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by John Diliberto  listen to feature>>7min (Echoes On-Line subscribers) |
Senegalese singers recording with Norwegian electronic musicians and mouth harpists; Japanese shakuhachi masters blowing on fusion grooves; Brazilian musicians adapting instruments from Native Indian populations and collaborating with American pop artists; a classical Chinese cellist bows licks with an Arab-Eurasian orchestra. Just another day in the land of world fusion. It's the soundtrack of the new millennium. |
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"Yes
it's one world, one music, one drum, one God, I mean there's
different keys and they play them on different instruments, but
it all comes down to one thing, vibration. I mean it's all vibratory."
--Mickey Hart |
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When we launched Echoes in October of 1989, it was already obvious that one of the directions we'd pursue was world fusion. There was a merging of global cultures that had been happening for a while. Debussey was influenced by Balinese gamelan music, John Cage took that same sound to his prepared piano compositions. In 1964, Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation brought his jazz clarinet in communion with Japanese kotos and shakuhachis and John Coltrane exploited the modalities of Indian ragas for his free form improvisations. And let's not forget Raga-Rock. But world fusion really exploded in the 1970s and 80s with Indian fusion from John McLaughlin's Shakti and Ancient Future.
 John McLaughlin |
 Ancient Future |
For some western musicians, the music of ancient cultures from Africa, India and Asia represents a sound closer to the source. Paul Winter was among the first to embrace the music of the world, incorporating tablas, sitars, frame drums from the Middle East and more. Playing with Russian choirs or a pod of whales, he's looking for a primal connection.
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"I'm very fascinated with the ritual music of earth cultures," says Winter. "Music that involves everyone present and that really involves them deeply." |
Paul Winter may not have been the first, but he launched a generation of musicians into world fusion, including Oregon, Shadowfax and Ancient Future. Ancient Future, who can be heard in this months on-line Living Room Concert collection, may have coined the term, World Fusion.
"We have all these isolated cultures that have grown up and developed all these fantastic things," exudes Matthew Montfort, the group's founder and guitarist. "The symphony, the Indian raga, African percussion, Balinese Gamelon..... But there's an opportunity here to develop some new and interesting music by combining these styles. And that's what I want to do."
Montfort and his long-lived group Ancient Future have done just that on several albums released since their self-titled debut in 1979 (Echoes On-Line subscribers can hear a Living Room Concert with Ancient Future).
In the 1990 rehearsal studio for Mickey Hart's Planet Drum were musicians from Cuba, Africa, and India, playing instruments at the heart of their countries consciousness. Meanwhile, Mickey Hart sits in the middle, triggering sounds from around the world with African balaphons (marimbas) that are wired into his digital samplers.
"I mean, I've mined all the sounds of this century that I possibly can get my hands on that I either manipulated personally or I pulled back and retrieved from a computer or shaped or created in the digital domain," exudes the proselytizing drummer "And then I manipulate them artfully, hopefully, you know [laughter] and create a new genre of music or percussion based music. 2lst century gamelan music!"
Hart has accomplished his mission on three Planet Drum albums.
World fusion isn't only westerners heading east, it's coming the other way as well. Although sometimes, even artists from other countries have to throw off the influence of the west to discover their own music. The late Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu came of age just as World War II ended. He, like many other Japanese artists rejected his own culture.
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"When
I had decided to be a composer, I didn't know anything about
Japanese traditional music," Toru Takemitsu
told us in 1992. "And I must say that I hated everything from Japan." |
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Takemitsu was a disciple of western composers like Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage. But in the early 1960s, something changed. After ten years of studying western music, he heard the Japanese puppet theatre called Bunraku, and Japanese instruments such as the shamisen, a Japanese lute.
 Bunraku |
 Shamisen |
"It was a shock," proclaimed Takemitsu. "When I first heard the shamisen music for puppet theater, I thought, 'This is essentially different from western music.'"
It wasn't long before these sounds were incorporated in his music, but more than that, Toru Takemitsu brought a distinct Japanese spirit and sense of time to his compositions like A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden and his epic work, November Steps featuring shakuhachi master Katsuya Yokoyama.
