Choying Drolma & Steve Tibbetts

Selwa

(Six Degrees)

Minnesota guitarist Steve Tibbetts (otherwise known for a series of fine solo CDs on ECM) and the Tibetan Buddhist nun and vocalist Choying Drolma finally follow up their 1997 album Cho (Hannibal), in which Tibbetts and percussionist Marc Anderson created arrangements for Drolma and her cohorts near her school for nuns in Nepal.

            If anything, the new Selwa is even more restrained that the first CD – almost austere. Where Cho featured some group chants more spoken than sung with occasionally heavy percussive rhythms, everything on the new album serves the sinuous melodies.  Drones and static or slow-moving harmonies still ground the material, but there’s always a tension in that glacial harmonic movement, and in Drolma’s extrraordinary control of pitch, her subtle ululations over exotic scales, and the deep-grain warmth of her instrument.

            Tibbetts and Anderson, meanwhile, are content to enhance the vocals with unobtrusive orchestral effects by electric and acoustic guitars and percussion.  These focused meditations are worlds away from the empty “trance” experiments of other Western musicians dabbling in the sacred songs of the East.  A couple of pieces, “Vakritunda” and “Gayatri,” hint at Western folk and pop song form, but even so this is an integral blending of musical and spiritual sensibilities.  One need only check the lyric sheet if there is any doubt about the severity inherent in these meditations.  One translation reads, “Kali, the blood Dripper, I praise you.”