The Silkroad Ensemble Release a Haunting, Surreal New Osvaldo Golijov Epic

Over the past practically three decades, the Silkroad Ensemble have been the world’s great champions of a blend of music from south Asia, through the Arabic-speaking world and the west. Their latest album, Falling Out of Time – which hasn’t hit the web yet – comprises a single, lavish, thirteen-part tone poem by contemporary classical composer Osvaldo Golijov, which hauntingly dovetails with the group’s esthetic. It may be the most stunningly accessible orchestral work the composer has ever written. It’s certainly the most eclectic, drawing on such diverse idioms as Indian music, classical Chinese theatre, jazz balladry and sounds of the Middle East.

This is a frequently operatically-tinged work, tracing a surreal, grim narrative surrounding the death of a child. Mythical creatures and archetypes are involved. The introduction, Heart Murmur rises from a brooding, skeletal Arabic-tinged taqsim to a darkly catchy, circling ghazal-like melody over a dancing, jazz-inflected pulse and the achingly intertwining voices of singers Biella da Costa and Nora Fischer.

Night Messengers is a stark, increasingly imploring nocturnal tableau, the womens’ voices wary and enigmatic over an all-star string quartet comprising half of Brooklyn Rider – violinist Johnny Gandelsman and violist Nicholas Cords – with violinist Mazz Swift, and cellist Karen Ouzounian.

That sudden, stratospherically high harmony in the enigmatic Come Chaos is a real shock to the system: is that a voice, Wu Tong’s sheng, or a theremin? No spoilers!

Uneasy, fragmentary flickers from the strings followed by Wu Man’s pipa join to introduce the simply titled Step, rising to a harrowing intensity. The Lynchian dub interlude afterward comes as another real shock.

Shane Shanahan’s tabla and the singers’ acidic harmonies take over the hypnotic ambience as In Procession, a portrait of mass bereavement, gets underway, Kayhan Kalhor’s muted, desolate kamancheh solo at the center amid the string quartet. Troubled atmospherics waft and eventually permeate Walking, the suite’s drifting, central elegy, lowlit with echoey kamancheh, Dan Brantigan’s desolate trumpet and Shawn Conley’s spare jazz-inflected bass

An ambient lament featuring spiky pipa in contrast to Jeremy Flower’s synth foreshadows Fly, which with its aching ambience and jazz allusions mirrors the centerpiece. Go Now, the suite’s most immersive, restlessly resonant track, features a long, plaintive kamancheh intro, a similarly aching, vivid duet with the violin. Da Costa reaches for the rafters with the pipa trailing off morosely at the end.

Akeya (Where Are You) is a dissociative mashup of orchestral 1950s Miles Davis, Etta James moan and kabuki theatre, maybe. The ensemble hint at rebirth and redemption in the closing tableau, Breathe. Is the nameless dead boy at the center of the story a metaphor for the hope and joy that was stolen from us in 2020? What a piece of music for our time!

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Philip Glass Hosts a Global Benefit Concert at the Town Hall

This October 24 at 7:30 PM, there’s a phenomenal lineup of global musical talent at the Town Hall. Philip Glass serves as artistic director and will play this concert, in addition to the great Turkish-American composer/performer Omar Faruk Tekbilek, Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, ghazal ensemble Riyaaz Qawwali, early music choral group Pomerium, and Gambian kora player/griot Foday Musa Suso. $35 tickets are still available as of today. The concert, titled In the Spirit (click for artist videos and info), is a benefit for the Hudson Valley-based Garrison Institute, which works in the fields of climate change, education and trauma .

The concert will include:

* Songs of Milarepa, a work by Philip Glass set to the poems of Milarepa (1052-1135), one of Tibet’s most famous saints and poets. This NYC premiere will be performed by baritone Gregory Purnhagen and pianist Nelson Padgett, members of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

* The Pomerium vocal ensemble, under the director of founder/conductor Alexander Blachly, performs early Christian music. Noted for its luminous sound, the ensemble has been described as the “most venerable of New York’s early music vocal ensembles (Wall Street Journal),  “the standard by which early music vocal groups are measured” (New York Times), and “a driving force for performances of Renaissance polyphony” (Washington Post).

