Of Drums and Drummers
Rhythm in general, and drums in particular, were the focus of two ear-opening shows I heard this week, each startling in its own way: Swiss keyboardist Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, which performed at Joe's Pub in the East Village, played a highly complex and nearly mechanical but extremely moving blend of jazz, classical, and ritualistic music Thursday evening. And on Sunday, the Japanese avant-garde rock band Boredoms led an army of seventy-seven drummers and drum sets in a loud and cathartic sunset ritual under the Brooklyn Bridge in its namesake borough's Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park.
While Bärtsch calls his music "Zen funk," it struck me as a weird hybrid of American minimalist Steve Reich and the German electronic group Kraftwerk, both of whom are pretty funky in their own ways. The quintet's drummer, percussionist, and bassist establish polyrhythms that divided and reassembled themselves with the precision of a highly disciplined Japanese warrior and, say, a particularly sophisticated Swiss cuckoo clock. The group's fifth member, Stefan "Sha" Haslebacher, plays bass and contrabass clarinets that create a low harmonic rumble sometimes indistinguishable from the sound of the subway trains passing under the club. Echoes of Stravinsky, Bartok, and Satie could be heard alongside those of the Meters and Brian Eno. Bärtsch and Ronin's Stoa was one of my very favorite albums of 2006, and his music was even remarkable in person. Watch them perform one of their pieces here.
While Bärtsch delivers divinity in the details of his music, the Boredoms were all about simple gestures delivered on an epic scale. Their hour-long "77BoaDrum" was inspired by the auspicious date (7/7/07) as well as the Japanese star festival Tanabata. The event consisted of seventy-seven drummers arranged in a serpentine spiral, with the Boredoms on a platform in the center. Rhythmic events conducted by singer and bandleader Yamataka Eye would spread slowly outward from that platform, with drummers taking cues from the player to their right. Part of the fun was watching the progression and hearing sounds crescendo until they reached this percussive nebula's furthest flailer. With only 4,000 spectators allowed into the park, hundreds more watched from the Brooklyn Bridge or from adjacent shores of the East River. The drummers may have been somewhat less precise than your average college marching band, but this crowd scene reached for the stars and succeeded.