Fest Strikes a Common Chord

Remember hootenannies? Those gatherings, so popular in the ‘60s, in which folks sat around swapping songs? Think of the Stimmen World Music Festival, which made a stop at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Sunday night, as a kind of world music hootenanny. The festival is actually the product of an annual German event that has brought together dozens of performers over the past eight years. For this tour, the collective included artists from India, Hungary, Switzerland, Mali, Madagascar and the United States.

Opening with an ensemble number titled “Djalako Avao,” which included a melange of styles, energized by generically African rhythms, the evening proceeded through solo offerings interspersed with more group efforts. Despite the desire for universality, musical differences were not easily resolved in the ensemble numbers, tending to frame those pieces in relatively simple settings.

A rare exception was a pure blues devised by American singer/performance artist Rinde Eckert, in which--remarkably--common ground was found for excursions by Indian singer Sudha Ragunathan, Hungarian singer Juhacz “Mitsou” Miczura, Swiss singer/dulcimer player Corin Curschellas, Malian singer/drummer Abdoulaye Diabate and the Madagascar duo of Jean Ramanambitana and Yvon Rakotonanahary.

But it was the individual performances that were most compelling: Miczura’s penetrating voice, a classic Hungarian sound; the remarkable vocal gymnastics of Ragunathan, whose rendering of the blues could have passed for bebop phrases; Diabate’s dramatic voice and presence, sweeping across the stage like a white-winged eagle; Curschellas’ colorful array of vocal textures, filled with squeaks, blips and instrumental simulations; the sweet-toned blending of Ramanambitana and Rakotonanahary; and Eckert’s astonishing versatility, easily embracing everything from countertenor balladry to eccentric combinations of voice, guitar, keyboards and wooden flute.

Best of all, there was the continuing revelation of the versatility of the human voice, of the way its diverse potential seems to contain resources for every imaginable form of cultural expression.