* Riyaaz Qawwali performs the ecstatic improvisational Sufi vocal tradition made famous in the West by the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. This multi-sectarian group is composed of Muslims and Hindus who perform in Khan’s Punjabi style

* Foday Musa Suso, a renowned Gambian griot or jali (oral historian/praise singer), is a master of the 21-stringed kora harp-lute.  He is known for his hypnotic performances of traditional Mandingo music, as well as for his collaborations with Herbie Hancock, Philip Glass, Jack DeJohnette, and the Kronos Quartet.

* Omar Faruk Tekbilek is one of the finest Turkish musicians performing on the ney (bamboo flute) and a versatile artist who has collaborated with oud virtuoso Simon Shaheen, Don Cherry, and Glen Velez, among others.  Singing and playing ney, he will perform mystical Sufi music of the Middle East with accompaniment on frame drum by his son Murat Tekbilek.

* Wu Man, the celebrated Chinese pipa virtuoso and interpreter of the traditional Chinese repertoire and contemporary pipa music, has been acclaimed for “her consummate musicality and brilliant technique” (New York Times). She will perform with the Scorchio Quartet, a cutting-edge string quartet that has been the “house quartet” of the Tibet House Benefit Concerts produced by Philip Glass.

Getting to Know Wu Man

Wu Man is one of the world’s leading advocates and virtuosos of the pipa, the spiky, ancient Chinese lute which has enjoyed a renaissance over the last fifty years. Last night at Symphony Space presented an opportunity to get to know her a little and hear a little music as well. She hails from the city of Hangzhou, where she was born into a family of traditional music fans who encouraged her to pursue her passion: as she told it, by the time she was eleven, she’d envisioned a professional life as a pipa player. In a coolly melodious voice, she took her time contemplating the challenges and rewards of someone playing an instrument and a repertoire that are both vastly different from what they were a thousand or even two thousand years ago when Iranian traders first introduced an early version of the tar lute to China.

As one would expect from such a fiery, technically skilled player, Wu Man is a gearhead. She took care to emphasize how the instrument – once limited to the range commonly employed by the viola or even the cello – expanded upwards, particularly since the 1930s, along with its repertoire. She’s very particular about craftsmanship: her pipa has ivory – recycled, she took care to note – on the lower frets and bamboo in the upper regions. Depending on the repertoire and the tuning involved (as with the guitar, there’ve been plenty of pipa tunings over the centuries), she’ll vary her choice of strings. This time out, she was using nylon, rather than steel or gut, to match the downstairs theatre’s intimate sonics.

Though she’s an expat, politics weren’t discussed – although she did admit to being hassled by Chinese cops while trying to film her recent crowd-funded half-hour documentary, Discovering a Musical Heartland: Wu Man’s Return to China, which explores a handful of the nation’s rapidly vanishing folk styles. Looking back, there’s no doubt that like many conservatory students throughout the world, she felt cloistered: her recent immersion in ancient folk traditions seems to be an attempt to make up for lost time. That theme comes to the forefront on her most recent album, the starkly beautiful, eclectic Borderlands, released earlier this year by Traditional Crossroads.

Much as it was interesting to hear her perspective, Wu Man speaks more eloquently through her instrument than any words could possibly express. She played about half a dozen short pieces, the highlight being a trio of Ukrainian and Chinese folk songs where she duetted with Ukrainian bandura lute virtuoso Julian Kytasty. As Ukrainian or Russian speakers would quickly realize, Kytasty comes from a family with roots in the China trade, and he is cognizant of them, explaining that these days he “looks to the east” for inspiration. The two hadn’t played together in at least a couple of years (he’s a big part of her hit album Wu Man and Friends), so this was a heartwarming reunion of sorts and it wasn’t long before sparks were flying, particularly on an old Ukrainian tribute to a fallen warrior that wound gracefully from a stately, resonant elegy to a volcanic ending driven by Wu Man’s feral tremolo-picking. A bit later on, solo, she also played a traditional dance that was her (successful) audition piece for the conservatory, a jaunty number that can be heard throughout many subway stations in lower Manhattan, played by a new generation of musicians who no doubt look to emulate her achievements.

