For Emma Garau, playing drums brings out personal truth
February 26, 2025
Choosing an instrument to play in the fifth grade was not a hard choice for Emma Garau. But there was one small problem. The drum set in the corner of the classroom was reserved for students with previous experience. Garau had none, so she spent most of her time messing around on the guitar and bass while staring eagerly at the drums.
Garau eventually fibbed to her teacher so she could pick up the drumsticks. “It was very obvious that was a lie,” she says, “but my teacher was awesome [saying] ‘I think this kid really needs to pursue this.’”
And she did. Today, Garau has a career in Minneapolis as a performing experimental punk and jazz artist, composer, collaborator, teacher, and mentor. Best of all, she can play drums all day long.
The BCE Trio, one of Garau’s many projects, will take the stage at Berlin in Minneapolis on Monday, March 3. The set will showcase her unique free jazz and improv style alongside bassist Chris Bates and pianist Bryan Nichols. With all performances, Garau hopes to push musical boundaries to make listeners think about drums differently.
“I want to evoke a comforting emotion in an uncomfortable way,” Garau says.
Growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Garau spent a lot of her childhood talking music history with her dad while picking through his record and CD collections. “I knew music early as something that was more than just [in the] background,” she reflects.
Once Garau got her hands on the classroom drum set, things moved fast. The school year ended with her playing at the fifth-grade graduation. From there, she drummed into middle school and devoted her free time into experimenting with punk rock. Jazz playing was reserved for school.
After proving her determination to play drums, her parents purchased her a set at a pawn shop. The cymbals did not have stands, so Garau used shoelaces to hang them from the ceiling. Inspired by bands like the Clash, Sonic Youth, Black Sabbath, and Dinosaur Jr., Garau started a garage band with some friends. This first punk experience emboldened self-expression and “opened up this semi-melodic noise experimentation side.”
Meanwhile, the music of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor drew Garau to avant-garde free jazz. Between punk and jazz, she began to see where her personal style landed. “I started going left of center everywhere artistically at the same time,” Garau says, “and starting to not divide the genres so much and see it as the same thing on different instrument palettes.”
Around this time, Garau and two friends formed Fortezza, an avant-garage doom-punk band. They recorded two albums, performed, and toured. While she kept playing jazz mostly at school, the punk she played on the road later helped center her future career path.
When it was time to make a college decision, Garau chose the University of North Carolina- Asheville to avoid the competition at more academic-focused music schools. As Fortezza prepared for another tour in 2020, the pandemic forced them to cancel plans. Full-time Zoom classes also added an extra layer of difficulty.
During this time of isolation, Garau also faced a reckoning about herself. Her drums helped her surface an internal identity. “I had this moment [thinking] the further I went down this creative, improvised music, self-expression rabbit hole by trying to say so much on the drums, I was not saying it from a place of being honest with myself and was lying to the drums,” she says.
Coming out as queer changed Garau’s perspective on music and her role as an artist. “It was like one little switch turning denial off that I definitely credit music to,” she says. “I think I became a better drummer that day.”
Garau graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2022, and immediately strategized on how she could play drums as much as possible. During that time, she released her first solo project, Birds Don’t Perch Here, in June 2023. The breadth of the album was an outpouring of her experimental avant-garde jazz style.
With Garau’s sense of self becoming clear, she began to think about leaving the South. She wanted to live in a city that had a better music scene, and in a safer environment to be a queer artist. After coming out, some social and performance doors began to shift or close, and the South started to feel small. “I would find myself pushed out of more spaces,” she remembers, “even when they [would say] ‘We're OK with who you are.’”
During the pandemic Garau took Zoom classes from Minneapolis-based jazz drummer David King of the Bad Plus and Happy Apple. King suggested she give the Twin Cities a shot, providing a lead that inevitably led to her moving to Minnesota in June of 2024.
“I just loved the balance of the down-to-earth Midwesterner plus the art weirdos,” Garau jokes, saying, “It's usually the same person.”
Almost immediately, Garau felt welcomed in the music scene. Within the first week, she met musicians Bryan Nichols and Chris Bates, and they eventually formed the BCE Trio. While she has found a local niche in jazz, the Minneapolis queer punk scene has also struck resonant chords. “It's the angriest nice people you've ever seen, and I really love it,” she says. “I find it inspiring. I'm always looking for ways to boost my level of energy and tenacity, to be simultaneously fierce and steadfast, but also gentle and calm.”
Fortezza eventually split up. However, Garau and former member (and best friend) Tristan Smith stuck together, evolving into the punk duo ¿Watches?. The Midwest punk scene bridges gaps Garau once experienced as a performing artist coming out as queer in the South. There, she felt the weight of a largely masculine-focused community. “I love seeing [punk] in really young music scenes, especially young queer music scenes,” she says. “It's something that comes out beautifully in queer and specifically femme people in aggressive music.
By day, Garau works as an instructor and restores drums at Twin Cities Drum Collective. Teaching students from ages 10 to 62 has given her the opportunity to encourage individual playing styles and build confidence. She hopes to inspire others through drums, art, and music fluidity. “I want to give them a vision of all the capability they have, and say, ‘All you need to do is follow the path,’” she says of her teaching style. “If you don't lie to the drums, the drums won't lie to you. It's okay to let a million small, easy decisions put the big decisions into place.”
With the looming uncertainty for federal funding streams that support the arts, this isn’t the first time politics have affected artists like Garau, and other artists like her. “I've been an ‘angry at the government punk rocker’ since I was 14,” she says. “In a way, it's been me, my friends, or my bands all screaming a lot of the emotion that people are having now to people who haven't been picking up on it for a long time. ‘What do you mean now is the time? It's been the time.’”
BCE Trio (Emma Garau, Chris Bates, and Bryan Nichols) perform at Berlin on Monday, March 3. Tickets
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