Armen Halburian was one of the first drummers to bring ethnic percussion to New York City's studio scene in its golden age of the '60s and '70s. As a member of Herbie Mann's Family Of Mann, Halburian recorded and toured alongside heavyweights Steve Gadd, Tony Levin, David "Fathead" Newman, and Sam Brown. He was an essential ingredient in the jazz flautist's rule-breaking ensemble, which became popular with R&B audiences of the day, and he later gained popularity among modern DJs and funk drummers, who mine his catalog for rare grooves to cop or sample. Halburian has put his exotic stamp on releases that include Larry Young's Laurence Of Newark, Dave Liebman's Lookout Farm, Leonard Cohen's New Skin For The Old Ceremony, and founding Weather Report bassist Miroslav Vitous's Miroslav.

Almost every Thursday night since the summer of 2009, Halburian has traveled from his home on Cupsaw Lake in Ringwood, New Jersey, to the Chapala Grill in Bergenfield to perform with Cactus Salad, a nine-piece Latin jazz band led by traps master Russ "Styles" DiBona. The gig has become Armen's musical and spiritual refueling, as in recent years his activity has slowed due to health problems.

Sharing the stage with Halburian, I'm amazed by how sharp he is and by his timing, fills, and choices of sounds. A custom-made percussion setup reflects his lifelong pursuit of music and invention. (I've been using his Stay-Set multidrum key, which was bought by Ludwig, since the late '60s.) He has a mambo bell mounted on a bass drum pedal, a gong to his right, Chinese cup chimes mounted sideways under a strange crash cymbal, a metal guiro, an oval shekere mounted on a hi-hat pedal, and a timbale right in the center, with a large pile of handheld bells, rattles, and tambourines on the floor.

Halburian seems to know just what to add to move the music forward. A bright moment for me during the set happens when he plays brushes on the timbale, Styles plays a clave and bell pattern, and I play two congas. Armen's wide-eyed, tongue-wagging smile transmits a flood of positivity, affirming that I'm in the right place. Speaking with him one afternoon at his home and recalling how, on a recent gig at Chapala, he picked up the tambourine and the whole sound of the ten-piece band changed at that very moment, I ask how he knows when it's the right time to hit a percussive accent.

"Well, we all can do that," he says, "It just takes concentration and focus. If you're playing and thinking about daily life-what's going on with your family, the war-you're not putting everything in the music that you can, because you're distracted. It's like driving a car: You can be distracted, and that's how accidents happen.

"In the past," Armen continues, "if there were times when I wasn't working a lot, I'd start thinking, Man, I gotta practice more! But you have to know how to be with your life. It's like when someone who has a lot of money loses it all, they freak out and jump out of a building. Musicians jump out of buildings in their minds! 'I can't play...I don't know what I'm doing....' But when they play again, they say, 'Jeez, I played better just now than I did when I was working steady.' That proves that the difference is in the way you look at it. You turn that negative thing into a positive thing. And that's partly about learning how to live with a little bit of happiness-not freaking out over everything. There are many expressions from different cultures that explain it, like 'Don't sweat the little things.'"'

Halburian's fascinating musical journey was sparked by his jazz-loving sister, who would frequent a bar called Junior's on Broadway in Manhattan, where top musicians would congregate between performances at the Strand and Paramount theaters. "My sister took me to these places," Armen says, "and I fell in love with the drums. Then I started taking lessons from a teacher named Sam Ulano. He used to have people like Art Blakey and Max Roach come in and do clinics, and that inspired me even more."

After a stint in the army, punctuated by lessons from Joe Morello during trips home, Halburian took the drum chair in pianist Marian McPartland's band (when Morello vacated it for greener pastures with Dave Brubeck) and began to build his reputation around New York, eventually developing a setup that included a gong and an early invention of his, the bell tree. "I would hang it from my ride cymbal to my crash cymbal," the drummer explains.

"My father, who had escaped from Turkey, played records from the Middle East, so I heard a lot of dumbek playing and tambourine playing," Halburian says of his musical upbringing. "It's part of my soul." Eventually Armen landed a gig with the Hungarian jazz guitar innovator Attila Zoller, with whom he traveled to Germany. It was on this trip that he met well-known musicians like Polish sax player Michael Urbaniak and his wife, singer Urszula Dudziak, and began attracting attention to his own unique musical approach. "I got a write-up in Germany," Halburian recalls, "and it said, 'The percussionist was amazing; he played all these gongs and cymbals and sounded like he was listening to John Cage.'"

Back home, Halburian became a regular on the influential New York City loft scene and built up an impressive (if often uncredited) résumé of pop, world, jazz, and avant-garde releases. Today he remains humble and full of wonder, but he's realistic about the difficulties of a musical life, punctuating his conversations with references to world cultures and psychology and the need to study music history.

"When you play the drums," Halburian says, "you originally get into it because of your love for what the drummer is contributing to the music-the sound, the rhythm, the grooves; it's something that we relate to. It starts there, but you have to then develop. You could go to school and learn-there are a lot of great players teaching today, and you can learn a lot quickly. But if you're not going to school to learn, then you've got to study who came before the drummers you love and then go back before those guys played. Go back to the quarter note, and then the ride beat, and then the addition of the bass drum, and then the hi-hat. That's how it all happened. And listen to the way they played solos in relation to the music and how they developed the solo from a rhythm pattern that they started into a more developed pattern. If it's just [sings] tak-a-di-tak-a-di-tak, expand on that.

"Learn how to play the conversation," Armen concludes. "That's one of the benefits of being a musician-experiencing that communication. That's what our lives are about: being in tune with your spirit and the world around you. 'Be here now' explains it simply. Being a musician, you know that's part of your life. It helps you to tune in, so you can then play to your potential."

For more on Halburian, including a full discography and descriptions of his drum inventions, go to armenhalburian.com.