The late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan came to his greatest renown collaborating with Michael Brook. Brook says he hears a link between the devotional Qawaali music sung by Khan and the electronic trance music. "I think with, there's definitely an ecstatic state process that seems to be part of Sufi music and qawwali," says Brook, who recalls the first time he saw Nusrat perform in his native Pakistan. "There were people, and definitely nobody was drunk or stoned, who were kind of going into states of ecstasy and some of them had to be carried out. So that happens there and I think we've taken a more a, secular approach to it with raves and people taking ecstasy and things like that. But I think in a certain sense they are fundamentally the same thing."
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan felt the same way. "Sometime when I myself was singing, I get lost in the different world and when I'm singing in that sort of mood, it affects more on to the audience. And they also get into the ecstasy."
Altered states and deep connections are at the root of world fusion for many players. This month we've heard Stellamara performing live on Echoes. Los Angeles born Gari Hegedus, who plays oud, violin and just about anything else with strings, says he was drawn to music from other cultures at an early age.
"What attracted me to this particular music is the information that it contains, it comes from an older culture in my mind that was closer to the earth really," he says, while cradling an oud in his lap in an Oakland living room. " And I would imagine that a lot of these sounds came from nature, the music and the rhythms contain that kind of information that feeds us."
"It's an amazing process to, to open the music up without cultural boundaries," chimes in Stellamara singer, Sonja Drakulich. "Because what ends up being exposed is that, is the unity between cultures ends up prevailing and I think that's really important in these times, to actually let that be, to let these modes speak and these rhythms speak together and it unveils the fact that all of this music comes from the heart of a human being, it doesn't have boundaries."
R. Carlos Nakai, featured in this month's on-line concerts, has been syntheszing muscial cultures his entire life. The first thing he did, as a Native American person, was start playing jazz trumpet. When he returned to his native culture with the Native American flute, he wasn't paying traditional melodies and Lakota love songs. He was creating new melodies and improvising freely on the instrument. It wasn't long before Carlos was crossing over to other music so much that it's a wonder he never tripped over the musical threads he was laying down. Carlos has played with Japanese groups like the Wind Travelin band, he records with Tibetan flutist Nawang Khechog and German born pianist, Peter Kater.
"I think in many of the other cultures that I haven't even seen yet, there's probably that sense of understanding, says Nakai. "The essential quality of being a human being on this small planet is one that deals with being inclusive of all the things that surround us."
World Fusion may have reached its apotheosis with Afro Celt Sound System. With musicians from Ireland, England, Africa, and India, the Afro Celts created a raging fusion that took traditional sounds and launched them on electronica rhythms. In concert, borhrans and uillean pipes duel with koras and djembes.
Asked where the musical intersection happens in Afro Celts, founder Simon Emmerson responded, "Where's the intersection? Well, where do you want to start, musically, socially, politically, spiritually?"
Unraveling the folds of this global ensemble is like trying to find the beginning of a Celtic knot. And little wonder. James McNally is the whistle and bodhran player in the group. His description of the recordings sessions for the first Afro Celt album at Peter Gabriel's Realworld studios sound like something from a utopian imagination.
"We had a week in a hut," he recalls. "[Artist] Jamie Reed came up and put up all his hangings, wall hangings and paintings. And the musicians would flow in, they could be Armenian shepherds coming into the studio one day. And suddenly some Indian tabla players show up."
Musicians continue to show up in the most unlikely places. Even in the midst of turmoil with the middle east, bands like Vas, Stellamara, Axiom of Choice, Yuval Ron and Omar Faruk Tekbelik are pursuing a Middle Eastern fusion. Politics is the sound of the world fragmenting and coming apart. World Fusion is the sound of the world coming together, or at least celebrating our common ground.
Perhaps it's a group like Brazil's Uakti who play homemade instruments that sound like they may have come from an ancient culture.... on another planet.
"Yes, I think that all of us on this planet came from different places in the universe and we don't know it," says Uakti member Artur Andres Ribeiro, with tongue only slightly in cheek. "And the music is a way of expressing, sometimes, these different influences."
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reviews of World Fusion CDs:
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Afro Celt Sound System Seed  |
Planet Passion  |
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Aguas da Amazonia  |
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Miles Beyond  |
Mondo Head  |
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