There are a number of great hand drummers out there, but Arturo Stable is different – he’s a great musician who plays hand drums. And while the signature rhythms of his native Cuba provide a starting point for the 33-year-old conguero, the depth of his talent has long ago played over those bar lines.

Don’t get us wrong: Stable loves the beats of son, guajira, and rumba – the music he grew up on – but when you’ve been away from your native country for 12 years, the pull of other cultures can begin to reroute your course. After studying in Boston, doing session work in New York, and relentlessly touring the world, Stable and the younger generation of hand drummers are more global in their musical outlook than the veteranos of the scene. “There’s already been so much music recorded with the timbal and the tumbao and whatever, that for me it’s not there any more,” he says while navigating his SUV through the Philadelphia suburb of Wynnewood. “I try to explore different ways to incorporate those folkloric elements, which I grew up with, and played for many years, and put them into my personal vision somehow.”

A Moment In Time

Stable’s congas are central on his brand-new release, Call. But more importantly, the album bears witness to the man’s gifts as a composer. “Some great percussionists, they only have the percussion training, not necessarily writing, composing, or arranging. Sometimes they get so locked into only the rhythmic ideas they forget where the music is going melodically, dynamically – the tension. As a consequence they don’t interact the same way with the band as everyone else. In my case, that’s something I’m very, very aware of.”

Whereas 2004 debut 3rd Step was an angst-y bit of modern Latin jazz, Stable recalls his first bandleader record as “somewhat standard.” He went all high-concept with 2007’s Notes On Canvas, a collection of dense, probing excursions, each track the aural equivalent of Stable’s favorite paintings by Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Kandinsky, and even his father. Call might be the golden mean between the first two albums, if not the most accessible underground hand-drum record of the year. Having written, arranged, and produced all the music, Stable relies on saxophonist Javier Vercher and pianist Aruan Ortiz as the conduits of his primary musical ideas. Both men are buffered by bassist Edward Perez’s liquid low end and the bronze drizzlings of trap drummer Francisco Mela, the latter a perfect foil for Stable’s mercurial handwork.

Except for an overdub in the final track, Call is a completely live recording. Given the album’s tonal subtleties and layered intricacy, he had to have been supremely confident about getting it right. “Lately with the whole technology thing, people take too long to record and they do a lot of overdubbing,” he says. “I’m not against it, but when you listen to those old Miles recordings from the ’50s and ’60s, those guys just went to the studio for a few hours and did it. I have played with these guys for years,” he says, contrasting the Call process withNotes On Canvas’ 17 carefully vetted musicians, “and we went into the studio and, boom!” Whatever got lost in recording perfection is more than made up for in spontaneity. “You gain a lot from that.”

Despite Stable’s worries of being just a Latin artist, half of Call’s tracks are written in clave. “Goodbye To Eternity” is the percussive money shot, a clave in 17/8 that’s tweaked in such a way that he ended up with a new cascara pattern. From that rhythmic foundation he was able to write the bass line, harmony, and so on. “I love the work of Ornette Coleman, and so I tried to use some of the conceptual work that he did, like having a driving rhythm section with a large melody that smoothes out the complexity of the rhythm, rather than having a melody that’s really strong as well, [which is when] everything becomes too strong.”

Whether holding back or charging full bore, hand techniques abound on Call. On “Old Memories” the resounding thud on the 1 almost makes it seems like he’s playing a standard drum set kick. The inspiration came from some vintage vinyl he was checking out two or three years ago. “I was like, ’Wow, my conga playing sounds so neat [in comparison],’” he says. “How did these guys sound like that? Maybe for lack of technique or lack of practice they sounded a little dirty, but I liked it. So I started experimenting with that and realized it was how much of your hand you put into the instrument.”

Then there are the drum roll—level speeds he achieves on “Danz Sol,” a series of staccato flurries remarkable for their delicacy, a neat trick considering most guys get louder the faster they play. “Eventually you get to a slap that is tough to give a soft dynamic. It’s more for playing fortissimo, but the movement between that open tone and that slap is a slight change in your fingers. So that allows you to play [mouths a machine gun—likebrrrrrrrrrrrrr]. That’s almost impossible to do with the traditional slap.”

For all the percussive pyrotechnics, Call’s melodies are the biggest selling point. The title track – bringing to mind afternoon coffee in bed as rain drums against the windows – has one of those hooks that will have to be surgically removed from your brain. Final track “Anthem” is the most bugged-out in terms of tension, layers, and overall busyness. Its Middle Eastern vibe directly channels flamenco’s gypsy influence, a subject on which Stable discourses like a PhD in ethnomusicology. “The instrument actually changed: Flamenco cajon sounds different from Peruvian cajon today. It wasn’t like that 20 or 30 years ago.”

