The National Concert Hall is making a statement with its big outdoor birthday party: hot jazz and top world music in the Iveagh Gardens, writes Arminta Wallace
You'd expect the National Concert Hall to celebrate its 25th anniversary with a maestro and an orchestra. What you might not expect is that the maestro in question would be a kora player from Mali - and the orchestra a 17-piece West African big band. But as NCH marketing and PR manager Rosita Wolfe explains, upending expectations is what the day-long celebration of jazz, world music and flamenco - planned for Saturday next, with much of it taking place in the glorious space that is Iveagh Gardens - is all about.
"We want to make a statement here - that we do a lot more than just classical music," she says. "Of course the core classical repertoire is our big strength, and later in the year we will feature celebratory classical concerts, including a gala performance of a new commission by John Buckley, and a night with the London Mozart Players and James Galway. But our remit is to be a centre of excellence for music, and to provide a platform for innovative and exciting programmes of music - of all kinds."
There has, says Wolfe, been "a very strong audience demand" in the recent past for performances at the National Concert Hall by artists as diverse as the Japanese Kodo drummers, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and flamenco guitarist Juan Martin. And although this year sees it celebrating a quarter of a century of music-making, the hall has its eyes firmly fixed on the future. "Ireland has changed hugely in the past couple of years, and musical tastes are also changing - so it's important that we develop and change too," she says.
Hence the inclusion, at World Routes, of a series of world music workshops for children, free gigs in the John Field Room and - thanks to the involvement and sponsorship of the OPW - a full programme of events, including the above-mentioned 2,000-seat afternoon concert by Toumani Diabaté and his Symmetric Orchestra, together with the jazz group The Bad Plus, in Dublin's Iveagh Gardens.
"We wanted to look at the garden space, to see what we could do there," Wolfe says, "and in conjunction with the OPW we said, 'Let's get a feel for what it's like - concert hall and gardens together'." The use of the gardens next weekend is fitting for the NCH in looking to the future: the multi-million euro redevelopment of the site into a large three-venue hall, hopes to incorporate views of the gardens from a new restaurant.
Some music lovers, however, are growing wary of the word "outdoor" - which, especially in proximity to the words "family", "wide variety", and "world music", can arouse suspicions that what is actually on offer is a mixed bag of multicoloured goodies of indeterminate musical provenance.
FOR THE PAST COUPLE of years, festivals all over Ireland have been offering "world music" strands which often boil down to little more than a bit of one-size-fits-all ceoil agus craic in African and/or Asian languages. Which is fine, but not necessarily suitable for a celebration of musical excellence and innovation under the aegis of one of Ireland's premier music performance spaces.
Enter Gary Sheehan, director of Note Productions, who put the World Routes programme together. Not only does it aim to reflect the best of what's going on in jazz and world music, he says, but it has been carefully calibrated to fit the NCH context.
"What's interesting about Toumani Diabaté - apart from the fact that his new album, Boulevard de l'Independance, is probably the number one world music record of the year - is the mix of traditional Malian music and innovative stuff. But not in some kind of spurious 'fusion' sense, just trying it on for size.
"When you listen to this music you hear 17 guys who've been playing together every Friday night for 10 years. Not just playing the music, but wearing it - and even though there's soul, there's funk, there's even flamenco in there, it fits. I quite like the idea of putting this kind of music into the Iveagh Gardens, where nothing like this has been done before. As for The Bad Plus, they're just the hottest jazz band in the world. And they're not po-faced. They play with big smiles on their faces - which not every jazz band does - so they should work really well outdoors."
He is conscious that not every kind of world music is suited to the ambience and acoustic of the NCH auditorium. No such problems, however, for the hugely creative Grammy award-winning piano and guitar duo of Michel Camilo and Tomatito. "They're one of the few who blend classical and flamenco in a good way," he says. "One of things I found encouraging about this whole project was the way the NCH backed this kind of artist - world music acts of the highest order. Toumani is as important in his idiom as Yevgeny Kissin is in his. Anything else wouldn't have been appropriate."
AS A REGULAR promoter of world music events, Sheehan says he is all too aware of the current somewhat confused state of play in a genre which, once the preserve of specialists and enthusiasts, has become a multicultural moneyspinner. "Sure, there are criticisms to be made about the state of world music," he says. "But they're mirrored by the lamentable state of rock music and by the anodyne international jazz scene. There are criticisms to be made of the classical scene, too. But just because Il Divo make cod classical music doesn't mean you can say that classical music isn't any good any more."
Sheehan insists that the music of Toumani Diabaté and his Symmetric Orchestra is an example of what's right, rather than what's wrong, with world music.
"Ten years ago Toumani was criticised in Mali for not honouring the tradition. Now he has emerged as a forward-looking musician who is keenly aware of how his music sits in the broader social and geopolitical context. But he is also aware of the past - of Mali as the centre of the Mande empire, for instance, and the part which colonial influences played in that, as well as the fact that his family has boasted virtuoso kora players for 70 generations.
"There's a real edge to Malian music at the moment, which is what makes it so special. The same thing is happening in neighbouring countries like Algeria, where you have musicians such as Rachid Taha making acerbic comments on the place of women in Algerian society. World music isn't the exotic coffee-table music it might have seemed eight or nine years ago. It's real, and it's relevant."