music
BY BRETT CAMPBELL
Refugees
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars transcend war
with music
D
Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars
JANE RICHEY
uring Sierra Leone’s savage,
decade-long civil war in the 1990s,
hundreds of thousands of refugees
streamed into often squalid refugee
camps. Eventually, seven musicians from
the Freetown area, many of whom had
suffered or witnessed brutal atrocities,
formed a band. Music became a refuge
from the horrors of civil war and exile. A
powerful documentary fi lm shown on
public television brought the story to
millions around the world, followed by an
acclaimed album and world tour — which
arrives at the Shedd on Feb. 21. The
reggae-accented Afrobeat music of Sierra
Leone’s Refugee All Stars measures up
to the band’s compelling story.
That’s only the fi rst of a fl urry of
strong world music shows over the next
month. They’ve warmed up the crowd
for Arcade Fire and Gogol Bordello and
played gigs from Malaysia to Macedonia
to Istanbul, and on Feb. 28, Brooklyn’s
Slavic Soul Party hauls brass to Cozmic
Pizza. This ten-tet has got to be one of the
most fun aggregations on tour, featuring
horn-goosed Balkan and gypsy music
propelled by irresistibly danceable funk
rhythms, sort of like Dirty Dozen Brass
Band with an East European accent.
On Feb. 29, Fenario Gallery (8th and
Willamette) hosts the great Algerian-born,
Paris-starring, San Francisco based DJ
Cheb I Sabbah . His fantastic mixes of
electronica, Indian classical music (tabla,
sitar), North African guitar pop, Asian
dub and more sounds like the music of the
global future. The show also features the
acclaimed Pakistani singer Riffat Sultana
and Afghan tabla master Salar Nader .
The next evening, March 1, another
fusion outfi t, Oakland’s Gamelan X , brings
its theatrical Indonesian/African/Balkan/
American groove thing to Sam Bond’s. A
Burning Man favorite, the group’s arsenal
includes Balinese bronze gongs (which
they use in performances of traditional
ceremonial marching music called
Beleganjur) as well as synth-bass, drums,
brass, strings and African percussion. If
you’d rather go to Rio that night instead,
the WOW Hall’s Carnaval Brasil features
the mighty drums of Samba Ja and other
Brazilian music makers and shakers.
As Virginia Woolf noted, for most of
history, Anonymous was a woman. We
don’t know the names of many composers,
male or female, before the turn of the fi rst
millennium, but the magnifi cent music of
the 12th century German nun Hildegard of
Bingen shows that gender has never been
a barrier to genius. Hildegard’s soaring
sounds reappeared in the 1980s thanks to
groups like Gothic Voices and especially
Sequentia, which recorded her complete
surviving works. UO visiting professor
Laurie Monahan, a renowned Boston-
based early music performer, collaborated
on those historic Sequentia recordings
and co-founded the equally wonderful
early music ensembles Project Ars Nova
and Tapestry. On Feb. 29, Monahan
leads Tapestry in a highly recommended
concert of ancient and modern music at the
UO’s Beall Hall, featuring music by and
about remarkable women through the ages.
This show ranges from great 12th and 13th
century composers such as Hildegard and
Perotin to contemporary (male) composers
such as the UO’s own Robert Kyr and
Ivan Moody, plus Rachmaninoff, Malvina
Reynolds and more — many anonymous.
And the songs come from what’s now
Spain, Ireland, Germany, Appalachia and
elsewhere.
More fi ne singers take the stage at LCC
on Feb. 21, when a couple of UO faculty
members, singer Douglas Webster and
pianist John Jantzi , join LCC sopranos
Siri Vik and Laura Wayte and tenor
David Gustafson in songs from operas
and movies. For modern music fans,
the Eugene Contemporary Chamber
Ensemble performs music of Schoenberg,
David Roberts and Gracin Dorsey in a free
show on Feb. 27 at Beall. For the more
electronically inclined, the UO’s Future
Music Oregon is bringing a contemporary
female composer, Elainie Lillios , whose
sound sources include pebbles in water,
feet crunching in snow and tree branches
rustling. The March 1 concert in Room 163
of the music school also features typically
futuristic music of the UO’s own Jeffrey
Stolet , whose instrumentarium this
time includes fl ashlights, video, “custom
interactive performance environment” and
Nintendo Wii remote controllers.
Also at the UO, on March 2 in the Collier
House, traditional Scottish Gaelic singer
and storyteller Rich Hill , of Seattle’s Keltoi
and Bones ’n’ Drones, leads a free concert
with the women’s a cappella ensemble
Kitchen Ceilidh and the voice-harp duo
Trilogy . And to see what happened when
those old Gaelic tunes made their way
over the pond, check out the excellent
newgrass band Cadillac Sky at the Shedd
on Feb. 24 and watch Celtic sounds morph
into bluegrass and country and territory in
between.
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EUGENE WEEKLY FEBRUARY 21, 2008 33