Rainbow

Chronicle of a Collaboration

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By Ted Levin

Rainbow emerged from an ambitious process of collaborative creativity that reached across continents and cultures, and across musical categories and conventions. It represents at once a continuity and a turning point in the Smithsonian Folkways-Aga Khan Music Initiative CD-DVD series Music of Central Asia, whose previous seven releases each focus on a particular region or musical idiom, or on the artistry of a particular musician. Like the artists featured on earlier releases, the lead performers on Rainbow are all consummate masters of their own musical domain. Indeed, Azerbaijani singers Alim and Fargana Qasimov and Afghan rubâb player Homayun Sakhi have already debuted on Music of Central Asia (Sakhi on volume 3, The Art of the Afghan Rubâb, and the Qasimovs on volume 6, Spiritual Music of Azerbaijan). But how could it be otherwise in our era of cultural globalization that in their sonic imagination, these inquisitive artists, no less than the famously intrepid Kronos Quartet, should hear their own music both enriching, and being enriched by sounds and sonorities from elsewhere. These days, the instant availability of so many musical "elsewheres" makes the prospect of artistic collaboration at once alluring and daunting, full of promise as well as potential pitfalls: where in the world to begin? How to move beyond superficial grooves toward deeper levels of music connection? What standard to use as a measure of artistic success?

To the first of these questions, David Harrington, first violinist and founder of the Kronos Quartet, offered a straightforward answer: "I follow my ears," he said. Harrington's relentless musical curiosity has been the engine behind Kronos's adventurous musical travels. "I started playing string quartet music when I was twelve," Harrington related, "and I remember one day, as a young teenager, looking at a map of the world and realizing that the only string quartet music I'd ever played was written by men who lived in the same city: Vienna, Austria. That just struck me. And so at that age it became a part of my thinking to try to learn more about other parts of the world through music." Harrington has devoted his career to doing just that—in the process, forging under the aegis of Kronos a living legacy of pioneering and wide-ranging collaborations with musical creators from many cultures.

David Harrington's global musical explorations led him to recordings of Alim Qasimov and later, Homayun Sakhi. Harrington recounted his first impressions of listening to Qasimov: "I realized immediately that there was a quality I had never heard before from a singer. The way he inhabits the notes he makes is profoundly beautiful. It's like he's molding and shaping these notes in a way that we can only try to do with our bows. I hoped that one day we might be able to meet and find a way of making music together."

That musical meeting happened in 2008, as the first project in an ongoing collaboration between Kronos Quartet and the Aga Khan Music Initiative. In its mission to revitalize and assure the onward transmission of musical traditions in regions where they are endangered, the Music Initiative came to understand that cultivating creative processes which lead to artistic innovation and evolution is as important as conserving links to the past. Kronos's long experience in creating new music—oftentimes with artists from other cultures who didn't share a common musical lexicon of terms and concepts—offered a successful model of how to do such work.

To launch the Kronos-Qasimov collaboration, Alim Qasimov and two members of his ensemble, kamancha player Rauf Islamov, and tar player Ali Asgar Mammadov, traveled to San Francisco to rehearse a set of Azerbaijani songs drawn from Qasimov's repertoire. The challenge of the weeklong rehearsal period was to create a seamless interface between the note-reading Kronos players and the Qasimov Ensemble, whose performances typically feature an ever-shifting blend of memorized and extemporized musical gestures.

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