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At the Skirball Cultural Center, February 24
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LA Weekly, At the Skirball Cultural Center, February 24 >>
As the Skirball’s exhibit on the life and work of Albert Einstein filled my mind and the music of Habib Koité and Bamada filled my pores, I wondered: Where did the father of modern physics’ theories about the relativity of space and time intersect with the Malians’ uncanny ability to morph the groove? Then it hit me later, like a flurry of Kélétigui Diabaté mallet strokes on the wooden keys of his balafon, like a sharp Mahamadou Koné thwack on the animal-skin head of his talking drum, like the first torrential thunderstorm after a prolonged Sahelian dry season. Michio Kaku relates in Einstein’s Cosmos that during his amazing run of theoretical insights in 1905, the great man said “A storm broke loose in my mind” when he realized that time elapsed at different speeds throughout the universe, depending on how quickly you were moving. In other words, the faster you go, the more time slows down. Had that old music-lover Einstein helped me unravel a small tangle of the paradox I’d experienced listening to Bamada and other master rhythmic texturalists?
When the tempos surged on “Muso Ko” and “Nanale” or swaggered funkily on “Bitile,” the moments stretched, each player’s contribution relative to the other’s, speedier or slower, busier or spacier, heavier or lighter, all pushing inexorably forward. Amid the relativities, the quality and presence of one thing stayed constant: Habib’s warm, optimistically world-weary tenor voice. This was, after all, just pop music (albeit music with an uncommon generosity of spirit), not a path to positing a Theory of Everything. When Habib and Bamada hit their own intensely mellow sweet spot on little beauties like “Saramaya” or “Kanawa,” it didn’t matter that time was dilating and space was contracting all around us.
—Tom Cheyney
02/24/05 >> go there
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