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The Colonial in the News:
Review: Ladysmith Black Mambazo Gives Riveting Performance
By Ronald K. Baker - January 18, 2008
PITTSFIELD - The mercury dropped with a resounding thud signaling the end of unseasonably mild temperatures for January in the Berkshires. Patrons huddled together as they walked briskly to the Colonial theater, grateful to have found one of the highly coveted parking spaces nearby.
A full house, indeed. "Great," a well-pleased David Fleming, artistic director, announced as he introduced the much-heralded guest artists on Wednesday night. Dispensing with further adieu, Ladysmith Black Mambazo took to the stage and immediately began to captivate the audience.
The all-male octet's brightly-colored matching shirts, white shoes and alternately bold and beguiling moves served as a backdrop for the compelling and plaintiff vocals of lead singer and founder Joseph Shabalala.
The voices and the visuals were equally riveting. One dare not look away. The group used eight stationary microphones on stands while Shabalala moved around the front of the stage enjoying the freedom of a cordless one.
It's hard to imagine a more acoustically perfect setting than the Colonial to hear a group like Ladysmith. Their nuances of style, dynamics, harmonies and virtuosity were met with an enraptured hush from veteran and new audience members alike. Every breath sound that the group used for effect was audible, as was each tap of the foot or click of the tongue. The leader seemed to magically control the singers without visible signs of conducting. It was as though he held the bellows of an accordion. Now and again, the South African singers purposely stepped back from the mikes and echoed a phrase. It sounded like someone had shut off the sound system momentarily. It had a wild effect, like hearing the singing of another group far off in the distance.
The phrase "well-oiled machine" comes to mind as an ersatz descriptor for the ensemble's singing and choreography. In particular, they used portamento so skillfully it came off as unison, no mean feat for eight voices. The same was true for percussive, staccato, special effects as well as for collective, legato passages – all seemingly orchestrated by the leader as if by mental telepathy.
It's hard to talk about Ladysmith without gushing. Superlatives seem inadequate. But it's easy to see why they have amassed 47 years singing together. They sing almost exclusively in their native Zulu tongue, yet while their stories come across as enjoyable pieces of music, it would have been helpful to have a synopsis of the content of each song as is often done in the opera. While it was easy to see that many of the songs told elaborate stories, often they were lamentably inscrutable.
The group's collective and individual athleticism is only exceeded by their musicianship and technical prowess. They are, at once, exuberant and subtle, alternately brash and beckoning. Humor, improvisation, ostentation and even intimidation, merge with good effect.
One the high points of the concert was Shabalala introducing his youngest son. (He has four sons who sing with the group.) Thompson Shabalala took center stage. He sang strongly and also had an elegant, youthful falsetto. During his solo, the elder Shabalala left the stage in apparent deference to the next generation of Mambazo.
After intermission, most of the audience reconvened. What else did the group have by way of surprises? How much a cappella singing and dazzling choreography would prove to be too much? It turns out that Ladysmith had saved their social comment for the second half. Themes of political and social unrest, some historical, inspiring, some even embarrassing, played out in subsequent selections. Much of the aforementioned was not for the faint of heart. Shabalala held a mirror up to white society as he purposely sought to unbalance the listener with an accurate, albeit somewhat painful, look at the old, and not so old, South Africa.
But tension had a way of dissipating, and Ladysmith retook the moral high ground as goodwill ambassadors. One member of the group had great fun taunting the audience with the prospect of a World Cup soccer match played out between the United States and South Africa. "You're going to lose," he admonished good naturedly.
For its tour de force, the group's final selection featured each member individually in a dance improvisation reminiscent of break-dancing. Their enthusiasm and energy, even after two hours of performance, was mind boggling. One after another took center stage kicking over his head, dropping to the floor into a squat, getting back up, waving his arms, spinning, flailing, strutting, and then kicking some more. It was a wild romp. The audience loved it.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo was not allowed to get away without an encore. The applause was determined and persistent and didn't go unrewarded. The group retook the stage to perform a final number that had an apparent reverence for them. The Colonial's solid-colored backdrop morphed into a weedy jungle scene. Shabalala relinquished his center position in favor of standing in line with the others. The unison anthem transported the listener to Africa in a poignant and evocative moment.
Thanks for a most enjoyable trip, Ladysmith.
Ronald K. Baker is a contributor to Muzikreviews.com.
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Review: Arlo Guthrie concerts in Pittsfield and Springfield, MA
By Dave Conlin – November 26, 2007
Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 mega-hit “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” had no bigger fan when it came out than me, then a freshman in college. By the summer of 1969, I’d dropped out and was ordered to report to the South Boston Navy yard to be “injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.” I, too, was informed that I was unfit to serve.
