Thursday, September 27
Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain
Global Drum Project
LAXSON AUDITORIUM | 7:30 p.m.$35 Premium | $30 Adult | $28Senior | $25 Student/Child
"Planet Drum . . . doesn't stray far from the spirit of the Big Bang." — The New York Times
The Global Drum Project reunites Grateful Dead percussion heavyweight Mickey Hart with his longtime friend and collaborator, tabla master Zakir Hussain — along with talking drum ace Sikiru Adepoju and the formidable conguero Giovanni Hidalgo — for a limited series of West Coast dates in celebration of the 15th anniversary of their ground-breaking album Planet Drum.
Planet Drum was released in 1991 on the Rykodisc label and went on to earn the first-ever Grammy in the World Music category. The tour is the groups first in almost a decade. It also marks the resumption of an artistic relationship — between Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain — that goes back to the late 1960s.
Hart and Hussain's musical relationship first emerged into the public eye in 1976 with the Diga Rhythm Band, a collaboration of percussionists (most of whom were students at the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music) that was, Hart said, "an American vision of a gamelan." After opening for a Jefferson Starship concert at San Francisco's famed Winterland, they recorded Diga, which included the tune "Happiness in Drumming," which evolved into the Hart tune "Fire on the Mountain," a staple for the Dead, Other Ones, and GlobalDrum.
Late in the 1970s Hart organized the Rhythm Devils, a percussion group that included his fellow Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann and Michael Hinton, among others, to record the percussion sound track to Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Soon after, in the early '80s, Hart collaborated with Airto Moreira and Flora Purim on Dafos.
By then, he'd begun an in-depth investigation into the socio-cultural history of percussion, which resulted in two books — a memoir, Drumming At the Edge of Magic, and then a pictorial history, Planet Drum. Alongside the book came the CD, Planet Drum, and perhaps the greatest summit meeting of percussionists the world has ever known. All of them were legendary.
The elder was the late Babatunde Olatunji (Drums of Passion) from Nigeria, the man who introduced African drumming into popular American sensibilities, along with his protégé and aesthetic heir, Sikiru Adepoju (whose specialty is the talking drum), also of Nigeria. From Brazil came Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew fame. One of the great Latin percussionist of all time, Giovanni Hidalgo, brought in the flavor of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Finally, Zakir Hussain (and his associate T.H. "Vikku" Vinayakram) blended in the magical sounds of classical India.
The Planet Drum CD was a critical and popular smash. And now, 15 years later, which each of the four — Hart, Hussain, Adepoju, and Hidalgo — at the height of their creative powers, it's time to invoke the percussion gods again.
If you enjoy this band, you might enjoy:
Zap Mama
Pink Martini
Tower of Power
Perla Batalla
Musafir
Jake Shimabukuro with Joe Craven
Youssou N'Dour
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Shidara