintegrated into chaos and there was gunfire day and night. On my final day of escape from the country, I remember sprinting across the tarmac as people urged me to get to the plane that would take me into Senegal. When I got onto the plane, it was an Air Force cargo jet, not meant for passengers, so I had to sit
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