Hand drummer and percussionist Randy Gloss had a new recording he could not possibly replicate onstage, so he expanded its vibe instead with an ensemble of his students/colleagues, showing what can be done when a drum circle is truly sphericalized.
Fellow percussionist Carlos Niño facilitated the event for his "big brother," and served as co-celebrant in the spooky introductory purification ceremony, where we could feel evil spirits fleeing the vicinity as Gloss elicited strange woozhes from a steel pot and Niño drew eerie plaints from a resonator with a bow.
Niño then left the stage to a succession of dynamically constructed jams involving (left to right) Kassandra Kocoshis (pictured), Gloss, Trevor Anderies, Marcelo Bucater and Clarice Cast.
Hard to know where to look or listen after Gloss' tablas rang out and began an intense conversation with Anderies' traps, so the answer had to be . . . everywhere at once. To say that Indian, African or Indonesian rhythms dominated at any time would be to understate the breadth of knowledge on display, since few distinctions were being made. It felt like a jam, but it was one composition after another. Interactions this quick and precise made international comity seem no longer a pipe dream.
Things that stood out: The way Kokoshis switched from creating a foundation by slapping her sitbox, to defining clear melodic corners by striking those porcelain flower pots. And the way Anderies' wrists generated polyrhythms on the snare without seeming to move. And Gloss' incredible ability to warp sounds out of drumskins by wiping hands across them, and carrying that a step further electronically on the bizarre aFrame instrument, which he can make sound like anything from a jew's harp to a whale's call -- oh, and the spice he shakes out of a tambourine, mgawd, that is just sorcery.
Can you listen to percussion for an hour? Find out.
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Watch this concert here.
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