String Theory
Located directly under Carnegie Hall's main stage, 650-seat Zankel Hall completed the institution's musical triplex in 2003 and has turned out to be one of the most acoustically accommodating venues in New York. I found myself there twice this weekend, enjoying a pair of shows that couldn't have been more different yet provided an unexpected bridge between otherwise distant musical cultures.
Friday night's spectacular performance by Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra began with Fode Lassana Diabate sauntering onstage and hammering out rhythmically complex and melodically enticing patterns on a wooden balafon, West Africa's xylophone. He was soon joined by a djembe drum, a small ngoni guitar, a drum set, electric guitar, bass, and piano, each of which generated radically distinct rhythms that eventually fused into a joyously kinetic whole.
Toumani Diabate let things settle down before seating himself behind his twenty-one-stringed kora, a thumb-plucked combination of lute and harp whose cascading tones and percussive bite resemble an African harpsichord. Diabate's music was ancient at heart, with roots extending back to the consolidation of the Mandinka tribal empire in the thirteenth century. And most of the bandmembers were the latest in long family lines of musicians known as djelis, or griots, whose original function was to praise the rich and powerful through song. Diabate's band does a lot more than that, however. By adding jazz, funk, and salsa to the mix, they create arrangements that rose to remarkable heights again and again as two singers praised the bandleader, their multi-country homeland, and the old ways. Hear them on last year's Boulevard de l'independence and get a rough visual approximation of it here.
After basking in Diabate's kora afterglow for a couple of days, a friend took me back to Zankel Hall last night for what turned out to be an unexpectedly complementary delight: pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard's lecture-performance titled "A Promenade in 88 Keys and 300 Years." Where kora virtuoso Toumani Diabate had compressed some 700 years of Mandinka musical history into ten players onstage for ninety minutes, Aimard, alone at a piano, performed thirty-two piano works, either in part or in their entirety, that did much the same for his own percussive stringed instrument. (Aimard discusses the "intensity, meaning, and renewal" he seeks in music in this New York Times interview.) Beginning with Scarlatti and Bach and ending with contemporary composers Marco Stroppa and George Benjamin, Aimard's narrative used the piano to reflect three centuries of Euro-American cultural history. While powerful Africans employed kora-playing griots to enhance their brands, Western composers looked to the piano to convey their best ideas. The mutual bottom line? Africa and the West are almost unimaginable without them.
Aimard continues his Time Signature series at Zankel on May 10 with a program of twentieth-century piano-percussion pieces by Bartok, Ligetic, Reich, Nancarrow, and others.