A group of more than 30 drummers who play in Minnesota bands got together on Friday to raise awareness for COPAL, a local organization helping immigrant families. They chose an audacious place for this jam: the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis.

Performance organizer Noah Levy — who has toured the world playing drums with the Honeydogs, Brian Setzer, Golden Smog, BoDeans, Soul Asylum, and many others — was inspired by a drummer he saw in downtown Minneapolis playing a full drum set in the early days of the ICE Metro Surge in the Twin Cities.

For detailed coverage of ICE in Minnesota, visit MPR News’ website.

“Maybe [he was] in front of one of the hotels to try to wake everybody up,” Levy says. “It looked so powerful to me. I thought, ‘Wow, that's commitment.’ Drum sets are not easy to move. As things were getting worse in time, all of us musicians just felt powerless and like we had to do something.”

About two hours before a crowd of thousands marched through downtown Minneapolis on Friday afternoon, Levy gathered with a bunch of drummer friends on one of the central features of downtown Minneapolis, the pedestrian-friendly Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi River. They brought a camera crew to document the performance and edit together a final product to share.

“I'd spent days just fretting about, like, ‘Oh, what if we bring all these people here, and then we can't play’,” Levy says. “So we did it, and it really only lasted about five minutes. The setup lasted way longer. And then we were done.”

The two iconic drum parts the group played were “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin and “Machine Gun” by Jimi Hendrix. Portions of both songs end up in the edited clip.

In a Facebook post, Levy identifies the “beautiful souls” joining him: Billy Thömmes, Jordan Hedlund, Greg Schutte, Patrick Nelson, Al Church, Tom Scott, Ken Chastain, Reed Grimm, Hallie Bowman, Marc Retish, Mark O’Day, Steve Gorman, John Christensen, Richard Medek, Bobby Vandell, Josh Kaplan, Josh Alfaro, Jeremy Harvey, David Jarnstrom, Morris Engel, Aaron Gillespie, Keely Lane, Adam Quick, and Lane Pedersen. And there were a few more.

“I guarantee that was the coldest gig any of us has played,” he writes.

“Everybody was all smiles,” Levy says. “Even though we're going through this horrible time, everybody just feels this horrible pit in their stomach. For a moment, we felt like we could laugh and be with each other, make some noise, and just scream into the void.”

External Link

COPAL website: copalmn.org