Mark D’Antonio is a professional Conga player currently who has recently relocated to Southern California after residing on the island of Maui, Hawaii for 18 years. Following a musical tour of Lahaina with his band at the time, Sunset Red, Mark decided to stay and create a free sports, music and entertainment newspaper. He has been a ‘student of the drum’ since age 9, studying drum kit with a host of talented instructors and mentors. A musical epiphany at age 15 (mesmerized by Armando Peraza’s brilliant conga playing) ignited the proverbial “light bulb” over his head and he switched from studying drum kit to Conga drums (tumbadoras) and all things Afro-Carribean, with a focus on Cuba. The rich abundance of West African drumming and dance (brought by slaves to the Caribbean), fused with the instrumentation, song forms and melodic richness of the Spanish colonists resulted in a cultural phenomenon that has yielded more musical wealth than most countries ten times Cuba’s size. The mixing of an established African polyrhythmic, call-and-response musical foundation introduced musical concepts that we take for granted in popular music these days, but were vastly different than the classical linear musical structures found throughout Europe. Personally, these complex Afro-Cuban fusions made prefect sense at a very rudimentary level. There was no doubt where his hunger for more musical knowledge and expression would lead. It was not easy however, to find the tools and the teachers. Seeking out Afro-Cuban instructors and “keepers of the flame” at a time when there were practically no instructional books, videos, DVDs, or workshops to gather the knowledge from was a unique challenge. The music, and especially the drumming, was an oral tradition, and one that you had to prove your sincerity to learn and to humble yourself before the drum and your drum teachers. He can remember the joy of locating a difficult or obscure drum pattern, painstakingly transcribed by hand, or locating a recording of one of the greats like Mongo Santamaria playing “Afro Blue” clear enough to pick out all the subtle parts or best yet, seeing a Santana concert with the percussion team of Orestes Vilato, Raul Rekow and Armando Peraza having a “percussion discussion” that sent chills down your spine. Most rewarding was that feeling when a difficult pattern would “stick” and be committed to muscle memory; when the patterns of notes evolved from mechanical repetition to musical expression.