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7 August 2005
Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
Jessica, her mother, a few of her family friends, Colette and I went to the world music concert featuring Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble at the Hollywood Bowl. Getting to the Hollywood Bowl from any part of the Greater Los Angeles suburbia is quite easy with the Park and Ride shuttle system about which I have written in the past.After alighting at the Bowl, we were swarmed by a multitude of summer outfits and just one man in a blazer around a close-necked T-shirt. Huge picnic boxes, little vanity cases, small suitcases on wheels were all brought out in huge numbers -- all for an evening of music and meals. We climbed up the entrance towards our seats on the huge deck of the Bowl amphitheatre and moved past static salesgirls in a reversal of roles crying themselves hoarse "Don't forget your programs! $1 each" and "Binoculars for rent, $7 each". For 75 cents however, each of us availed of cushions for our seats (or -- as I recently found out to my surprise -- tashreefs).
We spread out our dinners and amongst ourselves -- Colette had with her some vegetarian sushi, Jessica and her mother fixed a grand feast of various Chinese delicacies like mushroom noodles, buns stuffed with pork and mushroom and the Chinese equivalent of the South Indian military canteen variant of the parathas and I brought some puliyogirai rice seasoned amply with groundnuts, coconut flakes and curry leaves -- there was an entire continent's worth of exotic cuisine. Our American neighbours on the row behind us could not but stop murmurring about the food and one of them bent down remarking how wonderful our fare smelled. I volunteered some of my puliyogirai rice which she gently turned down. As Jessica offered me some luscious lychees and as I popped one after another into my mouth sucking off as much of its sweet ambrosia before spitting out the seed, a guessing game in hushed tones followed behind us with the ladies wondering what we were tasting. One lady had hastily concluded that it was a seedless cousin of the lychees not having waited for me to toss out the seed while the other triumphantly and self-vindictively asserted they were indeed the lychees soon as the rump seed was deposited on to our makeshift trash can. We in our turn drooled at the victuals our friends to the front of us brought with them. The Bowl was indeed all about the food and very little about the music -- Colette reminded me how people at concerts in Los Angeles would applaud between movements not waiting patiently to unload their pregnant appreciation for good music, this as opposed to staid, soberly dressed New Yorkers who brought with their sashays and ermine coats also a fine and studied applause as well as a table etiquette to disband it in measured and appropriately timed portions.
The opening act of the program featured Zola, a singer from Ulan Bator who sang majestically holding a note for what seemed like ages and then moving onto another. Mr Ma's accompaniment on an instrument quite unlike the cello in looks chimed in well with her resonating performance. Following Zola, the ensemble moved next to India and featured Sandeep Das on the tabla. Mr Das started off with a few sundry jokes in a sincere attempt to roll his R's about how it was the only time he could get the strings to perform behind the percussion instruments in order to explain the odd placement. He performed a piece he called Tarang which was a mix of a cycle of 6 beats alternating with another 16 beats long. The Tarang troupe also featured a dafli, a khanjira and of course the ubiquitous Yo-Yo Ma on the cello. Towards the end, Mr Das even attempted a little kunnakol although he slurred quite a few of the aksharas. When he finished, he drew quite an applause from the 5000-strong hall.
All through this while there were low-flying aircrafts whirring above the Bowl swirling by the sides of an imaginary velodrome. They kept approaching the Bowl at the most inopportune moments and it must surely have been quite a hindrance for the performing artists. The final piece before the intermission was perhaps the best of the three. The piece was imaginatively titled "Ambush from Ten Sides" and was supposedly representative of a legendary event that took place in China. The group featured Wu Tong on the guitar and Wu Man on the pipa. The piece started out with the guitar strumming a few notes of a Western à la Ennio Morricone. But then, Wu Man with the pipa took over and I was transported to a medieval, mythical China -- quite as in the movies -- of leaves from tall bamboo trees rustling. Ms Man with the pipa was simply enthralling and her rather simple attire made her seem like the troubled, fervent genius-musician playing in oppressive times a sweet forbidden music. The ambush from ten sides kept building in pitch and gusto until it reached a crescendo at which point one knew that the ambush was upon himself. It continued beyond that to the showdown and a slow resolution of what must have been a bloody encounter. Interestingly Yimou Zhang's sequel to Hero, House of Flying Daggers is titled Shi mian mai fu which literally means "Ambush from Ten Sides".
