An Táin Theatre, Dundalk
Californian composer Terry Riley, the man who wrote the first minimalist classic, In C, in the mid 1960s, turned 75 in June. He's currently engaged on a belated celebration of his birthday through a European tour honouring the legacy of one of his teachers, the Lahore-born Indian musician Pran Nath (1918–1996), who also taught Riley's fellow-minimalist La Monte Young.
Riley’s California Kirana tour (Nath was part of the Kirana tradition, and set up a Kirana centre in New York City in 1972) brought the veteran musician together with others whose work straddles the world of Indian music: saxophonist George Brooks and tabla player Talvin Singh.
The trio’s Dundalk concert on Friday, promoted by the Louth Contemporary Music Society which first brought Riley to Ireland three years ago, opened with an Indian raga. Riley sang with a coarse-grained tone – he is 75, after all. But, in spite of the at times almost hoarse-seeming sound, he showed an extended range and also a finesse in nuancing that was both agile and accurate.
Brooks’s saxophone picked up the thread from time-to-time to offer, as it were, a kind of reflective commentary that seemed to transmute the filigree of Riley’s singing into an enthusiastically simpler vocabulary. Singh’s tabla-playing stayed mostly in the background, save for a few dazzling flurries.
The raga was the longest and also the most interesting of the evening’s offerings. Riley played both electronic keyboard (which he insinuated at one point into the raga) and concert grand piano (a Fazioli), Brooks moved between alto and tenor saxophones (always sounding more unbuttoned on tenor), and Singh shifted between tabla and drumkit.
The players deferred gracefully to each other, everyone getting his moment in the sun, and, the sounds of the tabla apart, the axis of the style veered westwards after the long, opening number. The placing of the raga had an odd effect on the evening as a whole, almost guaranteeing a sense of anti-climax. This didn’t diminish the enthusiasm of the audience in any way. They clearly would have relished more. But the players declined their urgings.
