Connecting Chords offers a passport to global music in Kalamazoo

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Curtain Call — your front-row seat to the unique, lively, and memorable performances shaping Kalamazoo’s arts scene. Supported by the I.S. Gilmore Foundation, this series highlights the creativity and community that make each show something special.

They brought to Kalamazoo a beat-boxer, cellist, and five-string bassist doing a kind of South American-influenced funk with danceable Washington, D.C. go-go touches….

Or, later in October, we’ll get rural Korean folk dance and percussion….

But then, there’ll be an early silent Alfred Hitchcock thriller shown with live music…

Maybe you’d like Judeo-Moroccan songs of diaspora? Modern and ancient songs inspired by an Armenian mystic? A Romanian traditional song genre in danger of dying out? 

“It’s just that there’s so much neat stuff out there,” Executive Director Elizabeth Start tells us about the Connecting Chords Music Festival. 

So why not bring it all to Kalamazoo?

You may have missed the beat-box/cello/bass trio Biribá Union Sept. 24 (account of that concert below). Don’t worry. The festival of unique sounds (and dance, film, other incorporated art) from around the world is spread out from the middle of August until the end of November, so there’s more to come.

Music is sacred

It began in 2001 as the Michigan Festival of Sacred Music, to stage concerts of music from multiple faiths. 

Start says, “It was the brainchild of Wen Chau Chen,” former Kalamazoo College professor and administrator, and was under director Dick Snyder, retired from Miller Auditorium.

The first concert was planned for that November. 

“Then the 9/11 attacks happened,” Start says. Having multiple faiths and cultures coming together in one event suddenly took on new meaning.

Start came on in 2004. The question they were asking themselves then was, “We had this great purpose in 2001; does that still exist? Of course, the answer is yes.” 

The answer is still yes, but the concept of what is sacred was broadened. 

The biannual festival became annual in 2016. In 2018, it became Connecting Chords, under the organizational name of Michigan Festival of Sacred Music.

All music is sacred, in its own way. “To me, Beethoven is sacred,” Start, also a longtime classical musician and member of the Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra, says. 

“That’s actually one of the reasons why we have changed to Connecting Chords, because for some people sacred absolutely means Sunday morning worship, and it just seemed it seemed in this way limiting because to me so much is sacred.”

New sounds, old sounds

Much of what Start loves about bringing the world’s cultures to town is that she gets to hear things she’s never heard before. It’s an experience like being an explorer, a tourist going outside your comfort zone.

She mentions one patron who “clearly was brought against his will” to a concert and filled out a comment sheet with a tale of woe about sitting through the multi-tonal vocals of the Tibetan Monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery. He “clearly would’ve much rather been somewhere else,” she says, laughing. 

Maybe everything isn’t for everybody. It can be difficult to appreciate something that is outside of your cultural experience, outside of your world. So it’s cool to hear something you’re kinda familiar with, put in a new context.

Biribá Union launches the season

To describe Biribá Union’s concert at Bell’s Backroom Sept. 24, start with the familiar, the beatboxing. 

Cristylez Bacon was beatboxing and occasionally rapping in the go-go style of the Washington, D.C. hard funk offshoot. 

Hey, I saw Chuck Brown at the 2009 New Orleans Jazz Fest, so… that doesn’t make me a go-go expert, but I know the style. And like any Gen-X kid, I may have once attempted beatboxing after hearing The Fat Boys.  

Bacon’s beatboxing (mouth percussion, direct into the mic, with occasional live-recorded loop backup), and Patricia Ligia’s electric five-string bass added a funk/jazz layer. 

On top, with the sweetness of the biribá (a Brazilian wild sugar apple), was Mike Block and his cello. Block moved to the music, cello in a harness, bouncing about to the beat.

The bassist from Uruguay, hip-hop artist from Washington D.C., and Grammy-winning Bach cellist met at Silkroad’s Global Musician Workshop, and bonded over Brazilian music. 

“We are a weird band,” Block told the audience. “There’s nothing written for this.”

They wrote their own music, and what emerged was breezy yet funky. In it, there are hints of Brazil, Latin America, jazz, classical, hip-hop, all whipped up in a blender to make a smoothie of a sound.

They were engaging and made sure to let the audience know how this sound formed. Songs casually came out of inspirations, like Block’s little daughter building an “Ice Cream City” out of her toys.

Block told about his efforts to work through Bach’s cello suites; Bacon educated the audience about Doug E. Fresh’s beatbox pioneering and go-go’s audience call-and-response culture.

Was this sacred? Was it a communing of cultures?

Bacon’s rap in “Lamentations,” the trio’s most heavy-work, mood-wise, lamented the algorithms that’ve got us divided. 

He then got the audience united in participation. People tossed him words to include in a freestyle rap. Words like “Kalamazoo,” “gazpacho,” “ravioli,” “Edmund Fitzgerald…”  

“Who?” he asked. This was his first time near the Great Lakes, and he didn’t know about our fixation on a Superior shipwreck that happened over 40 years ago.

Biribá Union and the audience educated each other, grooved, and shared that night. 

25 years of cultural communion, cool stuff

Start’s favorite memories of cultural communion include musician/conservationist Paul Winter talking about Michigan wolves with then-head of the Kalamazoo Nature Center Bill Rose, and the Tibetan Monks being “kind of like teenagers… joking around and having a good time,” as they explored the exotic world of Kalamazoo. 

Festival of Sacred Music/Connecting Chords has been 25 years “of some really cool stuff,” Start says.

“It’s funny, because every year people say, ‘You’ve got such a great lineup, and you always just have such good stuff,’ and I’m like, yeah, and it’s totally different from last year. It’s just — there’s just so much neat stuff out there .”

Coming highlights of the festival include:

This Saturday, Oct. 10, is a Kleinstuck Trail Walk with local musicians Song of the Alvar.

Oct. 14, Nordic sounds from Stundom will be at Bell’s. Korean Performing Arts Institute of Chicago will send their master artists to Kalamazoo College Oct. 15 to perform dance and percussion. 

Start says she’s intrigued by “The Lodger,” a 1927 silent thriller by a young Alfred Hitchcock, Oct. 20 at the First Congregational Church. It will be backed by music from internationally renowned organist David Briggs and include a set of silent films with Kalamazoo’s Silent But Deadly.

The Nagash Ensemble, playing Nov. 15 at Stetson Chapel, K College, is a group Start is most excited about. They play Armenian music on traditional instruments like the duduk, oud, and dhol, but with modern flair. “It’s just such a crazy mix of old sacred music with modern compositional techniques…. It’s just this mesmerizing kind of indescribable music, but it just grabs you,” she said.

From now until Nov. 29, with the Kalamazoo tradition of the Messiah Sing, the collaboration with First Congregational Church of the Handel’s Messiah community sing, Connecting Chords will be hosting many other chances to connect, explore, and discover new and ancient cultures. 

See their site for the full schedule.