Every culture has a drum, every life has a rhythm, says percussionist Ndugu Chancler to an audience of so few that I am embarrassed for him. An event like this -- drummers from around the world, free, with parking, at noon, a Saturday on the heels of summer -- there should be a couple hundred folks filling up the clean white seats, at least. I am sitting up close, beneath a white canopy, third row, so eye contact with Chancler is easy. He's a passionate man -- I can hear it in his voice, see it in his excitement. After all, it is the 19th annual Watts Towers Day of the Drum Festival; Chancler is master of ceremonies, and Watts is his home. The towers are open for the first time since the '94 earthshake, and in the sunlight, Simon Rodia's broken glass hearts cast long, lovely shadows across the afternoon. A rare day indeed.

Drums bring us together, Chancler says, connect us with history, with the spirits. Drums communicate --- one soul to another. The congas talk to the bongos and the roto toms and the timbales and the dholaks and the rainsticks and the taiko and the snare drums. Drum to drum, drum to heartbeat, heartbeat to soul. I look at a woman sitting nearby, in purple African dress. Her dreads are tied up, wrapped in folded cloth, like a queen. She smiles, closes her eyes. There are a couple dozen African Americans in the audience. I am one of a few whites, Latinos and various others. Together we are a nice mix, but we are too few. There is ground and reason to meet, and yet, another rare opportunity lost. Sad, it is.

I am here with a West Indian friend, a drummer in his own right, from St. Thomas. He is anxious for the beat. It is his heritage, his roots, and he brings along a small Asian drum of sorts that he can keep time with. I wouldn't be here, were it not for him. A West Indian with rhythm in his blood can wander anywhere the rhythm calls. Watts, however, is not my world. The rhythm has never called me here. Yet with a few powerful words, Chancler has opened the gates onto this world. Very soon I will push them open even wider.

The first thing I notice as I cross the MTA tracks and turn down 107th Street are typeset signs that direct festival goers to the parking area. It is a dirt lot and the Explorer kicks up dust . Two men dressed in street clothes guide traffic, and welcome guests to the Watts Towers. The city of L.A. wants us here --of this I am quite sure. The gestures are everywhere: brightly-colored banners, healthy trees, pleasant winding paths, the LAPD. I had come here as a child, when I was too young for it to matter; today it matters. I look at all the small homes flanking the towers. They are neat and clean, some painted green, some pink, all shut up tight against the neighborhood. The bars on my windows in South Carthay are fashioned into the architecture, as ironwork. The bars on the windows around here are not for show.

I wonder if the locals feel reverence for the place, as I feel just now. Rodia's wire mesh towers, built over three decades beginning in the '20s, are like the pieces of Joseph's shining coat. Red and blue and orange and yellow, they are made of shells and bottles, bits of tiles and broken plates. They are an offering of sorts, an Italian laborer's gift to the future, a prayer for peace in a battle zone that the artist could perhaps envision. Standing before the tallest tower, some 100 feet high, is almost like being in church. I watch for signs of life coming from the houses, dogs, kids, bicycles, men mowing lawns, fixing cars. There is nothing. Intruders we must be.

The festival begins with Felipe Garcia Villamil, who blesses the grounds with Afro-Cuban chanting and prayer. It doesn't matter that I can't understand him. He is a holy man with a holy rhythm, and the audience, all of us, we listen. Then comes a troupe of drummers called the Rhythm Regiment Drum Corps, a group consisting of kids, some white with blonde hair, some Asian, some black, some Latino, some hip hop, some not, all drumming to the direction of Terry Moore, a small, mighty woman with an amazing grace that unifies two year olds with 12 year olds, children all, into a spectacular oneness, a whole that is like thunder among the small crowd of onlookers. I look at the little girls, the white ones and black ones, with their pony tails and their bows, and I think how lucky they are to be drawn together by the music. Their lives will be richer; their understandings of each other deeper. I grew up near Inglewood, before gangs and drugs and this culture of division and fear. A rich world mine was.

