When indie pop duo Tegan and Sara made their debut The Colbert Show appearance in September, they turned to Sarah Thawer to hold down the beat. Wearing neon-accented leopard print and backed by flashing lights and geometric shapes, Thawer nearly stole the show from the award-winning Canadian duo.
Thawer has become a go-to percussionist backing for artists, including a recent performance with Jon Batiste at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert. Her fusion drumming style has been garnering increased acclaim, as she can shift seamlessly from American rock to traditional Indian music. In October, SA Drummer magazine featured Thawer as their cover story under the headline “The Drum Guru.”
Sarah Thawer’s Music Legacy
With a musician father, Thawer grew up surrounded by music. The Thawer family had instruments all over the house and regularly hosted jam sessions. Her father would entertain Sarah and her twin sister “by jamming to different songs for hours.”
Indian music was Thawer’s first love. “It is so heavy with drums and percussion,” she explains. “I was just very drawn to it, and didn’t understand why, because I never grew up with a drum teacher or drum books.”
Nevertheless, drum music spoke to Thawer.
“I can’t remember a day in my life without music,” she adds. “It wasn’t something I got interested in, it was always a part of me.” Once she reached university, Thawer embraced a wider range of genres. There, she approached the formal study of drum playing. However, she continued to incorporate her self-taught techniques and influences wherever possible.
Developing Her Signature Fusion Style
Thawer went on to study jazz and world music as an Oscar Peterson scholar at York University. Since percussion was an early passion for Thawer, she played extensively before receiving any formal training. This ended up giving her an advantage when developing her signature style.
“When I started studying drum kit formally in university I re-learned what I ‘learned’ as a kid and was able to put it in technical terms and fuse that world and apply it in on the kit with the proper techniques,” Thawer explains.
For Thawer, various styles offer distinct modes of expression. “Playing different styles of music helps to think differently,” she says. She likens style to language, and describes fluency in technique as fluency “in the vocabulary of that genre, a.k.a. language.”
Next Steps for Sarah Thawer
Beyond The Colbert Show and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, Thawer has been busy. She has given many performances, each catalogued on her active Instagram feed. In November, she gave a clinic/performance at PASIC called “Exploring Indian Rhythms on the Drum Set.”
Thawer says that in the clinic she “take[s] a slightly different approach to Indian rhythms.” Instead, her approach emphasizes the globalism of music as she discusses the Cuban mambo, James Brown grooves in Funk, and how the “groove, feel and pattern” of these styles relates to more traditional Indian music.
Further examples of Thawer’s range of styles include a jam with Indian Gujarati singer Osman Mir and a lesson in Indian rhythms. For more clips of her jams, check out Thawer’s YouTube channel.
