Late on Friday night, on the more intimate Charlie Gillett Stage, there was an unusual cross-cultural treat: Ballake Sissoko is one of Mali’s most accomplished kora players, not as well known as his Bamako next-door neighbour Toumani Diabate and more firmly rooted in Manding musical tradition, but undoubtedly in the same class. Vincent Ségal is a brilliant French cellist who moves with consummate ease from the classical repertoire to free jazz. They are both technical virtuosi but neither of them plays to the gallery.

In a manner consonant with some of the most deeply held tenets of West African musical ethics, the two musicians shone brightly without outshining each other. The material is mostly drawn from Malian tradition, and Ségal, who has spent months living in Ballake’s family compound, has absorbed more than the sophisticated architecture of the kora literature. He understands deeply the values of modesty and cool: a kind of heartfelt minimalism that allows music to do more with less, and understate expression while maximizing emotional content.

The delicate ripples of Sissoko’s playing elicited washes of cello-colour, both plucked and bowed, from Ségal, in a dialogue of great refinement. There was call and response as well as the magical combination of two distinct voices from vastly different backgrounds, a mix enabled by the duo’s willingness to listen to each other. Ségal is familiar with the lyra players of Crete and the kemenche players of Iran and Turkey, and with the deft use of harmonics and a subtle command of microtonal slides, he extended the music’s field in a thoroughly beguiling manner. At times, his cello sounded like a Wassoulou soku, the one-stringed fiddle that conjurs the spirits of the bush, and at others like an Appalachian fiddler, delivering short rhythmic bow-strokes, with Sissoko’s kora, reminiscent of the banjo, an instrument whose origins lie in Africa. They claim the kora attracts the djinn, and it is said that it shouldn’t be played late at night, with the front-door open. With Ségal beside him, Sissoko was undoubtedly weaving magic, but of a wholly beneficent kind, holding the audience in a very rare spell.

Later in the festival, Aziz Sahmaoui and his University of Gnawa, was also in the business of contacting the spirit world, but in a much more extrovert way. Formerly with the Orchestre National de Barbès, the Paris-based collective who featured a number of different North African genres from Chaabi to Rai, Sahmaoui, in an imaginative reconstruction, focuses on the music of the Gnawa, the itinerant Maghreb musical sorcerers, who perform very powerful healing ceremonies that often take on the form of collective psychodrama, as well as spiritual house-cleaning that puts Feng Shui in the shade. The rhythm of Gnawa music is quite literally infectious – it is designed to take you out of your mind. The trance is activated by the repetition of magical incantations, the ear-splitting clatter of the kerkaba, large metal castanets, and above all the eerie sound of the gunbri, a gut-stringed sacred instrument associated with the sect. Sahmaoui played the lute as well, as the ngoni, a sub-Saharan cousin of the gunbri. With several African musicians in the band, Sahmaoui is taking Gnawa music back to its roots in Guinea or Ghana – the etymology of “Gnawa’ is clear about that – and the sect’s families are descended from West African slaves. The musicianship was spare, tight and ruthlessly effective. There was an almost scientific use of rhythmic breaks in the backing vocals, a characteristic splitting of the beat that feels as if designed to mess with the listeners’ minds and blow open the way for heightened awareness. In Gnawa ceremonies, the adepts are moved to dance their troubles away as they whirl to the rising power of the music. At WOMAD, the audience responded in similar though untutored fashion, transported, albeit for a few minutes, to another realm.

“Set the Piano Stool on Fire” was recently shown on ARTE France and Germany and also in Switzerland and Austria. The DVD of the film was released by Artificial Eye earlier in the summer. Further TV sales are expected in the next few months. The DVD rights for the rest of the world are available.

Press links:
Alan Rusbridger on Alfred and Kit (The Guardian)
Michael Church on the film (The Independent)
Mark Kidel on the making of the film (The Arts Desk)

DVD
To buy “Set the Piano Stool on Fire”

First published in The Arts Desk 6 November 2010

Terry Riley is one of the great unsung heroes of contemporary music, the Ur-minimalist who shaped the creative paths of John Adams, Peter Townshend, Mike Oldfield, and Philip Glass to name just a sample of the wide range of musicians who have been inspired by his raga-tinged loops and all-enveloping electronic soundscapes. Bristol has just hosted a series of exciting concerts celebrating the 75 year-old Californian composer.  Riley’s groundbreaking genius feels as fresh today as it first sounded in the 1960’s.

Back in the early 1950’s, Terry Riley was one of the first composers to experiment with tape loops: in the pre-digital era pieces of magnetic tape were dexterously joined in a looped form that could be played continuously. The idea of using repetition in music, associated as it is with modal harmonies and drones, could be seen as the musical expression of a desire to escape from the tyranny of resolution-driven narrative. Terry Riley’s music goes nowhere out of choice and draws the audience beyond boredom into an awakened apprehension of the here and now. This is the soundtrack for the years in which people first imagined the end of history. Riley both reflects the cultural currents of his time and has played a part in shaping them.

The first Bristol concert, at St George’s, featured the master himself, accompanied by saxophonist George Brooks and and Talvin Singh on tabla and percussion. This was, paradoxically, the least captivating of the evenings, perhaps because Riley chose to make it a homage to his teacher Pandit Pran Nath, the Indian singer who taught Jon Hassell, La Monte Young and US avant-gardists of the 1960’s. Indian vocal forms the core of a rich and profound musical tradition, and Riley’s singing in Bristol was little more than a touching and respectful attempt at impersonating a practice that, when done by the masters of the genre, is one of the most powerful and sophisticated expressions of the human spirit. The American, looking like a hippie sage, sat benignly at the keyboards, and even played a few jazz standards with some feeling. There were moments of magic when the sounds from the three musicians blended in a modal mix, producing a series of wave-like surges, but the event as a whole was disappointing.

