Terry Riley, on the cusp of 70

At one point during his birthday celebration at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on Tuesday night, composer Terry Riley said to the audience that in his next lifetime he plans to go directly from 69 to 71.

Not if his fans have anything to say about it.

Given the sheer level of bliss produced by this event -- a 3 1/2 -hour concert that included a major new work for the Kronos Quartet and pipa player Wu Man, pieces written in tribute to the birthday boy by John Adams and Pauline Oliveros, and performances by Riley and colleagues from the worlds of new music, jazz and Indian music -- there seems little doubt about the idyllic promise of Riley’s next life. In his nearly 70 years (his birthday is June 24), he has acquired more positive musical karma than anyone else could have in at least two lifetimes.

“He was the first composer to bring the pleasure principle back into contemporary music,” Adams said at the event, part of this year’s UC Santa Cruz Pacific Rim Music Festival. “Into this garden of music comes the gardener,” the astoundingly virtuosic and delightfully mischievous tabla player Zakir Hussain said of Riley during a half-hour invocation that began the evening. But none of that gets Riley off the hook. If he is in demand, that too is his karma.

Given the enormous influence Riley has had on music, from his 1984 “In C,” which inspired Minimalism, to his seminal influence on today’s integration of Western and non-Western music, this concert, the most important of several 70th birthday events, might seem to have been a bit out of the way. And the barnlike Santa Cruz Civic is a perfectly awful concert hall.

But some of the most important American music and music-making has come from this area, the land of composers Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell and home of the Cabrillo Festival in the summer. Besides, the whole point of Riley’s music is transformation and transport, “a ride on a rainbow,” as Riley sang late in the evening when he and his colleagues launched into a transcendent version of -- of all things! -- Duke Ellington and Juan Tizol’s “Caravan.”

The central work was Riley’s new quintet, “The Cusp of Magic,” which the Kronos and Wu Man had premiered two days earlier in Berkeley. It is in six movements, lasts 45 minutes and explores with remarkable ease the seemingly distant sound and aesthetic worlds of the Western string quartet and the plucked Chinese pipa.

The Kronos and Wu have worked together before, in Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera.” And Wu, who is one of the most elegant musicians before the public today, has shown a special flair for crossing over, inspiring some of Philip Glass’ and Lou Harrison’s best music. Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road project would be of an inferior silk without her.

Riley says in his notes that he wanted in this quintet to give Western themes an Eastern accent and vice versa. But the crossing over goes deeper than that, with traditions nested within traditions. Several movements are structured according to Indian rhythmic cycles.

The great beauty of this rich score, though, comes from the fact that it needs no translation. A lullaby -- at one point Wu sings a Chinese one with exquisite delicacy -- is a lullaby. And the big surprise of “Cusp of Magic” is that Riley goes from age 69 to 69 months. Halfway through, the toys came out. David Harrington, the Kronos’ first violinist, has been collecting toys from around the world for his new granddaughter, and Riley fell in love with them. They talk and squawk. When one repeated, “I want to be a cowboy,” waves of delight rippled through the hall.

The score opens and closes in ritual. With shades of “In C,” Harrington maintains a rhythmic pulse on a peyote rattle throughout the first movement. Sweetness sometimes turns to sadness. A dark cloud floats over the movement “The Nursery,” which Riley explains expresses his concern over the threat he fears from U.S. war posturing.

But contentment is the overarching theme. Elizabethan melodies, a recording of folk songs sung by a Russian doll, the harmonic progressions common in Cuban popular music -- all wonderfully suit the string quartet and pipa.

Elsewhere in the Kronos’ portion of the program, Oliveros paid tribute to her 50-year musical friendship with Riley with the ethereal “70 chords for Terry,” which she wrote for the group.

Electric violinist Tracy Silverman played the “Sri Moonshine” movement from Adams’ “The Dharma at Big Sur.” Sri Moonshine is the name of Riley’s ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Silverman was exciting, but his accompaniment, a synthesizer recording of the orchestral parts, was not. “Five Small Pieces,” written in 1956 by Riley’s lifelong friend and collaborator La Monte Young, demonstrated how far they both have traveled on their road to Minimalism.

Riley’s keyboard and vocal performances came at the beginning, as part of the lengthy invocation, and at the end, when he was joined by his “All Stars.” They included Silverman, Hussain, the captivating dancer, and singer Antonia Minnecola, guitarist Gyan Riley, saxophonist George Brooks and bass clarinetist John Sackett. Call it multicultural jazz or whatever you like. Riley called it “Night Ragas and Beat Sutras.”

Ellington got an Indian accent. Minimalist patterns emerged from nowhere and kept things driving. Hussain percolated everything. There is nothing like this aural mix. Yet every style was at home with every other. You felt that the level of musical hospitality had never been higher.

It looks as if Riley is going to have a very happy birthday. He deserves it.