Arohi Brings the Genres Together

It hasn’t exactly been receiving a great deal of media attention, but one of the most intriguing musical developments of the new millennium has been the increasing interactivity between jazz and world music artists. The Arohi Ensemble, led by guitarist (and sitarist) Paul Z. Livingstone, leans more strongly in the direction of its various world music elements, but both the spirit and the articulation of jazz are essential to its expression.

On Friday night at the Eagle Rock Community Cultural Center, the Arohi players--Livingstone, percussionist Leonice Shinneman and bassist Anand Bennett, with special guest guitarist Miroslav Tadic--seamlessly combined elements of jazz, Indian classical music and Brazilian rhythms with their own stylistically unfettered improvising.

Livingstone, who was born in Beirut, performed on a nine-string guitar of his own design. Using the instrument’s fretless fingerboard to slip and slide pitches, he ornamented many of his phrases with the whirling melodic curlicues and fleet rhythmic strumming characteristic of Indian music-making. Far from serving as an instrumental variation on the sitar, however, Livingstone’s guitar, and the way he employed it, continued to retain both the timbral and the articulative qualities of jazz--making for an extremely compelling combination of sounds and styles.

Livingstone’s associates were equally winning. Bennett moved easily from electric bass to the fluid sounds of his own “acoustic contracello.” And Shinneman, a percussion wizard, managed to use everything from a Western-style drum kit to tabla drums to the Indian clay pot, generating a flow in which rhythms were subtly transformed, moving from jazz through samba into the talas of Indian rhythm. Tadic, in his too-brief solo segment, fully justified his reputation as an artist who is equally at home in blues, jazz, Baroque and contemporary classical music.

Also on the program, Lian Ensemble offered a set of “mystical Persian music” highlighted by the extraordinarily mobile singing of Khosro Ansari. But the highlight of the program was the Arohi Ensemble, one of the many newly emerging groups eagerly in search of the unity that is at the core of all the world’s musics.