Drummer

Mrs. Ruth O. Drummer Mrs. Drummer is at the Robert E. Dailey & Son Funeral Homes, P.A., 1201 North Market Street, Frederick. There will be no calling or visiting at the funeral home. A memorial service will be held 11 A.M. Thursday, October 29 at the funeral home. Inurnment will be private and at the convenience of the family. The family requests that memorials be made in memory of Mrs. Drummer to Buckingham's Choice Residence Assistance Fund, 3200 Baker Circle, Adamstown, MD 21710. Online condolences may be made at www.daileyfuneralhomes.

Ralph Otis Fisher, a versatile drummer who performed at jazz clubs and did studio work with 1970s pop artists, died of cancer Saturday at his Randallstown home. He was 61. Over the past five decades, he played rhythm and blues, jazz and gospel at numerous clubs and private parties and was one of Baltimore's best-known drummers. "He had the right timing. He had the right touch. He had the right feel," said singer Ethel Ennis. "Speaking as a vocalist, he was a take-care-of-you drummer." Born and raised in Frederick, he first showed an interest in percussion when, as a child, he would hammer out musical rhythms on his family's kitchen chairs.

After the original drummer was found dead in the ocean, the music didn't change much. The members of the indie rock band Ra Ra Riot were just about to record their debut album when John Pike went missing in the early morning of June 2, 2007, at Wilbur's Point in Fairhaven, Mass. His body was discovered the next day in nearby Buzzards Bay. The tragedy nearly overwhelmed the six-piece band, which had formed barely a year before Pike died. But still, the group entered the studio. The Rhumb Line, the resulting album, balances the sadness hovering over the sessions with a sometimes-twee outlook on love and life.

The Rocker sees itself as two things: a testimony to the liberating power of rock and a showcase for the comedic talents of Rainn Wilson. Too bad it shortchanges the music and fails to provide much evidence for Wilson's appeal. It's a film that sometimes wants to be School of Rock, sometimes wants to be This Is Spinal Tap, but ends up more like an uninspired episode of The Partridge Family. Wilson stars as Robert "Fish" Fishman, the Pete Best of heavy metal. Like Best, who can lay claim to being the unluckiest drummer in history by virtue of having been fired from The Beatles about a year before they hit the big time, Fish is doomed to be little more than a footnote to rock history.

Richard E. Humphrey, a self-taught drummer and showman who anchored several Baltimore bands, died Thursday of complications from a heart attack at Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air. The Bel Air resident was 82. Born in Baltimore in 1925, Mr. Humphrey later attended high school in Elizabeth, N.J., where he taught himself to play the drums and formed his own band. He learned by watching his favorite drummer, Gene Krupa, who played with Benny Goodman during the big-band era. He made further use of his musical skills after enlisting in the Navy in 1943.

Flowering crab apples are in full purple bloom on both sides of our house. It feels as if we're a ballroom and soon a crowd of teenagers in strapless gowns and white tuxes will come and stand around as they do at proms, girls with girls and boys with boys, being elaborately cool and hoping somebody notices. I saw a prom crowd last Saturday night, all of them looking good except one boy in a tux who had decided to wear a white, long-billed cap, evidently to set himself apart as an independent thinker.

Music - buying it, making it, spinning it for others - consumes so much of Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson's life these days that sleep is a rare luxury. But he wouldn't have it any other way. When the Philadelphia-based drummer isn't in the studio or on the road with his band, the Roots, playing more than 200 dates a year, he's beating the skins for other acts (Jay-Z, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, Jaguar Wright, Christina Aguilera, the list flows on). And when he isn't keeping time on the drums, he's accelerating or suspending it as a DJ on the turntables.

If you'd consider it foolhardy to invest in a Florida real estate company this year, you're not a contrarian investor. Contrarians buy sandals in winter, snowshoes in summer and openly scoff at all the "index huggers." They saw the Internet bubble for what it was and refuse to chase anything on a Wall Street buy list. While value investors seek promising stocks selling at low prices, true contrarians are students of psychology who move in an opposite direction from either market optimism or pessimism.

For trance-fusion jammers the Disco Biscuits, the past six months were loaded with loss and gain. Original drummer Sam Altman played his last gig in August, before leaving to pursue a career in medicine. Soon after, the three remaining band members auditioned and hired a new drummer, settled into a new studio and released a live, two-disc album. They are past the tumult - re-energized and back on the summer touring circuit. They will headline this year's Starscape Music and Arts Festival in Fort Armistead Park on Saturday.

Halfway through a set at Simon's of Butchers Hill, the drummer of the David Wells Trio was onstage tapping and grinning with his mouth shut. Anyone sitting in the upstairs dining room with him could read his mind: "Man, this is some smooooth jazz." And if owner Eugene Jones can lock down a consistently solid lineup four nights a week, Simon's upstairs room will be a routine stop for local jazz lovers. Jones is pretty close right now but still has a kink or two to work out. Jones, formerly the manager of Fat Lulu's, opened the upstairs in November.