The vendors fire up the barbecues, preparing for crowds that haven't come. The smell of jerk is in the air. I follow it away from the stage, past the women selling T-shirts and dresses, past the entrance to the towers, to a stand selling hibiscus ginger tea. "Want one?," my friend asks. He hands it to me, tells me he has heard ginger isn't good for women because it's too yang. I laugh, and drink the tea from a plastic bottle. Who has time to think about such things?, I ask him. Caribbean women, he says. The ginger in the tea is strong. It opens up my nose and spikes the taste buds. I want the jerk chicken now. I decide to buy it from the Jamaican woman. I have seen her before, sampled her fare. It is fiery, if I remember correctly. $6.95 buys rice and peas, greens and more than enough pieces of sweet chicken. It is perfect with the red flower tea. I sit in the sun, on the grass, and listen to the West African drum rhythms in the distance. People walk around me, chat, comment on the aroma of the jerk. It is the friendliest of crowds. Perhaps it's the music, I think, as I sip the tea. Or maybe it's the towers, the awe-inspiring nature of the place. Strange, I think, not the cold, sneering L.A. that I have come to know so well.

As I wander back toward the stage, my friend calls out to me. "I'm over here," he says, pointing to a big tree, under which perhaps 40 drummers have gathered into a circle. Some are from the Watts Towers Drum Workshop, some from the Yoruba House on the Westside, some from the Will Rogers Memorial Park. There are old women and two year olds. There are bright fancy drums and simple tambourines. There are congas and bongos and cymbals and samba whistles and drum sticks that seem moved by magic. My friend has asked a Native American man with a thick ring through his ear for his drum. The man gives it up, and my friend puts the drum between his legs. He finds the rhythm. A Rasta brings his handmade version of a steel drum, and sets up a small seat. He finds the rhythm. A turbaned man with a long red beard and an Indian instrument of bells finds the rhythm. An African woman with a basket balanced on her head enters the circle, dances for the drummers. The dance is in her waist, and the basket stays still. The drummers get louder and louder and the rhythm gets more complex and more amazing. It is fundamentally Cuban, but has jazz, and Middle Eastern elements. I try to study the beats but am too enraptured. It is like a drug, and it pulls me in. My hips become part of the rhythm and can feel it in a way they have never felt it before, not in Los Angeles, anyway. In an audience the feel is quite different. A drum circle is participatory, inclusive, larger than one or two or even 20 performers. For the drummer I imagine ecstasy, a perfect moment when instruments and bodies and cultures co-mingle to create such a beautiful fusion that everything else is lost. A belly dancer finds the rhythm. A sax player tries, but fails. An old man takes his drum and hands it to a stranger. He then helps a little girl tap, tap, tap with some sticks. It is music for its own sake, but it is also something else. It is about community. And it is happening right before my ears.

The frenzy moves out from the circle, across the grounds to Chancler, who feels it on the stage, where just now he has a free moment to kill. He sends a message to the drum circle to bring this beautiful thing to the stage. It is open mic, he says. I watch as dozens of people, some of them friends, but most not, regroup on a stage in Watts, to give the people what they came to hear. It is from the gut, this music, unrehearsed, raw and as wrenching as it gets. The crowd, now considerably larger on this Saturday afternoon, rises to its feet. They will hear Aztec drummers, South Pacific drummers, Panamanian drummers, terrific all, but this is what they will remember.

There are gates here in Watts, imagined ones, but they keep people out, and others in. I tell a friend at my Culver City gym on Sunday morning about what happened to me on Saturday. I tell him that today there will be a day of free jazz in Watts, and about the beauty of the crowd, and the music, and the community. He's a homeboy with a shaved head and a way-cool attitude. "I don't go to Watts," he says. "Been there, done that." I tell him I didn't think that he had, that in fact I was quite sure he hadn't, and go about my workout.

About six years ago, beauty chemist Lloyd Bell took a good long look at Whoopi Goldberg's dreads and said to his wife Kathy: "That's gonna be big." What? asked Kathy, half-listening, half not.

"Dreads," said Lloyd, "braids, twists, hair extensions, natural styles -- kinks and all."

Kathy, a human resources specialist in the telecommunications industry, had heard her husband ponder and speculate before, but this time, she says, it was different. She knew her husband was brilliant, more than just "a pair of hands," and she'd never seen him so dreamy, so creative.

"I had an idea," Lloyd Bell says decisively, sipping hot coffee from a bright blue cup. "A good one."

