The United States doesn’t have a frame drum tradition of its own origin the way most pages on this site do — but it’s been the unlikely epicenter of the modern frame drum’s reinvention as a solo concert instrument. American percussionist Glen Velez, already featured on this site’s home page playing the tar, is widely credited with sparking a worldwide resurgence of frame drum playing in the 1970s and ’80s, drawing together techniques from Middle Eastern, North African, and South Indian traditions into a unified vocabulary that didn’t exist in any single source tradition. His influence was significant enough that Remo, the drum manufacturer, developed an entire signature line — the Glen Velez Tambourine — in 1983.