Curly: How The Grain Speaks

Just by looking at wood, we can read its story.

I don’t just mean the classic idea of counting a tree’s age by its rings — I mean something deeper: we can sense its life, its traumas, its evolution, its wounds, its struggles. We can see how it grew, how it was nourished, where it lived…and even how it continues to live on after its death.

Trees are extraordinary beings. They hide nothing.

Working with their wood to craft instruments has taught me more about myself than any book or word ever could. It’s helped me understand my own processes, my breaks and lessons, from the deepest part of me.

Many species carry stories of migration.

Maple, for instance, originated in Asia and crossed into North America as Laurasia drifted apart. Mahogany has its roots in Africa and traveled to South America with the breakup of Pangaea. And just like them, most of us carry in our blood the story of an ancestor who once migrated — who left behind the known, or was simply born a nomad.

Migration is a dance between joy and loss.

It’s the promise of new adventures, but also the weight of goodbyes. It means facing new climates, new soils, that force us to adapt, to twist, to reinvent ourselves in order to keep standing. We bend, we break, we come close to falling — but we learn. And in learning, we transform.

That’s what gives birth to the Curly figure in wood: those waves, those ripples, are beautiful scars that reveal a story of resilience, adaptation, and survival.

When we make these instruments sing, when we let them speak, we are simply bringing these beings back to life. We give them a voice — and in that voice, they lift us, inspire us, and invite us to build new bridges through music.

That’s why this little series is called “Curly” — because it is a story of transformation, of migration, of memory…

a story that is also my own.

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Ricardo Parra

If you're interested in the drums from this series, please see them here. Or, contact me to discuss how we can create a Curly drum just for you.