At the time, Bell was working for Image Labs in Oxnard, a few miles from his home on the Channel Islands coast of Southern California. Bell, possibly the only black chemist working in the $4 billion African-American hair-care industry, was responsible for Let's Jam, a group of gels, silicone sprays and relaxers for black hair that was very popular and made Image, a white-owned company, lots of black dollars. "So I went to this white guy, Michael Blair, known in the industry as the father of Let's Jam and president of Image, and I said let's do a braid spray." Blair, says Bell, showed absolutely no interest.

It wasn't surprising, says Kathy Bell, somberly. "All of Lloyd's career, companies were telling him not to put expensive chemicals into products because," she stresses, " �they won't know the difference. As long as it smells good Lloyd,� they'd say, �you people like sweet fragrances.� " And, says Lloyd, why would a company be interested in a rebel style of African-American hair that most white people hoped was trendy, destined to go the same way as the Afro.

"I was listening to Bob Marley and I was watching hip-hop explode," says Lloyd, adjusting his tie. "It was spreading to fashion, to sports, even to rock. There were legal cases about braiding licenses. And all the products available on the market," he says, "were about straightening and relaxing hair, how to change it, not how to keep it natural. I wanted to create a shampoo and conditioner, using all the best, highest-grade products, for tribal, Afrocentric hair." To clean it, he says, keep it healthy. And nobody, not the hair-care industry, not the banks, not even his close circle of friends, would hear of it. Nobody, that is, except Kathy.

About the same time as Lloyd Bell began to conceive of Nubian Secrets, Marietta Carter-Narcisse, a Barbados national, was the head makeup artist on Malcolm X , filming in Egypt. "I looked at my straightened hair and suddenly," she says, "I saw it as a contradiction. In August 1991, I decided to take all the chemicals out of my hair, so I shaved my head and started my locks." Fashion locks, she carefully explains, cultural, practical, not religious Rasta dreads that begin with sand and aloe and dirty, matted hair. "My mother cursed me, told me it wasn't accepted in respectable West Indian families. I told her I didn't want to look like a white person. Straight is right because white is right," she says, defiantly, tossing her honey-colored locks behind her shoulder. To wash her dreads, she admits, took hours, and a night to dry. And when it was "Pine-Sol clean," she tells me, "my scalp would itch."

Madrid Johnson is considered a damaged hair expert, a man who takes the few little broken strands that some people of color "hold onto" and renders it healthier, shinier, fuller and softer. From his salon in Oakland, California, Madrid's Exclusive Hair Design, he and his staff serve some 200 patrons in a week. He trains, teaches and travels the world for Luster Products, an all-around system for black hair care that includes relaxers, conditioners, shampoos, lotions, gels, sprays, spritzers and glossifiers. He stayed in touch with Lloyd Bell because, despite companies that catered to black hair care, there wasn't one line of product to keep hair healthy and natural. "The relaxer market," Johnson says, "has been astronomical" and has dominated the entire black hair-care industry. Relaxers are, he says, one of the most damaging things a person can do to his or her hair. Dreads, knots, twists, loops are chemical-free, innovative and alternative, not retro styles, he points out, and not one company was exploiting the trend that was putting people of color in touch with their heritage. "I thought that Lloyd Bell might formulate a product that could be revolutionary."

Without interest from his company, Lloyd Bell began working at night in a small lab he'd set up in his kitchen, sending products that he was developing to his brother Bruce Bell, a beautician in Bakersfield who was still pressing, straightening and relaxing hair, but who was noticing a change. Ultra-conservative young black men started asking for braids and dreads. Professional people, over 30, who'd once considered braided hair ghettoish, were going natural, moving away from the Euro-look that has dominated beauty in this country for most of this century, and the last. "I had to subcontract, hire girls from the community to twist and braid and add extensions. But clients couldn't wash their hair," says the younger Bell. "They'd come to me looking raggedy, smelling all the way up the block. If God wanted us to look this way, then why didn't he make it easier to wash our hair? There were no products that cleaned right, or smelled right, nothing that would lather up without too much agitation."