The intermission saw droves of men and women making for the exits to the lavatories and as the night wore on, so came out the jackets, scarves, blankets and sweaters to drape sparsely dressed skin which just a few hours ago was apt and physician-recommended for the plaguing heat -- the concomitants of a desert climate. And as the cross to the north-east acquires its stream of permanent lighting to shine as a guiding beacon to all those lost and groping to find their way to an evening party or a nightclub under the famed Hollywood banner, little flutters of flashes went off randomly from within the Bowl and two powerful light beams crossed paths and marked a giant X across the sky above as if to mark a target in their crosswires. The hemispherical dome itself has acquired mellow lighting from red to blue and set the mood for a dulcet duet between Wu Tong and Yo-Yo Ma. Mr Tong's voice though not as stiletto-tipped on each note as Zola's was, was nonetheless imbued with a deep melody filled with elegiac pathos, warning and bemoaning perhaps the hardy and fallen merchants in the ambush from ten sides. It was some surprise then that Yo-Yo Ma chose to call Wu Tang their resident rock star instead of resident a cappella artist.
Then came the turn of the Gypsies. While the piece was announced as having originated in Rajasthan and culminated in Romania, it had more shades of a Slavic/Balkan influence than anything remotely Indian. It had three movements -- Lament, Rustom and something I did not quite catch the name of. Up until the Roma piece, the concert had been more or less devoid of any fast beat. The second movement in the Roma piece did however make up for some of this deficiency but not too well. To the untrained ear such as mine, their music was a good and acceptable approximation to real Gypsy music though Colette seemed to think it was more a case of classical musicians trying very hard to lose their rigid bearings and embrace more bon vivant in their music but self-conscious enough not to be able to.
The last two segments of the regular concert were devoted to Persian music and what fine music it was! The first piece was an essay in unalloyed, pure Iranian classical music -- music pagan to staunch and puritanical ideologies but the Word of God to the love-smitten Sufi saints. At its heart, Iranian classical music does not differ much from Hindustani classical music -- the piece had a simple, common refrain that is honed, threshed, sculpted and interpreted differently with each cycle of 16 beats. But as those notes are repeated you can almost see the trains of pack-mules and travellers alike wandering yet devoutly treading the path. The next piece fell back into line with the general confusion of world music acquiring more performers and instruments trying to cope with the Iranians. With the exception of the scintillating Wu Man on the pipa and at times Yo-Yo Ma on his trusted cello, none could come close to matching their vibe.
And when everyone thought the concert ended, Yo-Yo Ma palpably blushing at the standing ovations accorded him and his project launched into two encore pieces. Surprisingly, it took the encore pieces to wipe out the last few smudges of dissonance between the various artists and they all came together to make arguably the best music of the night. Not surprisingly, the star of the show was Wu Man on her pipa, Yo-Yo Ma on his cello finally showing us why he merited the marquee rates and two wonderful reprisals from Zola and Wu Tong.
With that final flourish, the concert ended. Our back-seat dinner-scowlers had for some time been quite enthralled with the music but the encore pieces drove the two men in the party to shriek and howl to register their contentment. The women striving to strike a dignified note, began to brush off Yo-Yo Ma's effervescence on stage as unnecessary showmanship though as is true with all the guilty secrets of middle-aged life they seemed to be enjoying it. For our parts as lofty observers of the world around us, we smiled wanly and to ourselves as we made way for the exits, the 655 bus shuttle and the car trip back home.
