By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of April  6-13, 2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 85
                BERKELEY---However great the disappointment over Yo-Yo Ma’s rather minor accompaniment role, the sell-out crowd was dazzled by a 14-member virtuoso group in world music, spinning out fusion in varied dimensions.
                   Here Artistic Director Ma’s vision for the Silk Road Ensemble comes to the fore: many musics, many seemingly incompatible instruments from around the world, and habile composers producing the fusion of sounds from several continents.
               As long as the name of Ma is the reason for the sellouts, Ma needs to get cracking, and subdue his diplomatic zeal in letting every musicians get in some choice solo licks. Ma is a legend, perhaps the reigning one these days, and the audiences come to hear him.
                But in the long-awaited April 6 concert at Zellerbach Hall, Ma’s virtuosity was not on view  till an hour into the event, and then only in a single selection, a razzle-dazzle duet with a drummer in Giovanni Sollima’s “Taranta Project.” Overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time!
                Ma however was the catalyst for the Silk Road Ensemble, founded in 1998, bringing together threads and traditions from disparate parts of the world. Both the level and the variety of musicians in the group are extraordinary. Western string instruments blend compatibly with the Chinese pipa and the Persian fiddle known as kamancha, the Japanese end-blown flute called the shakahachi, and the middle-Eastern lute known as the oud.   
                To make it happen, the SRE commissions prominent composers like Gabriela Frank and Osvaldo Golijov to write new fusion music, scheduling extensive rehearsals to make it work. The result is a tasty new tossed salad with myriad ingredients, carrying forward Ma’s one-world philosophy bringing many populations together under one musical roof.
                In this one program, at least 10 different world cultures were represented.
                And some distant traditions are surprisingly close. The “Taranta Project” builds on various Mediterranean strains---but its fast-charging finale showed surprising similarities to Irish step dances. And along the way had a tango theme too. And “Air to Air” by the Argentinian-Israeli Golijov, runs the gamut from Christian-Arab sources to music of Sardinia, with adroit juxtapositions of the highest and lowest registers. A show-biz flair was introduced by the flamboyant Cristina Pato flaunting the Galician bagpipes charging about the stage and letting out occasional yips of delight.
                At the diametric extreme, the “Taranta Project” went into the lowest register when the bottom (C) string of Ma’s cello was tuned an octave lower, producing a guttural sound.
                Among the most memorable hybrid works was local composer Gabriela Frank’s “Chayraq,” a varied and complex piece that was mostly Peruvian. It also incorporated the amazing virtuoso woman of the Chinese pipa (the pear-shaped mandolin), Wu Man. 
                The SRE made a last-minute program change as a heart-felt testimonial to Japan and its suffering from quake, tsunami, and nuclear radiation. This was Kojiro Umezaki playing the supremely soulful shakuhachi solo "Kogarashi" by Nakao Tozan, who had written it after visiting a previous disaster, the 1923 Tokyo quake that had killed close to 100,000.
                The concert was amplified, but skillfully so.
                Subsequent tour concerts of the SRE and Yo-Yo Ma are April 7. San Francisco; April 8,  Davis, CA; and April 10, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
                Silk Road Ensemble, with Yo-Yo Ma, cello. At Cal Performances April 6. For tour info: go online.
             ©Paul Hertelendy 2011
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           Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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