Polite Cross-Cultural Exchange in Glass’ Pleasant ‘Screens’

Collaboration runs deep in the creative ethos and the machinery of composer Philip Glass’ musical life. Glass maintains long-standing liaisons that are renewable--and sometimes tour-able. That’s the case with the versatile West African griot, or storyteller, Foday Musa Suso. They first got together in 1989 to create music for the Jean Genet play, “The Screens,” about tension between Algerians and French colonialists.

Their traveling show of the same name, which includes music from the play and subsequent works, landed in Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater on Tuesday. With music wavering between West African and Euro-American ideas, pianist Glass and his longtime reed player Jon Gibson bookended instrumentalist Suso--on kora, donsongoni, nyanyer and vocals--and percussionist Yousif Sheronick on stage.

What works in theater doesn’t always play out in concert. Despite noble efforts to find a common cultural ground between Suso’s undulant, soulful grooves and Glass’ classic primary-colored harmonic language and comparatively stiff rhythms, the music too often lapsed into atmospheric blandness, going nowhere, if pleasantly.

Some pieces worked, such as “Land of the Dead,” a haunting lament built from Glass’ simple two-chord vamp, Gibson’s supple, echoic melody, and Suso’s one-note figure on the one-string nyanyer. But the evening’s best moments came from Suso’s inspiring showcases or such strictly Glass-ian pieces as “Night on the Balcony.”

Overall, we got a sense of distant cultures trying earnestly to converse, but never getting beyond mutual politeness.