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In Dogole's hands, it makes a soft pattering sound that is melodic, bell-like and rhythmic all at once. If he gets it back in time from the Swiss shop where he sent it to be tuned, he'll play it Aug. 31 when Hemispheres performs at 142 Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. In most jazz groups, the drummer is the guy in the back who gets a solo now and then so that the audience can take a bathroom break or talk among themselves. I've seen and heard Dogole play a number of times now, and I can tell you that it has always been a highly entertaining experience. The guy totally gets into it. "People always say that I look like I'm in a state of ecstasy," he says. "When I get a chance to go out and play, especially with this group, I'm going to play with as much energy as I can. These are exquisite moments when we get to do this and share it with an audience. I feel like I'm riding on a magic carpet." With his glasses and light beard, the thin, angular 51-year-old looks like an ethnic studies professor cum jazz hipster, an image that just happens to fit his unusual background of intellect and improvisation.
Growing up in Philadelphia, young Ian began piano lessons at 4, switching to guitar three years later. He was a student at an all-male East Coast prep school when he heard the Miles Davis masterpiece "Bitches Brew," transforming him into a teenage jazz fiend.
"When 'Bitches Brew' came out, my universe went upside down," he remembers. "Miles Davis changed my life. While most of my peers were listening to the Grateful Dead, I had 150 Miles Davis records and 150 John Coltrane records by the time I was a senior in high school. I was listening to avant-garde jazz musicians like Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor. I was way off the deep end."
At the same time, one of his high school teachers introduced him to Indian and Chinese classical music, an interest he carried with him to Brown University, where he majored in the classics and ethnomusicology.
"I was playing in a Balinese gamelan and I was learning Ghanian drumming and I was studying Japanese koto," he recalls. "I was gaining exposure to music from the whole planet while still being obsessed with jazz."
While finishing his master's degree in the classics at Villanova University, he shifted his focus from guitar to percussion after sitting in on conga drums with jazz saxophonist Richie Cole once a week at a club in New Jersey .
"While I didn't have a clue what I was doing, the audiences were responding to me," he laughs. "I had more energy than technique. But I started getting a sense that I could go somewhere with percussion."
In 1978, Dogole came out west to Palo Alto for further graduate work in archeology and ancient Greek at Stanford University, but left Stanford after a year to form his first band.
"It became apparent to me that, as much as I loved academia, the musical urge was starting to dominate," he says. "I felt I had all this music in me that I had to express. As I was expanding the number of instruments I had, I was crystallizing my vision of bringing jazz and world music together. I'd use an African talking drum to play a melody by Thelonious Monk. I named my approach to this music 25 years ago as global fusion."
In 1987, while living on the Peninsula, he visited a friend in Mill Valley and fell madly in love with Marin.
"I was smitten with the place," he remembers. "It felt like the Hobbits were living here. I moved to Mill Valley and I have been addicted to this place ever since."
For nine years, Dogole was a member of the well-known world music group Ancient Future. And for the past decade and a half, he has presented school educational programs, called "Adventures in Global Fusion Music," with bassist Bill Douglass, a member of Hemispheres. He is an active volunteer performer for Marin-based Bread & Roses.
In his career, Dogole has recorded and performed with the likes of Alex de Grassi, Steven Halpern, Maye Cavallaro, Mimi Fox and Hamza El Din, among other notables.
Three years ago, Hemispheres played for the first time at the 142 Throckmorton Theatre. In addition to Dogole and Douglass, the band features woodwind player Sheldon Brown and the Grammy-nominated reed virtuoso Paul McCandless, a founding member of the pioneering New Age jazz group Oregon. Pianist Frank Martin often joins the group on stage.
On "Convergence," the band explores traditional pieces from Turkey and Brazil alongside original compositions that pay homage to John Coltrane and the legendary jazz drummer Billy Higgins.
"Taking the fusion of music cultures from all over the planet and superimposing them over a jazz foundation has been a thread that has always followed me," he says. "Hemispheres is the ultimate vehicle in which I get to express these things that I've been working on all these years."
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