Maal’s Subdued Set Turns Lively

Baaba Maal was hoping to create an intimate, acoustic setting for his concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday. Touring in support of his latest album, “Missing You,” which was recorded in outdoor settings in his native Senegal, he arrived with a small ensemble of guitars, percussion, hoddu (a small, four-stringed instrument), acoustic bass and guitar (courtesy of his longtime musical companion, Mansour Seck).

The evening began in quiet fashion--a marked contrast with the high-decibel music that had been gushing out of the hall’s speaker system prior to Maal’s appearance on stage. Once he arrived, however, he immediately took command. A highly dramatic presence, wrapped in aristocratic white garb, he played a few songs accompanied only by his guitar and the lyre-like kora of Kauding Cissoko.

Other musicians joined them one by one--first Seck, whose presence always seems to bring a galvanizing energy to Maal’s programs, then percussionist Bahkane Seck, bassist El Hadji Niang and hoddu player Barou Sall.

It soon became apparent, however, that the concert hall setting simply wasn’t going to approximate the ambience of an African village. Nor did it help that Maal was relatively motionless for the first part of the program.

In his Hollywood Bowl appearance last summer (which is undoubtedly what attracted many of the Royce attendees) he was a whirlwind of dance and movement, his leaps and twirls accompanied by a large, rhythmically dynamic ensemble.

Despite the magic of his remarkable voice, moving ecstatically through the repetitions of traditional-style story songs, the performance was running in low gear. Perhaps recognizing this, Maal became more active, adding dance steps and generating more physicality in the presentation. He was joined by Mansour Seck, who, despite his blindness, was almost as active as Maal, urging the audience to applaud, dancing in place and singing harmony and lead lines.

The result was an immediate upswing in creative energy, producing more vibrant interaction among the musicians and the establishment of an interaction with the crowd. It wasn’t the laid-back intimacy Maal described at the start of the performance, but--even given the fact that few in the hall could understand the Fulani language of the songs--it finally became the communal experience he was seeking.

Halfway through the performance, composer Hans Zimmer and a few other players joined the ensemble to re-create some of the Maal music from “Black Hawk Down.” Presumably useful as a promotional tool for the film, it was an unnecessary distraction from the Maal program--somewhat like sitting in a movie theater and being forced to watch commercials until the picture begins.