A World of Music : Eclectic ensemble Eternal Wind will tour with its own special brand of international sounds

Put a dumbek with a pi’pa, toss in a suling with a ney, and what have you got? Alphabet soup? A bunch of Scrabble winners? An Abbott and Costello routine?

Not even close. All the above tongue-twisting words are actually the names of only a few of the musical instruments employed by an eclectic musical ensemble called Eternal Wind.

Organized a decade ago, the group is one of the more long-term participants in an emerging form of musical expression loosely identified as World Music. The members of Eternal Wind--students and faculty from CalArts and UCLA--view its growing popularity with some bemusement. Individually and collectively, they have been making their own brand of World Music for more than 10 years. This spring, Eternal Wind will tour Europe with Yusef Lateef, a veteran of both World Music and jazz.

“We try to approach it from our own, hopefully unique perspective,” said Adam Rudolph, the group’s percussionist, in a recent conversation at his instrument-filled house in Venice, “but we certainly realize that there is a fair number of other musicians who are directly or indirectly involved with what is referred to by the media as World Music.”

A “fair number” might be underestimating it. David Byrne’s recent foray into Brazilian music and Paul Simon’s African pop-tinged “Graceland” of 1987 were two of the more visible manifestations of the growing interest in non-European-based musical forms.

Beyond the eclectic syntheses of artists like Byrne and Simon are the purer currents of such music as African hip-hop, Brazilian samba, forro and lambada, Jamaican reggae, Puerto Rican salsa, Algerian rai, Spanish flamenco, Zairean soukous and Nigerian juju.

Rudolph, however, perceives Eternal Wind’s approach as far more than a synthesis of exotic elements. “What we try and maintain in our group,” he said, “is a real linkage to the history and tradition of African-American or so-called ‘jazz’ music. And that means improvisation. We try to maintain the level and standard of improvisation that exists in the music of people like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman.”

The jazz connection is a natural extension of the backgrounds of at least three of the group’s four members. Trumpeter Charles Moore (now working on a doctorate in cross-cultural music studies at UCLA) and woodwind player Ralph Jones (working on a bachelor’s degree in ethnomusicology at UCLA) are veterans of Detroit’s fertile jazz scene, with experience ranging from Yusef Lateef and Pharaoh Sanders to Stanley Cowell and Sam Rivers.

Former Chicagoan Rudolph, who has a master’s degree in fine art and teaches at CalArts, has performed with Don Cherry, Herbie Hancock and Jon Hassel.

Eternal Wind’s fourth member, Uruguayan guitarist Federico Ramos, has toured Spain with various flamenco groups, as well as performing with such internationalists as L. Subramanian and Strunz & Farah. He is now working on a bachelor of fine arts degree at CalArts.

Any given performance by the group might feature as many as 50 different instruments from all parts of the world. The dumbek, for example, is a tunable North African drum--one of a vast battery of shakers, beaters and noisemakers that are the performance tools of percussionist Rudolph. Woodwind specialist Jones supplements his saxophones and clarinets with an array of indigenous flutes, including the wooden Indonesian ney and suling, as well as the brassy-sounding, double-reeded Indian shenai.

Trumpeter Moore occasionally adds the sonorous tones of the Indian conch and the Tibetan long trumpet to his repertoire. And guitarist Ramos is adept on everything from the multi-stringed, pentatonic Chinese pi’pa to the Japanese shamisen.

“We do play a lot of unusual devices,” said Rudolph. “But all these instruments are just tools for music making. The technology that went into making wooden flutes and talking drums was the perfect marriage of the technology and the music of a particular place and culture and time. We add today’s technology--MIDI, synthesizers, electronics, etc.--in the same spirit, because they reflect the technology and culture of our place and time.”

Moore took the thought one step further, explaining how Eternal Wind views the connection between music and instrument as almost symbiotic. “The fact is,” he said, “that we don’t even write specifically for instruments anymore. We write out of feelings and ideas about where we want the music to go. Then we adapt it for the instruments.

“One piece might require that I approach the trumpet from a language other than Afro-American improvisation,” he continued. “It might have a Hindu or a Brahmin or a Ghanaian influence. As a player, I have to make an attempt to understand what that language is and try to get it on my trumpet. And that’s part of the challenge of bringing all these elements together.”

Eternal Wind’s success in doing just that is evident in their concerts, which can be almost eerily atmospheric. The New York Times, for example, described a 1988 program in glowing terms: “The group’s semi-improvisatory style pointedly juxtaposed Western and non-Western modes in loosely connected pieces that evoked a natural world of wind-rustled grasslands and grazing animals.”

But such atmosphere doesn’t come without work. The group, as Moore explained, approaches the music from a scholarly, as well as a creative point of view.

“We believe in being research-based,” he explained. “If you listen to the Juilliard Quartet, those guys are deep into what they’re doing. They’re not only artists, they’re musicologists, and they can give you the complete background on the music they’re playing.

“Well, we’re trying to do the same kind of thing. For us, none of our pieces are stand-alone product. They all come from somewhere, from some source. Because we’ve done our homework on those sources, the music can be free to constantly shape itself. At its best, it has no frozen moments.”

In fact, the ability to evoke different musical cultures without misunderstanding or trivialization may be the unique aspect of Eternal Wind’s music. As Down Beat put it in describing the group’s first recording (Eternal Wind, Flying Fish 348), “The quartet travels the mysterious African grasslands, the Orient and elsewhere as keen observers taken with how different peoples think, worship and live. This wonderful album reflects their concern.”

The Eternal Wind musicians take a reasoned, if somewhat cautious view of the growing media fascination with World Music.

“I’m glad that there’s interest,” Rudolph said. “It’s sort of inevitable anyhow. Just as it’s inevitable that people in Africa love to listen to Jimi Hendrix and James Brown. But what’s really interesting to me is the question of how the different musical cultures are going to maintain their identities as they become more and more in contact with each other. How do we avoid winding up with all the colors of the rainbow mixed up into the same music?”

Moore was a bit more phlegmatic. In his view, the cultural mingling of different musics has always taken place--only the recent media attention is new.

“Look,” he explained, “they were blending different musical ideas in Africa before we knew how to write. Take a look at Gypsies who start over in India and wind up in Spain. Then their music continues on to Cuba and way down to Uruguay. It even becomes part of what Jelly Roll Morton called ‘the Spanish tinge’ in jazz.

“But the communications media has divided all this stuff up over the years, making artificial categories that don’t have anything to do with the continuity of the music. So what’s happened now? Perestroika is in, world communication is in, so World Music is in too.”

Moore and Rudolph recognize the commercial value of the media attention, they prefer to take the long view of their music.

“I think what it really comes down to,” concluded Rudolph, “is that what Eternal Wind is doing is trying to understand music in its purest form, removed from stylistic idiosyncrasies. We’re rooted in particular traditions and perspectives . . . but we try to look at all musics equally.

“It’s easy to hear the differences--to hear the things we don’t understand. But to hear what’s universal in all musics--that’s the great challenge. And it’s the best reward, too. Because we’re never bored.”