Vashti Provides Instruments of Healing

The winter solstice--the shortest day of the year, the point at which the days once again start to become longer--is a time of celebration in every world culture. Appropriately, the celebrations often are accompanied by music filled with joy at the return of the sun (with its bounty of metaphoric and spiritual symbolism). And on Friday night at the Electric Lodge in Venice, the percussion group Vashti added another element, especially vital as this strange year reels toward its close: the element of healing.

Can healing come from drumming? Why not? Beyond the voice, the drum is humanity’s first instrument, its usage generating togetherness and communication, a shared way to deal with the shadows and phantoms that dwell beyond the perimeter of the campfires.

Vashti, led by the versatile percussionist Adam Rudolph, underscored that view with a performance in which one aspect of community after another was established, from individual performer to paired performers, from collective playing to a mutual rhythm-making experience embracing the entire, packed-house audience.

Wiping out the notion of stylistic borders and political boundary lines, the eight-man ensemble included, in addition to Rudolph, Indian tabla player Abhiman Kaushal; American percussionists Brad Dutz and Munyungo Jackson; Iranian percussionists Mehrdad Arabi and Pejman Hadadi; a versatile musician from Bali, I Nyomen Wenten; and one from Java, Djoko Walujo.

It would be hard to imagine a percussion instrument that was not present in the colorful array of musical devices covering the stage. But more impressive was the remarkable diversity of the performances themselves--mystical combinations of flutes and cymbals, shimmering organic sounds generated from a quartet of clay pots, plangent gamelan timbres, interspersed with powerful, all-join-in rhythmic exchanges. Call it an embracing, healing way to bring back the light.