Present for a live broadcast of “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree Revisited” at the Guthrie Center in Housatonic ten or so years ago, I marvelled at how well Guthrie had updated it, to include Richard Nixon and the mysterious gap in the Watergate Tapes.
Hearing it on successive nights, Nov. 16th at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield and then at Symphony Hall in Springfield, was a bit of a drag, however, and it was apparent that Guthrie has had enough, too. In fact, he announced that he’d just made a deal to play the Colonial every year around Thanksgiving, adding that “the 50th anniversary is probably the next time you’ll hear (it).”
Removing it from the setlist will make room for more of Guthrie’s exquisite treatment of other people’s songs, and for him to play more of his own affecting and timely work, such as his Hurricane Katrina lament, “In Times Like These.”
That is the title song on his recent release which was recorded live with the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, directed by John Nardolillo, who conducted the Springfield Symphony for the Nov. 17th concert.
A highlight of both concerts was the version of “St. James Infirmary” (also on the new CD) that Guthrie learned from his father Woody’s sidekick Cisco Houston. The solo version is superb, his rich voice and deft guitar play cast a spell on the audience. The orchestral version, with some especially nice trombone and clarinet riffs, carried everybody all the way to the Big Easy.
Both nights Guthrie played “My Peace,” a recently discoverd lyric of Woody Guthrie’s that he wrote music for; a simple, sweet song, and a poignant collaboration that defies death.
Dave Conlin contributes to NewBerkshire.com
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Review : KRONOS QUARTET
By Seth Rogovoy - October 19, 2006
German philosopher Theodor Adorno is reputed to have said, “After the Holocaust there can be no poetry.” And although his remark has been widely misinterpreted to mean that art is futile in the face of the worst of human calamities, it does and has always raised the very real challenge of dealing with something as monumental as the purposeful destruction of an entire race of people in a single work of art – a painting, a film, a poem.
Given its mostly purely abstract and formal qualities, music might be the art form best equipped to deal with the seemingly insurmountable challenges presented by the monstrosity of the Nazi Holocaust. And one would be hard put to find a more effective attempt at addressing the banalities and clichés of the Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews than in composer Steve Reich’s landmark 1988 composition, Different Trains, written for the Kronos Quartet, and which served as the centerpiece of the group’s program at Pittsfield’s Colonial Theatre on Friday night on the occasion of Reich’s seventieth birthday.
As it happens, Different Trains is also Reich at his best – his supreme achievement, blending his masterful patterning of melody on the human voice; phasing tape loops and live musicians; using repetition of rhythm for emotional affect; and injecting very personal and autobiographical elements into his compositions, here being the contrast of his own intercontinental train trips as a young boy living a bicoastal life in the U.S. at the very same time that cattle cars were transporting Jews to death camps all over central and Eastern Europe.
And as it happens, as it was on Friday night, Different Trains also showcased the Kronos Quartet at its best – certainly at its most challenging and provocative, but also its most adventurous, working with pre-recorded tape loops and voice recordings to build a miniature symphony of sound expressing both pain and beauty while allowing for the individual musicians to add their own expression to a composition that could just be a piece of industrial music but instead winds up being the most humanist of works. Lead violinist David Harrington in particular wrung pathos out of the repeated ostinatoes that paralleled the mechanical sounds of trains that hinted at the agonies that might have been felt by those trapped inside.
But Friday night’s concert was about more than just Reich’s Different Trains. Kronos perhaps wisely paired that piece, which culminated the second half, with Tenebrae, a slow, meditative, single movement work by perhaps the hottest young composer of our time, Osvaldo Golijov, familiar to Berkshire audiences for his many works performed in recent years at Tanglewood, including this summer’s startling world premiere for Yo Yo Ma titled AZUL. In Kronos’s hands, Tenebrae was elegiac and sorrowful.
The first half of Kronos’s concert was typically eclectic, with the group flaunting its avant-garde and world-music credentials by playing numbers by downtown composer John Zorn, whose Cat o’ Nine Tails was a postmodern take on cartoon music; several numbers by Rahul Dev Burman – think of him as the John Williams of the Indian film industry, or Bollywood; and a newly discovered piece by an unknown Iraqi composer aptly titled Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me.
And if all that wasn’t cool enough, Kronos took the stage for an encore and offered a string quartet transcription of a tune by Icelandic Sigur Ros, one of the hippest rock bands in the world.
Seth Rogovoy is the Editor-in-Chief of Berkshire Living Magazine
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