This particular mix of meet-and-greet and concert was assembled under the auspices of the World Music Institute, who’ve been staging memorable concerts from a global cast of characters here for literally decades.

CD Review: The Silk Road Ensemble – Off the Map

Their most adventurous album. For ten years, the Silk Road Ensemble has been bringing some of the most fascinating, intense and pioneering Asian and Asian-inflected music to western audiences. On their latest cd, an all-star cast of some of the most imaginative players on the planet – literally – take a flying leap into a rich, cutting-edge program of cross-pollination with equal parts gusto and finesse. For one reason or another, it’s arguably the least Asian of the Silk Road albums, and also the most demanding – while some of the compositions here are among the most accessible the ensemble has recorded, others are far from that – but a close listen pays tremendous rewards.

The cd opens with a three-part suite by the reliably multistylistic Gabriela Lena Frank (who just won a Latin Grammy!), titled Ritmos Anchinos. The opening piece, as Frank puts it, has Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man discovering her inner latina. The second is a blissful little dance inspired by a Chinese-African village in Peru; the third hitches a raw, clattering, rhythmically tricky, reverb-driven pipa piece to a second part where the pipa takes on some particularly imaginative jazz guitar voicings.

Hong Kong-born composer Angel Lam’s phantasmagorical, shapeshifting Empty Mountain, Spirit Rain follows, building to a dark, dramatic crescendo following a sparse buildup in the Asian scale, Kojiro Umezaki’s rustic shakuhachi flute bringing back a rain-drenched, ambient feel. The second part is a mysterious narrative of the events of the first part, sweeping along uneasily on the wings of the strings.

Evan Ziporyn’s compositions draw deeply on his gamelan work, and his trio suite here, Sulvasutra is no exception. Based on an ancient treatise on the proper proportions for Hindu altars, there’s a definite symmetry here, circular, echoey and insistent, the extraordinary string quartet Brooklyn Rider interpolating atmospherics within tabla player Sandeep Das’ hypnotic rhythms. The second part sounds like what another adventurous string composer, Ljova Zhurbin, might have done with a gamelan, adding a raw Carpathian edge to the pointillistic ambience; Wu Man reappears deviously in the concluding segment, taking the piece rousingly back to Fiji.

The concluding suite – if you can call it one – is the album’s star attraction, the latest from Osvaldo Golijov, alternatingly rousing, joyous, raptly hypnotic and haunting. On the slinky, seductive first section, the Argentinian avant garde luminary proves himself adept and frankly exhilarating (if not exactly innovative) at lush Mohammed Abdel Wahab-style levantine orchestration. The still, brooding, mystical tone poems that follow fall in stark contrast with the ecstatic, defiant Sardinian protest song that fades up and blasts along like the Pogues, Galician bagpipe star Cristina Pato fueling the blaze. And then it’s over. It’s out now on World Village Music and it makes a particularly suitable holiday gift for the cutting-edge listener on y0ur list.

A Couple Bars’ Worth of Sunday’s Bang on a Can Marathon

This year’s Bang on a Can Marathon promised to be one of the best ever, in terms of sheer talent if not ambience. Lately this sprawling festival has lacked the freewheeling, anarchic spirit of earlier years, but the performers on the bill just get better and better. The deck is typically stacked with the biggest name acts playing later, this year’s being a criminally good list of performers: Ars Nova Copenhagen playing one composer after another, pipa innovator Wu Man, Missy Mazzoli’s haunting ensemble Victoire, the astonishing string quartet Brooklyn Rider, Tortoise and of course the Bang on a Can All-Stars. But the afternoon’s acts were just as good. To those who might rail against the boomy acoustics and sterile ambience of the World Financial Center Winter Garden, it’s at least a lot easier to negotiate than some of the other spaces BOAC has used.