Terry Riley should have returned to Bristol for the next concert, a stunning rendition of his masterpiece “In C”, played by a 20-guitar orchestra led by Portishead’s Adrian Utley who was joined by Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, Graham Fitkin and Charles Hazlewood on an assortment of keyboards including an ear-tingling Farfisa organ and the honeyed tones of a Hammond B. The piece consists of a series of 53 separate modal fragments, all in the key of C,  played not always in strictly order and only sometimes in unison by the assembled musicians. The regular pulse which sounds almost ritualistically through the piece was held by percussionist Tony Orrell, a man better known for his inventive free jazz drumming. The ensemble was completed by the delicate and contrasting textures of Ruth Wall’s harp. This was not the first guitar orchestra adventure for Adrian Utley, who is probably Britain’s most versatile and creative electric guitar player – in terms of the range of moods and timbres he can produce. Last year he created a 100-guitar piece for the re-opening of Bristol’s Colston Hall, a site-specific piece with musicians strategically placed to produce a kind of musical architecture. A few months later, in collaboration with Will Gregory, he created a brilliantly-conceived new soundtrack for Carl Dreyer’s silent classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc, this time with 8 guitars, a small choir, keyboards, percussion and  harp.

While the music for Dreyer’s film was undeniably a major and original piece, the performance of “In C” was something else. Within the warm embrace and uniquely vivid acoustic of Bristol’s St George’s, Adrian Utley’s ensemble, who played without a PA, gave Riley’s classic remarkable presence. The piece requires from each and every musician, a deft and mixture of discipline and instinct, close reading of the simple score and individual improvisation. The assembled musicians felt their ways forward, at first tentatively, only slowly winning the audience’s engagement and battling against an annoying buzz from one of the amps, but thirty or so minutes into the piece, they found a groove, and the audience followed, having no doubt unconsciously, as Riley intended, internalised the piece’s many-layered and shifting patterns of sound. On paper, this is piece that threatens chaos, but the absence of soloists or stars seems to bring out the cooperative spirit that anarchists believe natural to humanity.

From that point on, the event took on an other-worldly quality, the relentless repetition no longer binding the audience to feelings of bemusement or boredom, but facilitating a kind of liberation. I spoke to several people afterwards and they all felt the same sense of near-ecstatic release, as if something inside them had been turned on, that made them feel an extraordinary sense of well-being. “In C” is skilfully constructed – perhaps according to what Sufi musicians would call “soul science”, techniques for inducing trance.  The piece starts simply, moves into more intricate and inter-laced patterns and finally reaches a series of emotional climaxes. The orchestra rode the successive waves of climactic energy as if they were one – even though without a conductor (Charles Hazlewood was only playing the organ), collectively sensing the diminuendos and crescendos with uncanny sensitivity.

The following night some of the same musicians re-assembled at the Bristol Old Vic, to perform improvisations based on Terry Riley’s later and better-known master-piece, “Rainbow in Curved Air”. The concert was part of “Bristol Jam”, BOV artistic director Tom Morris’s  unique and imaginative celebration of impro.   The stage of the atmospheric 18^th century theatre was bathed in dramatic light and dry ice as Charles Hazlewood gave a pithy and articulate introduction to Riley and minimalism. We were, he said, to have a “psychedelic experience”. Much as with St George’s, a beautiful (and architecturally minimalist) converted church building, the Bristol Old Vic provides the perfect vessel for a musical journey in which intimacy allows for the mind to wander and open up to Riley’s meditative music.

The first half of the show was devoted to “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band”, one of the two compositions from “Rainbow in Curved Air” the album that was so popular and influential when it came out at the end of the 60’s. A trio of saxophones – Andy Sheppard  (tenor and soprano), Jason Yarde (alto) and Will Gregory (baritone) – formed a chorus of understated sounds that ran from breathy whisper to mournful screech. Adrian Utley slowly drew a bow across his electric guitar transcending the instrument’s sonic clichés, while Graham Fitkin produced otherworldy textures from his keyboards and synths.

After the interval, they launched into Riley’s iconic “Rainbow” piece, a modal adventure in 7/8, whose introduction inspired the opening of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and Pete Townshend’ “Baba O’Riley”, the guitarist’s homage to the American minimalist and his own spiritual teacher Meher Baba.

If Poppy Nogood had led us into a wondrous world of moods and textures, stilling that part of the mind that is programmed to expect narrative (or “teleological” as Hazlewood put it) music, the final piece enabled the musicians to let rip and freely explore the possibilities of the piece’s modal structure.  They were visibly having a great time, playing with sound as if for the first time: Ruth Wall plucking the extremities of her harp strings to produce tiny insect-like phrases, Tom Jenkinson (aka “Squarepusher”) slapping his bass with a mixture of razor-sharp funk and wild abandon, often in perfect harmony with Tony Orrell’s discrete but potent drumming, the sax-players Sheppard and Yarde alternating sensitive washes of reedy colour with sheets of sound reminiscent of John Coltrane, and Hazlewood, Gregory and Fitkin – at various keyboards – providing a thrilling range of rhythmic runs, bass-heavy chords and mesmeric drones. Although this was nominally “The Charles Hazlewood Allstars”, this was music made by stars  – but without the intrusion of competing egos. There is something about drone-based modal music that transcends the strictly personal, favouring instead the pull of the collective and the sheer thrill of creative collaboration. That Terry Riley’s music should have inspired such genre-free improvisational exploration says a great deal about the lasting importance of his music.