Bang the Drums Softly

By DAVID COLMAN
Published: February 3, 2008
MODELS do not as a rule make a lot of noise, being paid to suggest secret realms of sensuality without making a sound. As for making a joyful (or other) sound unto the heavens, well, isn’t that what all those rock-star husbands are for?

The supermannequin Shalom Harlow got into the noiseless-poise racket early — via ballet lessons. But fate, in the form of vertically persistent DNA, doomed her dreams of joining the tutu corps.

“I was always getting kicked out of ballet class anyway,” said Ms. Harlow, the prettiest face (and one of the more sincere voices) at the Earth Pledge show of sustainable-yet-avant-garde fashion last week. “You know, for whispering to a friend or having a giggle fit. In the face of authority, my rebellious nature always comes out.”

So imagine her fiendish delight upon discovering there was a special kind of shoe designed to raise a ruckus. “When I first saw tap dancing,” she said, her blue eyes gleaming, “I immediately got it: the righteousness of being able to make so much noise with your feet!”

But though dancing and music consumed her teenage energies, it was not long before holding still (i.e., modeling) would beckon. And she got her musical kicks, or tried to, by picking up the guitar in her early 20s.

“Who doesn’t try learning the guitar when you’re that age?” she asked. “So I was schlepping this thing halfway around the world to shoots — and at the time I lived in a sixth-floor walk-up in Paris — and all I knew how to play was Deep Purple and ‘Smoke on the Water.’ ”

More than 10 years after giving the guitar the heave-ho, Ms. Harlow finally picked up another instrument: a pair of drumsticks. And almost instantly, the eureka moment she had had with tap shoes struck again.

“I love the percussion,” she said of the sticks and shoes. And like dancing, drumming feels more like an intensely physical exercise in coordination than does the guitar or piano. “It’s a right brain, left brain thing,” she said. “There are different beats, but cooperating together. It’s your whole body doing it, you’re doing the snare drum and the high top with your hands and the bass drum with your foot. You’re this whole motion machine.”

The result is mesmerizing yet energizing at the same time. “It puts you in this really interesting space,” she said. “It’s really meditative, and you get to make a truckload of noise.”

It’s a nice change from old-fashioned meditation, which she has tried, and respects, but ... “This isn’t so complacent that it gets boring. You can sit in lotus and wait for divine enlightenment for years.”

Zen Buddhists might even take comfort in the drumming practice Ms. Harlow has engineered, something like a koan made flesh. She is shopping for a drum kit of her own, but there’s no hurry. She prefers something portable enough to travel to shoots with and does not want to annoy her neighbors in Brooklyn Heights.

So Ms. Harlow owns, and plays with, a pair of hickory Good Wood drumsticks. No drums. Instead, she arranges bed or throw pillows in drum-kit style, pops in one of her learn-to-drum DVDs, and goes to town like her drum-solo hero, John Bonham from Led Zeppelin — minus the noise.

“Maybe it’s not as gratifying,” she said, “but I love it for the sake of the practice.”

And for the absurdity of it all. She gets to engage, and disengage, all at the same time.

“Having fun is the most basic elements of life, and this is totally fun being all silly. It’s ridiculous — I’m playing the drums on pillows.”

And as you will be reminded in the new ads for Tiffany & Company, Ms. Harlow can always hold still quite nicely later.

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