Tour 2005
Philadelphia,
April 9 Review & Photos
Walker Art Center, April 17 videos
LA Times Review April
2, 2005
East meets West in a harmonious fusion
By Don Heckman, Special to The Times
"World music" has always been a generously inclusive label, encompassing
the most rooted traditional expressions to glossy, studio-packaged assemblages
of synths, grooves and aural exotica. Where does an ensemble consisting of a
Tibetan Buddhist nun and a pair of Minneapolis-based musicians fit into this
kaleidoscopic picture? In a niche that is all its own, a place in which strikingly
different cultural backgrounds find common creative cause.
The performance by this extraordinary trio — Buddhist nun Ani Chöying
Drolma, guitarist Steve Tibbetts and percussionist Mark Anderson — Thursday
at the Skirball Center was an intriguing display of empathic cross-cultural
musicality.
Drolma, who entered a nunnery at 13 (she is now 33), has been educated in meditation,
chants, rituals and ceremonies. A transcendent figure on stage, she conveyed
the chants and the songs in vocal timbres alternately throaty and guttural,
warm-toned and lyrical, shimmering with an inner sense of spirituality. Tibbetts,
who has been releasing fascinating recordings since his initial, eclectic album,
"YR," in 1980, is no world-music dilettante, having traveled frequently
to Nepal (and elsewhere). His warm guitar playing, enhanced by the occasional
triggering of subtle audio textures, added welcome harmonic foundations to Drolma's
largely pentatonic melodies. Anderson's percussion — cymbals, tabla drums,
frame drums and more — enhanced the music without intruding on its focus.
There were a few passages, to be sure, in which the balance between East and
West tilted a bit too far in the direction of lush, Western entertainment qualities.
More often, Drolma, Tibbetts and Anderson revealed the appealing aspects of
world music's inclusive cultural embrace.