World Festival Reaches Wide to Celebrate Quest for Spirituality

The World Festival of Sacred Music opened its two-week series of Southland programs Saturday night with a lengthy, multihued program at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Ambitious in scope and content, its programming symbolized the broad reach of the entire series via the presentation of music reaching across the globe from India and Tibet to Africa, Cuba and the United States.

At the core of the performances rested the inextricable link between music expression and the quest for meaning within the infinite that is the goal of all spiritual pursuits. And what was most fascinating about this concert--and, in fact, what is most compelling about the entire festival schedule--is the extraordinary diversity of means that humankind has employed, over thousands of years, in its efforts to accomplish that goal.

Humanity’s first musical instrument was surely the voice, imitating sounds of nature, furthering communication, accompanying work and celebrating communal gatherings. Vocal sounds undoubtedly also played a significant role in the mysteries of early spirituality, perhaps not unlike the animalistic similes associated with the many still existent shamanistic rituals. And the call-and-response pattern--clearly established very early as an interactive expression between individual and group--was a natural use of sound and rhythm as an organizing technique, present in virtually every musical culture.

The importance of the voice was identified at the start of the Royce program via the presence of the Zangdokpalri Monks and Nuns of Tibet, led by Kunzang Dechen Lingpa. Although the seven-voice ensemble accompanied themselves with two-headed drums, bells and thighbone trumpets, it was their chanting that was at the heart of their richly meditative presentation.

The vocalized repetitions are intended, in Buddhist practice, to establish an atmosphere for internal visualizations in an effort to purify the corporeal gates and clear internal blockages. The Zangdokpalri Monks and Nuns offered a series of relatively brief examples of the process, establishing a remarkably pensive spiritual atmosphere within the distinctly non-pensive environs of Royce Hall.

In music’s long passage through history, after the voice came the drum. And the second group of performers on the opening-night concert--Puerto Rican-born master drummer Angel Ruben Maldonado Cruz (“Cachete”) and his ensemble Los Majaderos--illustrated one of the ways in which percussion became linked with the voice.

His group, which included four drummers (including himself) and three singers, moved across the spectrum of Afro-Caribbean musical culture, colorfully exploring sounds ranging from the bata drumming of Cuba’s Santeria tradition to the secular sounds of the rumba. The music was both visceral and hypnotic--as trance-inducing as the efforts of the Zangdokpalri performers, although in a completely different fashion, at the service of completely different artistic and spiritual goals.

Flutes and stringed instruments were the likely followers of voice and percussion. The former arrived initially as perhaps accidental discoveries, particularly attractive for their capacity to mimic the sounds of birds and small animals. And, once the bow was created as a method of propelling arrows, it also arrived as a sound-making device, initially via a single string, eventually via the multiplicity of forms that followed.

Prince Diabate, whose large, colorfully garbed ensemble closed the opening half of the festival opener, is a master kora player from Guinea, West Africa. The instrument’s unique structure--a set of strings attached to a pole extending out of a large, resonating gourd--is found throughout Africa, undoubtedly the sophisticated contemporary end product of centuries of instrumental evolution.

The descendant of a long line of Guinean griots--the storytelling carriers of history in many African cultures--Diabate is also a determinedly contemporary artist. Connecting his kora to electronic amplification, strutting the stage in rock guitarist manner (he has been described as the “Jimi Hendrix of the kora”) and offering music combining African instruments (the xylophone-like balafon) and the tambin (a flute from the Fulani people) with electric guitar, bass and occasional funk rhythms, his music was more culturally heterogeneous than spiritually convincing. But the “animation” dancing of Mariatou Camara--present on too few numbers--maintained a more direct connection with African roots.

Like so many other aspects of contemporary society, the festival opener was confronted with the reality of the post-Sept. 11 world when the originally scheduled qawwali singer Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was, at the last minute, unable to fly to Los Angeles from his native Pakistan. Fortunately, a superb replacement was available: Indian vocal artist Lakshmi Shankar.

In Indian classical music, the voice, the drum and stringed instruments reach an extraordinary level of sophistication without in any way abandoning implicit spiritual connections. Shankar’s marvelous presentation--beginning with a classical kheyal and continuing with a lighter thumri--was both an extraordinary example of vocal mastery and an illustration of manner in which Indian classical music, with its vast array of ragas and talas, all associated with spiritual factors, links the root sources of music to its most complex manifestation.

It was a bit strange, however, to hear Shankar performing with an ensemble that was reportedly scheduled to appear with Khan, the combination resulting in an odd blend of classical Indian vocalization accompanied in qawwali style.

The climactic event of the long evening was the performance of a set of Duke Ellington’s sacred music by the Luckman Jazz Orchestra, led by James Newton--yet another example of the most contemporary manifestation of spiritual artistry.

Unfortunately, the orchestra was not well served by the audio engineers, who imposed a notion of sound reproduction that almost completely distorted the ensemble’s sound.

It was bad enough that the piano, bass and drums--as so often happens in big band concerts--were amplified well beyond the level of the 13 horn players. But, even worse, tuba player William Roper’s horn (which was directed toward its own microphone) was reproduced so loudly that the gorgeous ensemble textures of the Ellington score were blown away.

And that was a shame, since the orchestra played superbly, with fine soloing from saxophonists Jack Nimitz and Frederick Keith Fiddmont, trumpeters Bobby Rodriguez and Nolan Shaheed and pianist Lanny Hartley (among others).

Less can be said of the two vocal soloists, Henrietta Davis and Cedric Berry, who would do well to pay more attention to the majesty of the Ellington score than to the sound of their own voices.

(One hopes the Luckman orchestra’s performance of a more extended program of Ellington’s sacred music on Saturday at the Faithful Central Bible Church will offer a more faithful reproduction of the ensemble’s exceptional playing.)

A performance by the amazing young tap dancer Landry Barb II ended the concert on an upbeat note, his enthusiasm and vitality providing a compelling example of the unspoken, unspecific quality of spirituality that is always present in music that touches the heart.