Living Art, Sounding Spirit: The Bali Sessions

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About Living Art, Sounding Spirit: The Bali Sessions

Amazon.com A longtime rock drummer playing at the fringe of his genre's rhythms, former percussionist Mickey Hart submerges himself in Balinese gamelan music with this three-CD package. Hart's recordings, gathered over three days in early 1998, are distinguished by remarkable excellence, both in the execution of the performances and in the sound quality. With each ensemble holding a slightly different sound as its own, the music ranges from all-percussion to percussion with bamboo flutes and/or two-string fiddles that sound like the Chinese erhu. But there's also a 54-minute choral work that's both built on gamelan and usually performed for tourists. Here the piece, "Kepandung Sita," is a maze of chants and interlocked antiphony, all of it sung in a percussive, mesmerizing display of electric, crescendo-like rises that make the blood run thin. Not to be misconstrued as a neotraditionalist, Hart also includes three newly composed works on the third CD. Each seems entirely traditional and yet pulsing with colors that you hear nowhere else on the set, marking the new works as a sort of footpath into the gamelan's future in Balinese art music. Hart's snapshot of the Balinese gamelan stands on its own for a wide range of listeners. It does so gracefully and with great success. --Andrew Bartlett