During his 25-year career as a chemist for Redken, Pro-Line, Max Factor and World of Curls, among others, Lloyd Bell received notices of specialty products developed by various chemical vendors that had properties he admired. For the most part, though, the products were expensive, botanicals that had never seemed indulgent for whites were considered unaffordable within the more budget-minded black hair-care market. But he stockpiled those notices, tucked them safely away in a folder that would one day open up a whole new way of life to a whole lot of people. African Shea Butter, also known as Karite Butter, from the Karite Tree found in Central Africa, is an amazing natural conditioner which helps ease skin irritations, protects from sun damage, counteracts any increased dehydration, enhances shine and far exceeds cocoa butter in superfatting qualities without the apparent greasiness. Panthenol nourishes hair and scalp, moisturizes and strengthens hair. "I wanted to use the best ingredients," he tells me, pushing up his gold-rim glasses, " the ones that get results, that promote scalp wellness."

From A Special Touch Salon, Bruce Bell kept his records up-to-date, and evaluated the data so that when the right moment came, he and Lloyd would push full steam ahead. Bruce took notes on scalp conditions, on smell, on sheen, and Lloyd fiddled with the formulas, devising a way to get the shampoo to penetrate tight braids, until, says Bruce, "the product was really working." Dreaded hair became "soft, touchable, sensual," says Bruce, "the way it's supposed to feel."

The time came in early '96. Lloyd Bell was walking down the hall from his lab, feeling very good because a product he had just finished was about to be marketed, and he overheard the finance people talking about "boosting our N line. It was so hurtful," says Lloyd, "that I had to go home." His wife told him not to go back. "I'm from the old school," says Lloyd, "Louisiana, the last state to integrate. My father was a civil rights lawyer; my mom a teacher. The African-American brands made these companies the bulk of their money, but they weren't valued. I wasn't valued."

Lloyd went back, but only to settle things up. Kathy took an early retirement from Packard Bell in July 1998, to finance Lloyd's operation, which was about to take off. Their friends were shocked, seeing little to respect in this home-based business. After all, says Kathy, "very few people get excited about shampoo that had yet to make it into a bottle." And the banks, they weren't biting either. It seemed that black chemists with small-business ventures were not viable investments. Still, Bruce Bell and Madrid Johnson were in the rooting section and Kathy could get her hands on some $300,000 of her retirement income. But how to get the rich liquid concoction deep into the dread, that was still the question?

It was the valve that was so radical, says Madrid Johnson. It took the product from liquid to foam, so it could be applied to knots or dreads or twisted hair, penetrating without having to lather vigorously so as not to disturb the style. It is also great for added extensions, eliminating the hair loss that inevitably occurs with agitation. FoamBurst Shampoo, they named it, to be used with a conditioner and lock lotion that, yes, smells lovely, but also works inside the hair, beneath the surface of the cuticle, without glycerin gels or oils that leave a buildup, especially on dreads. And was cost a factor? I ask as I pour more coffee. Lloyd Bell laughs: "I took out all the thickeners, and the salt that deceives the consumer. I saved where I could, on marketing," he says, "not on product." The first bottles were shipped in February 1999. The Bells, friends were impressed, but it was not until the company recently moved into a 2,000-square-foot building that they finally saw what Lloyd had been doing at home for all those years .

Marietta Carter-Narcisse has used Nubian Secrets for over three months. Her dreads have not felt cleaner or softer, or looked shinier, she says, since her hair locked up nearly 10 years ago, long before Trisha Yearwood and Reba McEntire started wearing braids. "It doesn't strip too much, or coat too much." The products can be used on synthetic or human hair and are available on-line, or by mail order, as well as in a number of beauty supply outlets nationwide. The system sells for $24.95 and comes in a sweet little plastic drawstring pouch, for traveling to such places as the gym, where you might have never before thought of washing your hair. In fact, in the gym where I exercise, there's this beautiful young black woman who doesn't want to sweat because she doesn't want to have to wash her hair. Says Carter-Narcisse, laughing, from the gut, her dreads covered with FoamBurst: "Black women will do anything for their hair." Yes, says Kathy Bell, running fingers through her own wavy tresses, "I think that's true."

Nubian Secrets, 3844 Channel Islands Blvd., 138, Channel Islands, CA 93035 (805) 289-9988, fax (805) 289-3539, www.braids-dreds.com