David is a multi-faceted percussionist, musician, educator, recording artist, performer, sound accompanist, composer, arranger, and enthusiastic rhythmist. He is the founder of and main teacher for the Embodying Rhythm School of Percussive Arts in Hotchkiss, Colorado, which offers many different types of musical and educational opportunities and performance adventures for students and the community, including private lessons, group classes, and hands-on workshops, as well as musical outreach programs for schools.
Full Bio^
David Alderdice is a multi-instrumentalist, educator, recording artist, performer, arranger, composer, musical coach, and enthusiastic rhythmist who started playing music at age 5. Besides being a father, musician, and educator, David is the founder and lead teacher for the Embodying Rhythm School of Percussive Arts based in Hotchkiss Colorado.
He has been playing and performing music professionally for 20 years and has been an active and passionate music educator since 2004, providing private lessons, group classes, and workshops to the public. David has been offering hands-on percussion workshops and musical coaching in schools, community centers, and libraries as well as his own teaching studio for the past 10 years. David and his wife, Arlyn Alderdice, are the founders and directors of the Embodying Rhythm Marimba Project which brings hands-on learning opportunities, in-school assemblies, in-school residencies, performances, summer camps, and lots of musical fun to people of all ages in the North Fork Valley and beyond. With support from The Learning Council, David and his musical colleague, Jeannette Carey, founded and co-direct the multi award-winning North Fork Valley Community and Parade Band in 2015 and now have around 40 rotating members with an age range from 10 to 70.
David is a regular volunteer in many of the music departments in the Delta County Public School system. He has taught music at both the local Montessori and Waldorf schools, and is currently a certified music educator for the Vision Charter Academy. David has been a drummer and guest musical director for the international in-school dance residency program Celebrate the Beat since 2008 and has worked in the Dance Department at Mesa University.
David gives inspirational talks on living a musical life and delivered a TEDx Talk entitled “Rhythm and Shifting our Perceptions” in February of 2016. David is also the artistic director of the World Music Concert Series at the Blue Sage Center for the Arts in Paonia, Colorado. David has had the honor of studying privately with many great teachers including Ed Soph, Glen Velez, Layne Redmond, and Jon Seligman.
Extended Bio^
David is incredibly in love with the process of delving deeper into conscious relationship with sound and silence. The relationship of how they interact and communicate and dance through motion and stillness within the infinite vastness of space and time has fascinated David ever since he can remember. He is a rhythmist. He enjoys learning, internalizing, exploring, sharing, playing, and experimenting with different rhythms and sensibilities from different cultures and traditions from around the world and applying them to his passion and study of the drumset, percussion, frame drums, marimbas, vocalizations, body percussion, ethno-musicology, groovability, visual arts, nature, silence, and the music itself.
David was born in New Orleans and this human journey has also had him living on both coasts of North America, on the plains in Middle America, and in the Shenandoah Valley before bringing him to be living more and more sustainably in the North Fork Valley (near Paonia and Hotchkiss), on the western slope of the Colorado Rocky Mountains in 2003.
After taking summer music classes at the University of North Texas when he was seventeen, David decided that he didn’t want the bureaucracy and competition or the debt of a major music school, so he went to Montgomery Collage (a community college in Maryland) taking some music and anthropology classes, but mainly taking art classes. By putting a lot of his focus on applying all of the artistic universal concepts, aesthetics, and mysticisms of the different art mediums he was studying in school into the different musical projects he was involved in – he seemed able to meet Music on its own terns, in its own creative realm. Ever since then, he has been learning as much as possible by attending private lessons, workshops, and classes while putting himself through a self-applied musical study of different rhythms and sensibilities from around the world and the uses and applications of intermingling sound and silence into sonic soundscapes and infectious grooves.
Recently David has become a proud papa and has been enjoying all the life lessons inherent in having such an amazing being for a son. He has also been learning and sharing tunes on the marimba, playing different frame drums (especially the lap style frame drum and the Brazilian pandeiro), “reciting” solkattu (south Indian rhythmic vocalization patterns), playing with shakers, practicing the drumset, and sharing different ideas, concepts, and feelings on rhythm and drumming through workshops, lessons, and classes. David also enjoys spending time in the back-country of Colorado’s mountains; gardening, planting trees, learning about permaculture, and always striving to be present with whatever arises.
Influences^
David tries to find teachers wherever he goes. “Just as the whole world is a drum, everyone is my teacher” he says. He has had the pleasure of studying privately with some really great teachers as well as attending many informative clinics and workshops to learn the following instruments and musical sensibilities …
Drumset:
Frances Thompson* (stick control /rhythm theory /four-limb coordination), Jon Seligman* (rhythm theory /world rhythms), Ed Soph* (jazz sensibilities /limb interdependence), Robert Jospe* (Cuban, Brazilian, and Caribbean styles), Steve Lawrence* (latin / jazz), Gary Chaffee (linear concepts), Billy Cobham (modern and progressive styles), Dom Famularo (general drumming concepts), Steve Houghton (jazz and pop), Adam Dietch (funk), Zoro (R&B), Larry Bright (double bass drumming), Will Rapp (snaredrum / drumline).
Hand Drums:
Jon Seligman* (frame drums), Glen Velez* (frame drums /solkattu /overtone singing), Layne Redmond* (tambourines /frame drums), Pejaman Hadidi* (Iranian tombek and daff), N. Scott Robinson* (frame drums), John Bell* (North Indian tabla), Marla Leigh* (tabla), Andy Skellenger* (tabla), Faisal Zedan* (riq /Persian sensibilities), David Kuchermann (frame drum), Miranda Rondeau (melodic voice w/ frame drum), Bruno Spagna (Italian tamburello), Abbos Kosimov (Uzbekistani doyra), Clarice Castilho (Brazilian pandeiro), Brad Dutz (Brazilian pandeiro), Pejman Hadidi (Persian daff), Naghmeh Farahmand (Iranian daff and tombek), Randy Gloss (South Indian kanjira), Thomas Zirkle (riq)
* These are teachers that David has taken private lessons with throughout the years.
Marimba and Music Theory:
Musekiwa Chingodza (marimba / mbira / hosho / Zimbabwean sensibilities), Peter Swing (African marimba ensemble), Dennis Gordan (piano), Lori Cotler (solkattu), Beth Quist (Indian raga / vocals), Ward Harris, Mark Cook, Jesse Memman, and Brain Cardany (jazz sensibilities), Lenny White and Buster Williams (jazz rhythm section), Barry Mitterhoff (mandolin), Bill Hollin (orchestral and symphonic sensibilities / classical guitar)
Other Rhythm and Embodiment:
Kenny Werner (Effortless Mastery), Ward Harris (love of life through jazz music /deep listening), Joanne Hammil and Sue Rubato (teaching music to children), Randy Sabian (Improvisation), Koto drummers (Japanese tiako drumming), Mel Allard (tap dancing), Vickie Dodd (sacred sound as a body work), Dimebag Darrell (rockstar guitar), Amy Williams* (aruvedic yoga), Adyashanti (satsang), as well as others.
Active listening, internal searching, present awareness, music, silence, noise, nature, animals, friends, mountains, and wilderness are also some of David’s great teachers.