Cognoscenti who were there at the opening bell raved about Andy Akiho’s psychedelic piece, Alloy, played by the Foundry Steel Pan Ensemble. BOAC co-founder Michael Gordon’s Trance, played by the jazz orchestra SIGNAL, went on for almost an hour. Some said for too long, but to these ears the tension of the band in lockstep with a series of looped vocal fragments and drum machine served well to illustrate a struggle for freedom. They went up, then down, running the same phrase much as the loop they kept in step with, finally crescendoing as the loop faded and disappeared, the band adding a sense of triumph while maintaining the tense, metronomic feel of the first 45 minutes or so. It was very redemptive: man vs. machine, man finally winning out.

Guitar quartet DITHER, augmented by seven ringers on a mix of Fenders and Gibsons did one of Eric km Clark’s deprivation pieces, each guitarist given earplugs and headphones so as to deliberately throw off their timing (doesn’t work: we’re used to bad monitor mixes, being unable to hear a thing onstage, feeling for the drums and playing what’s in our fingers!). Echoes swirling around underneath the big skylight, the effect was akin to a church organ piece, maybe something especially weird from the Jehan Alain songbook with a lot of echo. It ended cold with a single guitarist tossing off a playfully tongue-in-cheek, random metal phrase.

The Todd Reynolds Quartet followed with Meredith Monk’s lone string quartet, Stringsongs, in four bracingly captivating sections. The first, Cliff Light was a hypnotically polyrhythmic, astringent dance, introducing a stillness at the end that carried over to the second part, Tendrils, austere and plaintive but growing warmer and prettier, brief phrases flowing in and out of the arrangement, often repeating. Part three, Obsidian was more dawn than darkness; Phantom Strings, the final segment was practically a live loop, its circular motifs growing more insistent and percussive, the group seizing every dynamic inch the score would allow them.

The daylight hours’ highlight was, of course, Bill Frisell. The preeminent jazz guitarist of our time turned in a characteristically thoughtful, deliberately paced, absolutely brilliantly constructed series of three solo pieces, the first one of his typical western themes spiced with harmonics and drenched in reverb, a welcoming, friendly, comfortable way to ease into what would quickly become more difficult terrain. The clouds came in quickly with his second instrumental, eerie and minimalistically noir. Finally, Frisell hit his distortion pedal and upped the ante, bending and twisting the notes, adding glissandos and hitting his loop pedal in places where he’d found one that would resonate beneath the methodically Gilmouresque menace. One of those loops made a sturdy underpinning for a brief segue into a bright, optimistic, latin-tinged theme that quickly morphed into a common 4-chord soul motif and it was then that Frisell pulled out a little shimmery vibrato to wind it up on a warmly optimistic note.

One of the maddening things about Bang on a Can is that somebody like Frisell will give you chills, and then the next act will leave you scowling and wondering why anyone on earth thinks they belong onstage. This time the culprits were Your Bad Self playing a trio of Ted Hearne compositions, the first a straight-up noir rock ballad in 6/8, the singer setting off a crazy, screaming crescendo on the second verse that lingered after they’d brought it down again. Too bad the best he could do was scream, because he was off-key and positively lame on the next two numbers, a fractured, frantic musette with a jazzy trumpet fanfare and a moodier tune. This is what happens when classically trained people who don’t know rock but think they do anyway try to incorporate it in their music. Or maybe they do, but they don’t know soul from affectation, at least when it comes to vocals. At least the band was good. After that, the UK’s Smith Quartet launched into a Kevin Volans piece with which they’re supposedly associated – too bad, because it didn’t leave a mark. Then it was time to go uptown. But all that was a small price to pay for a free set by Frisell, not to mention the early afternoon’s program.

Only one complaint: where were the kids? Most of the crowd was older than the performers. New music is for young people! Maybe because we don’t have money, we don’t get invited these days? For those missing out on the evening’s festivities, Feast of Music was there to provide some insight.