[Dixielandjazz] Roots Music?

[Stephen Barbone]

NOT OKOM - BUT, a delightful review of a musical performance by
Trombonist Roswell Rudd, who in the 1950s, was an extraordinary young
OKOM trombone player in New York City. Like Steve Lacy, now an avant
garde reed man, but back then an extraordinary OKOM reed man in NYC, he
has taken his music to another dimension.

Regardless of one's musical appreciation level, both of them are
extraordinary, thinking, jazz musicians.

As Mr. Diabate said (in the last paragraph below) "we are all eunuch."

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

February 18, 2004 - NY TIMES

MUSIC REVIEW | ROSWELL RUDD AND MAMADOU DIABATE

When Cultures' Sounds Don't Match, but Echo

By KELEFA SANNEH

       How do you tune a balafon? At an engrossing concert at St. Ann's
Warehouse in Brooklyn on Friday night, the trombonist Roswell Rudd gave
the answer: you don't.

The balafon is a wooden West African instrument that resembles a
xylophone, and every balafon produces a slightly different set of notes.
So the members of Mr. Rudd's hybrid band made sure their instruments
matched Balla Kouyate's balafon. The only way to stay in tune was to be
slightly out of tune.

The concert grew out of a 2002 CD called, "MALIcool"
(Sunnyside/Universal), a collaboration between Mr. Rudd and the Malian
kora player Toumani Diabate. (The kora is a 21-string instrument with a
long neck.) For the current tour, Toumani Diabate has been replaced by
another kora virtuoso, his cousin Mamadou Diabate, but the spirit
remained the same. Mr. Rudd and his bandmates explored a world of
musical assonance, where instruments echoed one another without quite
falling into lockstep.

Mr. Rudd sometimes amused Mr. Diabate and Mr. Kouyate by unleashing
wildly off-kilter trombone slides. When he swung his instrument while
emitting long warping notes, he looked and sounded like a drunken
elephant. Other times Mr. Rudd just sat back and watched, swaying in
time to the swinging polyrhythms.

During the CD's title track, Mr. Rudd's graceful solo got a prickly but
no less graceful response from Mr. Kouyate. Mr. Rudd directed the
musicians with vigorous gestures (a cross between conducting and air
guitar), then the musicians hit the penultimate note together, with Mr.
Rudd balancing on one foot. After a split second of silence, his other
foot hit the stage with a faint thud.

All night long Mr. Diabate unleashed dense, dazzling riffs on his kora,
which sounds a bit like a harpsichord. On the album Toumani Diabate
found subtle ways to echo jazz harmonies, but Mamadou Diabate's style is
more strident. During "All Through the Night," a Welsh folk song
featuring the singer Nora York, he took the stately tune in a new
direction with a zigzagging solo full of unexpected clusters of notes.

There were times when the overlapping rhythms and laissez-faire
arrangements devolved into a multicultural muddle. But more often the
musicians' curiosity was contagious, especially during a version of
Thelonious Monk's "Jackie-ing," where Mr. Diabate and Mr. Kouyate
delighted in Monk's lopsided melody.

At the beginning of the second set, Mr. Diabate took the microphone to
say something about the universal language of music. "We are all
eunuch," he said, and a murmur arose. But then he continued, explaining
that everyone is different, and people realized that they had misheard
him.