Urban Tap in Paris, France

June 9th, 2010

On a rainy evening, Tamango hosted a show for the French music television channel Mezzo. With multiple camera men swarming the stage and about 300 or so people crowding the room, Tamango was in especially fine form. Tamango owned the stage and motioned for his collaborators to join him one by one. Percussionist Daniel Moreno, tabla player Mosin, the great saxophonist David Murray, the great Malian keyboardist Chieck Tsien Shek etc. The audience responded to the nasty grooves and lively interplay with enthusiastic applause and cheers. Beat box phenomenon Kenny Muhammad had the crowd hollering. Members of Kodo were in town to perform at the esteemed Opera Theater in Bastille and a few came by to check out the show. One of them, my good friend Arai Takeshi jumped up on stage to do a taiko duo with me. The rest of the music had a groove that was either strongly influenced by or quite directly from Africa- whether it was African American jazz and hip hop, or Senegalese or Malian rhythms, the music was hard grooving and polyrhythmic, with subtle interlocking patterns. The tabla meanwhile has a rhythmic and tonal range and depth that allows it to effortlessly fit into almost any other music. On the other hand, the beauty of the taiko is in it's simple and graceful power and booming resonance. Because of this, the taiko tends to drown out a lot of the subtleties of other instruments and if played quietly defeats the very reason of having such a large reverberating drum. Because of this, it may tend to lack the subtlety and variety of touch that so many other drums have, making collaboration a challenge. Tonight, however, I feel the dramatic change in sound and style of drumming was very effective. The physically dynamic and viscerally intense taiko piece, was a dramatic change in pace from the highly danceable, African heavy, groove oriented improvisation that resumed soon after the taiko piece finished to rapturous applause. All in all, another great performance by Tamango and his Urban Tap that I was thrilled and honored to be a part of.

Afterwards the tabla player, Mosin, his brother Shahid and their cousin and I jumped in a taxi to stay in the apartment of Kiki, a very generous friend of a friend and performer herself. We arrived around 2 am or so and the two brothers, without any discernible concern for the fact that she was sleeping, proceeded to speak loudly, enter her bedroom and turn on lights to put away instruments, and carelessly stomped around the room while settling in. I was, to be honest, a little disappointed to find out that four guys were sharing this smallish living room, two sharing the fold-out couch, one on the floor on a rug and myself on a guest of honor's inflatable mattress. I have avoided sharing a bedroom with friends, much less relative strangers ever since leaving Kodo, where I was traveling for months at a time for two thirds of the year, often sharing rooms with my fellow musicians. I was exhausted from jet lag, long rehearsals and late nights and just wanted to rest in privacy. Shahid noticed my reticence and asked me what was wrong and if I was hungry and kept apologizing for the sleeping arrangements. He then made a delicious dish of potato, onion and plenty of Indian spices mixed with rice. We sat on the floor at 3 in the morning sharing in this delightful home cooking, talking about Indian classical music and the countless expert musicians and our adoration of them. Mosin, the tabla player was just an eighteen year old kid although he played the tabla with knowledge, skill and a maturity that belied his age. When it was finally time to sleep, the cousin, who is working on getting his doctorate in an esoteric form of Indian singing, apologized again for the sleeping arrangements. "In India, with a space like this", he said "we may have twenty people sleeping. You must be used to not sharing with so many people, no?" I felt guilty for having been so high-maintenance and happy to have shared such an intimate evening with these wonderful people.