Music Reviews : Anthropological Vaudeville From Xochimoki at LACMA

Since its gala opening--with Igor Stravinsky himself on the podium--in the spring of 1965, the Leo S. Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has subsequently hosted hundreds of presentations, most of them under-attended.

The exceptions are rare, but sometimes memorable. A large audience showed up Wednesday night, for instance, for the fascinating anthropological vaudeville given by the two members of Xochimoki.

The duo--its name means Flower of the Ancient Ones--specializes in playing more than 100 native instruments of Mesoamerica, some of them literally a thousand years old, singing the songs of native cultures, even dancing now and again.

What musicians Mazatl Galindo and Jim Berenholtz have challenged themselves to do seems monumental.

They have learned how to operate an orchestraful of sometimes complex instruments, have memorized thousands of words in many tongues--the cultures represented include, according to the program, “the Maya, Mexica, Toltec, Zapotec, Mixtec, Totonac, Raramuri, Purepecha, Seri and Huichol”--and have attempted to bring it all together in a viable entertainment.

For the most part, they succeed, at least as sampled for 96 minutes on this occasion.

Without becoming didactic, the personable, serious performers present a panorama of native expressions, stressing the communal aspects of its various components. They wear authentic clothes, move from instrument to instrument smoothly, vary the tempos of their repertory, indicate the wide-ranging byways of complicated folkloric traditions.

Most important, they put these expressions in context when they observe that their broad repertory exists at that point in culture “where music, science and spirituality come together.”

Alas, near the end of their show, they add superfluous 20th-Century technology in the form of musical backgrounds provided by synthesizer. Though neither tasteless nor vulgar, this addition skewers the performers’ authenticity and brings into question their integrity as compactors of music, science and spirituality.