When asked to name the track that most challenged him, Stable is baffled. Other people’s visions require interpretation, reading, and so on, he reasons, but all the musical ideas on Call are his, and thus poured out of him as naturally as exhaling. Suddenly worried he sounded arrogant, he admits “Goodbye To Eternity” kept him on his toes. “That track was pretty physical because the pattern is really long, it’s really fast, and I have a solo, so I’ll say that is the toughest, rhythmically speaking.”

Drumming In The Streets

Stable grew up in Santiago de Cuba, and then Havana, where the embargo of inexpensive Western electronics did not prevent a rich and vibrant local music from echoing in the streets. “Not many people had radios,” he says. “Everything is really hands on. Every weekend there will be something going on in the streets, in the neighborhood. People playing congas, ritual stuff. You meet people, hang out. Everything is more … direct in Cuba. Or it was back then.”

As cultured and highly educated people, Stable’s parents encouraged his development early on. He originally attended school for piano around age seven but was considered too young at the strict “Soviet-style” conservatory in Havana. To bide his time, he opted for percussion until he was old enough to take piano. But he fell in love with the congas, and that changed everything.

From then on he soaked up all things hand drums, jamming at friends’ places and at informal gatherings around Havana through his teenage years. When he was 20, he made his way to Mexico where he taught at the Benemérita Universidad Autónmo de Puebla near Mexico City. He then pursued an advanced degree atPuebla State Development University, before heading to Berklee on a full scholarship. After graduating with a degree in composition, he moved to New York where he found like-minded musicians, big-city excitement, and best of all, session work with big names such as Paquito D’ Rivera, Giovanni Hidalgo, and Victor Mendoza. “I love New York, but it’s absolutely crazy.”

Can’t Stand It

For Stable, technique begins before the first slap. To sit or to stand? It’s not even a question for Stable, who plays seated just like the guys he idolized growing up, such as Mongo Santamaría, Ray Barretto, and Giovanni Hidalgo. “I don’t like playing standing up,” he says. “You cannot hit the congas the same way. If you go to see pop stars, yeah, the percussionist will be standing because you want them to dance and move and interact in a graphic way for the viewer. But when playing jazz you want your ground solid.”

Taste For Academia

Call isn’t the kind of album one easily tours behind, but Stable has already done a brief U.S. jaunt with a slimmed-down version of the band, hit the road with vibraphonist Dave Samuels in the newly formed Triastic Project, and most recently, a European tour with Vercher, the horn player on Call. “He loves percussion, he’s a very rhythmic player. Sometimes he puts together projects that involve two percussionists and a drummer, which is a lot of fun if that doesn’t become the OK Corral.” [laughs]

For a guy who makes most of his money touring, it’s surprising how much passion Stable has for drum instruction. What for most musicians is a way to pay bills has become a crusade for him. At the University Of The Arts in Philadelphia, where he is a full-time music professor, Stable is creating a hand-percussion major from scratch, covering everything from charting out beats to real-world networking. He hopes to have it launched a year from now. “I’ve been doing research on it. There’s great hand percussion teachers in several universities teaching what they know, but not a program to teach you all that you need to know to go out and make a living at it afterwards. There’s no such thing. So that’s the kind of thing I want to get involved in.”

Some of his experiences in academia shaped this objective. Back at Berklee, Stable saw students with tons of talent but no focus. “The most important thing at a school is what you’re going for and what you’re trying to get out of it, because if not you can get lost in paperwork,” he says. “Berklee has people like Danilo Perez and Joe Lovano. There’s so many great musicians teaching there, but you don’t see them there every day, and unless you really know who they are and what you want to learn from them, you don’t see them.”

Setting up a hand-drum-only curriculum is novel for Stable, but the bad habits of beginning students are something he’s very familiar with. “Going for the fancy stuff over the traditional will be the first mistake. People will see a player that they admire play something really fast, really cool, and try to imitate that instead of learning everything that that player has learned for years before they got to create whatever fancy move they did the first time.”

Forget about getting kids to practice – today’s players risk being instilled with poor instruction before they even get near a drum. Stable has experienced this situation firsthand. “Yesterday I was watching a video – and I won’t name names because I want everyone to have a happy career – but it was from a very successful percussionist and it was so [pointless]. This guy’s name appears in hundreds of recordings, his work as part of those bands came out very nice and you appreciate what he’s doing, but when you see him by himself, teaching, giving a clinic, you’re like, ’Give me a break. How can you dare to do that?’”

It’s About Music

With the heady, avant material he records, you would think Stable would no longer deign to be a mere sideman. “No, not at all,” he protests. “Even when I play jazz I’m an accompanist. It’s a very enjoyable part of the craft. And it’s not easy to be a good accompanist, especially if you have skill. Actually, that’s one of the best compliments I have ever gotten from my playing. Not, ’Oh, you played this’ or ’You played that’ but ’Man, it’s great to play with you because you support what I’m doing.’”