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Concert Review
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Chicago Tribune, Concert Review >>
By Howard Reich
Tribune arts critic
September 17, 2007
Perhaps a performer who's more charismatic, versatile, dynamic and inventive than Dobet Gnahore will emerge during the ongoing World Music Festival -- but I doubt it. The show that Gnahore played during the opening night of the festival drew ecstatic responses from a sold-out house at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Friday night, and for good reason.
If Gnahore, who's from the Ivory Coast, had done nothing more than wrap that voluptuous, supple, nimble, octaves-leaping voice of hers around her listeners' ears, she would have earned the cheers and standing ovations that greeted her work. But she also moved like a dream, expressing the undulating rhythms and buoyant melody lines of her pan-African source material with extraordinary physical grace and poetry.
Add to that the startling emotional range of her music -- which spans plaintive laments to ebullient dance pieces -- and you have a performer who is practically a theater piece unto herself.
The seemingly disembodied voice that opened the set, as Gnahore sang offstage, barely hinted at the experience yet to come. But as Gnahore's beguiling vocals floated through the house, her melismatic phrases and amber tone quickly seducing the ear, listener curiosity had to be piqued.
Soon she took the stage, slowly building the intensity and fervor of her show. By the time this evening had reached the first of several dramatic peaks -- with Gnahore singing, swaying, chanting, dancing -- an intimate auditorium on North Lincoln Avenue had become a window to African cultures past, present and future. Singing in various African languages, combining ancient tribal dance rituals with 21st Century moves, imploring her audience to sing along with her in chants of daunting complexity, Gnahore seemed to bring the voice of a continent to those lucky enough to have heard her.
If there's any justice in this world, she's going to be very, very famous.
The Zimbabwe singer-guitarist Louis Mhlanga opened the evening, the quiet humanity of his vocals dovetailing neatly with the insouciant spirit of his instrumentals. Even so, he was fortunate to open the show, rather than close it, because it cannot be easy for anyone to follow Gnahore.
On Saturday night, the geographical focus of the World Music Festival shifted to Eastern Europe, with two bands offering 21st Century viewpoints on gypsy music, to varying degrees of success.
Surely most listeners attending the sold-out show at the Old Town School would have concurred that the standout artist was Macedonian clarinetist Ismail Lumanovski, performing with the New York Gypsy All-Stars. The phenomenal speed, technical brilliance and musical fluidity of Lumanovski's playing rendered him virtually a Paganini of the gypsy clarinet.
The evening's other originally scheduled headliner, Romano Drom, had to cancel, because of security-clearance issues, "courtesy of the Department of Homeland Security," Old Town School executive director James Bau Graves told the crowd.
If their replacements, New York-based nouveau-gypsy band Romashka, didn't match the technical level of Lumanovski and colleagues, Romashka earned points for high spirits -- and for rushing in to fill the suddenly empty slot. 09/17/07 >> go there
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