O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Fest Offers Kaleidoscope of Sound : The event gives stage to variety of ethnic groups. Despite some flaws, there was lots of enrichment.

You could call it the fair to celebrate the Orange County that the Orange County Fair forgot: While the county fair may have had a bee-coated clarinetist, it offered little representation of the diverse ethnic groups who now call Orange County home. But the Kaleidoscope Festival, held over the weekend in UC Irvine’s Aldrich Park, more than made up for that lack.

The Historical and Cultural Foundation of Orange County, which organizes the fest, didn’t leave many cultural stones unturned in this, its second, biannual Kaleidoscope. The lineup of Southern California-based performers included an Iranian orchestra, Israeli folk dancers, Irish balladeers, an African-American gospel group, American Indian dancers, Vietnamese traditional musicians, Chinese opera, Japanese sword dancers, Hispanic folk dancers, and a mock East Indian wedding party. Even the Marshall Islands were represented.

The fest was spread throughout the campus’s bowl-like park, with two general performance stages abetted by pavilions, food booths, teahouses, stages, displays and a crafts mart representing more than 20 cultures.

The main-stage entertainments Saturday included amplified feet, as East Indian dancer Bhairavi Kumar accompanied tabla rhythms with the thumping of her feet. That was followed in short order by Irish jigs and harp tunes played on a hammered dulcimer. (An example of how musical ideas spread through cultures is the hammered dulcimer, which originated in Iran but also appeared at the fest in Irish and Vietnamese ensembles.)

The Inter-Tribal Dancers of Los Angeles offered a program of Southwest and Plains Indian dances, including a Pueblo Eagle Dance, in which a solo dancer donned feathers and mimicked flight. Drummer/chanter John Dawson, an Apache, provided an insightful narrative to the dances, something more of the fest’s performances could have benefited from. The only introduction many acts had was a KBIG-FM radio personality struggling to pronounce their names.

Too bad, for some of the most fascinating things at Kaleidoscope were made more fascinating when given explanations or placed in a cultural context. There aren’t many other places in the county where you could both hear a mridungam, and learn that the Indian drum’s twin heads are treated with an iron-filing paste and--no kidding--a cream-of-wheat paste to produce different resonances.

The one gospel group that did show up Saturday (another didn’t), the Stanley Kidd Choir, didn’t seem to have providence working in its favor. Evidently someone behind the scenes had plugged in a hair dryer or some such and blew out all the power going to the stage.

The electric piano and other instruments did finally get some juice, but the choir turned in an uneven performance. The Shamesh dance group performed lively Israeli dances, to both traditional Yiddish tunes and Ofra Haza disco tracks. The Navigators were five fellows from the Marshall Islands wearing grass skirts and dancing with large sticks while a conga player chanted something that sounded like a South Seas’ “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” (Dancing with sticks was a pretty common feature in many performances. As the late sage Elvis Presley once sang: “If you can’t find a partner, use a wooden chair”).

The example of Peking Opera provided on the main stage represented only a very narrow slice of that tradition. It came chiefly in the form of one juggler who balanced a sword on a stick, his moves restrained by the low stage roof, all the while distorted, taped music played.

The standout performance Saturday came from Lac Hong’s Vietnamese Traditional Music Group. Though given a performance slot that allowed time for only two tunes, the 14-piece ensemble’s music was both exotic and inviting. The central instrument, played by Vincent Pham, is called a one-string , and the string in question is moored at one end of a slender steel bar. When bent, that bar changes the string’s pitch and adds a vibrato quaver, which Saturday sounded like a steel guitar at its sweetest and eeriest.

Theirs was the only performance to approach the quality and depth of Sunday’s show-closer, Oshagh. That ensemble, expanded from its usual eight members to 11 for this performance, is sort of an Iranian version of the Chieftains that plays traditional music with classical precision and rustic spirit. There are several virtuoso performers in the band, particularly tar (a banjo-like instrument) soloist Ahmad Rahmanipour, santur (a 72-string dulcimer) player Esmail Tehrani and tombak drummer Reza Torchizy.

The ensemble’s most rousing performances were two numbers accompanied by dancers. On the first, “Reng,” five percussionists opened with a study in polyrhythms, Torchizy soloing above the boiling beats on a huge, metallic-toned tombak .

Other standouts on Sunday’s bill included Daion Taiko Japanese drummers, who blended dance and martial arts disciplines in the style of Japanese drum athlete/fanatics Ondeko Za and Kodo. There also were Japanese Kenbu sword dancers. As a male solo vocalist sang in Japanese of honor and gallant death, dancers, both male and female, performed the highly stylized, graceful and solemn motions of the dance. A sharp contrast was offered by Relampago del Cielo, a Santa Ana-based dance troupe that performed fabulously spirited regional Mexican dances.

Caribbean Heat, billed as “fire dancers,” evidently left their butane at home. But the three dancers, from Barbados and Trinidad, did engage in some incendiary moves, dancing on nails and broken glass and doing an utterly salacious limbo, all to taped Soca music.

As beguiling as this year’s Kaleidoscope was in its dizzying display of world cultures, it often was bewildering in its slapdash organization.

At least one person who stopped at an information booth to inquire about the location of one performance was brusquely told to “Buy a program.” That program itself was often scarcely more helpful, thanks to scheduling changes, numerous no-shows, and a wildly unrealistic production schedule.

Some groups scheduled to appear on one stage turned up at the other; several more simply didn’t show up at all. Whole Scottish pipe bands, gospel choirs and Armenian Cultural Foundations are presumably still lost somewhere in the ozone.

The biggest and surely most avoidable failing was the way production schedules very often factored in no setup time whatsoever. According to the schedule, an 11-piece orchestra was expected to begin the instant a dance troupe stopped, ignoring the time required to set up chairs, music stands and 11 microphones and get a rough sound balance. It was only an incredibly adept sound crew that kept the schedule from becoming an utter shambles.

Compounding the problem, several performers appeared more than once and on different stages, necessitating more setup time. That also contributed to the performance times being limited to between 15 and 30 minutes, which in many cases, particularly that of the Vietnamese music group, was far too little time to share such a rich culture.

Much of the music provided for the dance performances was necessarily on tape, but often those tapes were hardly performance-grade, being distorted and clumsily edited.

Other problems resulted from the fest having a successful turnout--organizers said two-day attendance was 36,000, up from 26,000 in 1989.

On Sunday, the seating area in front of the fest’s Grove Stage often proved too small for its audience. Most of the fair’s food booths were crowded along two sides of a narrow lane, making it nearly untraversable much of the time, particularly on Sunday after a horse in the East Indian wedding procession left a steaming impediment right in the midst of it all.

These are minor considerations compared to what a poorer thing Orange County would be without the Kaleidoscope Festival, but all could be corrected easily to make the production quality of the next event more consonant with the wealth of experiences it offers.