Silk Road Ensemble's "When Strangers Meet" frequently commutes from my CD stack to the Bose, and then here at the Top O'th Planet I feel the harmonics of a vast net of longitudes converge and find a path ready inside me.
With the release of their new album, "Beyond the Horizon", it's a perfect time for a broad reintroduction of the worldly confab Yo-Yo Ma conceived in 1998. Not so many years ago World Music was a trinket smuggled home by college students, splashed in primary colors and floating on a round Robbie Shakespearean bassline. The genesis of this segment, like the music, is more nuanced ? Echoes' John Diliberto ran into Silk Road's Yang Wei at the Philadelphia airport and proposed doing a radio piece.
And it's all mapped out here, the Asian bazaar of sound from China, Japan, India, and the Middle East, smooth and strong, "a global collective [where] unlike the United Nations they all actually like each other."
Listeners will too. There are those psychological leaps, though ? the, um, classical music. And those foreign sounds. Which is precisely where "Global Horizons" succeeds, gently unfolding some history of humanity's ancient interstate, scoring the story perfectly with the Ensemble's blossoming cloverleafs of sound.
This full-magazine-segment feature (7:57) is entirely accessible to the general public radio audience, with the polish and precision you expect from Diliberto (though I found Kimberly Haas's narration a bit arch). Frankly, it's so good, NDs and PDs will want to flag music directors so that classical and/or world music programming slots can quickly feature the full CD and it's predecessor.
If MDs are so inclined, they'd do well to also investigate Silk Road Music, a Chinese/Canadian collaboration founded in 1992 by Qui Xia He after "a fan compared her style of [pipa] playing with that of the late Jimi Hendrix", according to Billboard magazine. Silk Road Music has since steered down the Pan-American Highway, adding Quebecois folk, New Orleans jazz, and Brazilian mix. Plus some Celtic and flamenco vibes.
Together, these Silk Roads traffic in a tectonic shift in world music beyond Afro-Caribbean basin pop. The on-ramp is right here, with "Global Horizons".
Review of Yo-Yo Ma And The Silk Road Ensemble: Global Horizons
Geo Beach
Posted on June 15, 2005 at 02:48 PM
Silk Road Ensemble's "When Strangers Meet" frequently commutes from my CD stack to the Bose, and then here at the Top O'th Planet I feel the harmonics of a vast net of longitudes converge and find a path ready inside me.
With the release of their new album, "Beyond the Horizon", it's a perfect time for a broad reintroduction of the worldly confab Yo-Yo Ma conceived in 1998. Not so many years ago World Music was a trinket smuggled home by college students, splashed in primary colors and floating on a round Robbie Shakespearean bassline. The genesis of this segment, like the music, is more nuanced ? Echoes' John Diliberto ran into Silk Road's Yang Wei at the Philadelphia airport and proposed doing a radio piece.
And it's all mapped out here, the Asian bazaar of sound from China, Japan, India, and the Middle East, smooth and strong, "a global collective [where] unlike the United Nations they all actually like each other."
Listeners will too. There are those psychological leaps, though ? the, um, classical music. And those foreign sounds. Which is precisely where "Global Horizons" succeeds, gently unfolding some history of humanity's ancient interstate, scoring the story perfectly with the Ensemble's blossoming cloverleafs of sound.
This full-magazine-segment feature (7:57) is entirely accessible to the general public radio audience, with the polish and precision you expect from Diliberto (though I found Kimberly Haas's narration a bit arch). Frankly, it's so good, NDs and PDs will want to flag music directors so that classical and/or world music programming slots can quickly feature the full CD and it's predecessor.
If MDs are so inclined, they'd do well to also investigate Silk Road Music, a Chinese/Canadian collaboration founded in 1992 by Qui Xia He after "a fan compared her style of [pipa] playing with that of the late Jimi Hendrix", according to Billboard magazine. Silk Road Music has since steered down the Pan-American Highway, adding Quebecois folk, New Orleans jazz, and Brazilian mix. Plus some Celtic and flamenco vibes.
Together, these Silk Roads traffic in a tectonic shift in world music beyond Afro-Caribbean basin pop. The on-ramp is right here, with "Global Horizons".