Musical journey through slavery
Instrumentalists, singers, dancers explore brutality
Over the course of 4½ centuries of unspeakable brutality, the international slave trade created a major redistribution of the world’s peoples. Entire populations were forcibly relocated from Africa to the New World, and with them went cultural traditions, which then took root in new and inhospitable terrain.
That compelling story peeked through in scattered bits and pieces — sometimes forcefully, more often in desultory fashion — over the course of “The Routes of Slavery,” a 2½-hour musical presentation that arrived in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Saturday, Nov. 3, for a twonight run in the Bay Area. (The opening, presented by Cal Performances, was followed on Sunday, Nov. 4, by a reprise in Bing Concert Hall by Stanford Live.)
Conceived and created by the early music pioneer Jordi Savall, “The Routes of Slavery” brought together some two dozen performers — vocalists, instrumentalists, actors and dancers — from both sides of the Atlantic to present a sampling of the enormous range of musics (plural) from this cultural landscape. There were griot songs from Africa, slave songs from the United States, marches and dances from South America, and much more, in a sort of pageant of misery and resilience; in between chapters, actor Aldo Billingslea read historical excerpts on the subject.
The cumulative impact was both affecting and somewhat flattening, as centuries of unimaginable inhumanity — the work progressed chronologically from 1444 to 1888 — blurred into a watercolor of musical experience. One dance or musical sequence
Centuries of unimaginable inhumanity blurred into a watercolor of musical experience.
gave way to the next, often fading out with a seeming shrug.
There was no evident connection between the spoken selections and the music, nor did the musical miscellany, for all its individual moments of beauty and grandeur, tell a story of cultural transmission. It was simply a sequence of musical offerings, like a leisurely procession through an indifferently curated historical museum.
But if the overall historical context materialized only vaguely, there were still many moments of electrifying beauty and drama. Several of them came from the singer Neema Bickersteth, who deployed her fantastical vocal range alongside a richly spiritual communicative gift to impart pathos and strength to several of the American numbers.
From Mali, the commanding singer Mohamed Diaby, together with the vocal trio of Mamani Keita, Nana Kouyaté and Tanti Kouyaté, conjured up vivid images of the slaves’ ancestral landscape, as did the kora virtuoso and singer Ballaké Sissoko. Brazilian soprano Maria Juliana Linhares brought expressive urgency to songs from the Southern Hemisphere.
Savall, meanwhile, played the viola da gamba and led accompaniments in ever-shifting configurations by members of his ensemble Hespèrion XXI. It was all perfectly stately and polite.