Music

POST-IBERIA
Multicultural musicians attain authenticity without purity

photo: Shiho Fukada

Vusi Mahlasela of South Africa

Details

Globalfest
Public Theater
January 10

Okay Player Tour
Irving Plaza
January 3

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More About

• Susheela Raman
• Savina Yannatou
• Mississippi John Hurt
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Hip-Hop and Rap

With an aural smorgasbord as ambitious as last Saturday's GlobalFEST, it's inevitable that a few choice items will go untasted. In five hours on three stages at the Public Theater, a sold-out crowd scrambled to see 16 multicultural attractions from around the world and around the block. Forty-minute sets were just long enough to leave most of us wanting more.

Few, if any, of these acts were obsessed with the "purity" of their music. Authenticity and purity are not the same, and if festival participants chose to bend and blend genre categories, it was only after serious study of those root musics they hoped to update or alter. If anything, the participants in Manhattan's first GlobalFEST proved it's possible to respect the past without being forced to preserve it forever unchanged.

On "Woman," the Anglo-Indian contralto Susheela Raman incanted ur-feminist mantras over lost chords which link South Indian, Egyptian, and Black American modal options. Raman's stripped-down trio was followed by Greek soprano Savina Yannatou, whose acoustic septet abounded with exotic instrumentation and share Raman's fondness for eastern scales and pentatonic improvisations. Live, Savina reworked Sephardic and Bulgarian folk songs as extended jazz compositions. Sometimes Celtic or flamenco motifs emerged, only to vanish again into a sea of swirling sound.

But since even love songs sound sad wrapped in so much melisma, the major-key riffs and manic polka tempos of Forró in the Dark provoked a delightful shift in mood. A local expat quintet anchored by triangle, a zabumba drum, and piano-accordion, they sang rustic proverbs over cheery baião and xote rhythms, thereby ranking alongside Les Yeux Noirs—led by two Jewish violinists from Paris purveying gypsy jazz with klezmer melodies and art-rock attitude—as the night's best party bands. A similar regional predilection for major mode marked the performance of South African protest singer Vusi Mahlasela, alone on acoustic guitar. Alternating Zulu with English, his gentle voice flowed from reedy tenor to light falsetto, while his nimble fretwork brought to mind the compositional strategies of Cat Stevens, Mississippi John Hurt, or Leadbelly.

Three distinct diasporic sensibilities dominated GlobalFEST: the Semitic, the Gypsy, and the Pan-African. And all three helped shape the cultural profile of the Iberian peninsula, whose mercantile voyages of "discovery" after the fall of Granada created the world we inhabit today. —Carol Cooper

SOLILOQUY NOT DIALOGUE
Hip-hop's days of two-way communication left far behind

The highlight of the Okay Player Tour had their moment 12 years ago—not that there wasn't enough modern talent onstage January 3. J-Live hit the ones and twos and cut up his old standard "Braggin Writes," Aesop Rock and Mr. Lif deftly freestyled round-robin while Jean Grae reworked Jay-Z's "Threat," and most of the sprawling bill's acts solidified their status as disciples of the golden age. But when high priests Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth hopped on stage and unleashed their old classic "They Reminisce Over You," all else was shadow.

At its core, "Reminisce" brilliantly demonstrates how hip-hop was once a dialect for young black people to express a broad range of experience. The street runs all through the song, but Pete and C.L. are equally obsessed with entrepreneurial Aunt Joyce and Uncle Sterling's autophilia. Its detailed characters and themes made "Reminisce" an anthem for young black America—mostly because young black America had the means to listen. Say what you want about the duo's protégés—and there were plenty performing. But very few of them can duplicate that sort of hold on the imagination of their peers.

The Irving Plaza audience was overwhelmingly white. Which would mean absolutely nothing, were it not for the fact that a cat like Vast Air will never, ever, ever be on black radio. In the golden years worshipped by so many neoclassicists, talent was only half the equation. The other half was people who looked, lived, and struggled like you, nodding their heads—not just for rhythm—but for deep understanding. Minus that, the Okay Player Tour felt more like a soliloquy than a dialogue. Hip-hop's crowd, informed by experience, was once its soul. Without it, hip-hop's underground—for all its lyrical talent and stupid insecurities—leaves me feeling widowed. —Ta-Nehisi Coates