Going gaga for gongs: Song of the Bird King + more

I want to highlight music that we don’t hear enough of in the West, and an issue near and dear to me.

Check out the audio interview of jazz drummer and gong player, Susie Ibarra — available on Lonnie Isabel’s Reporter Notebook blog here. Joined with composer/percussionist husband Roberto Rodriguez, Ibarra is making a documentary about the music of indigenous tribes in the Philippines. The project is called Song of the Bird King and links two urgent issues: the degradation of the environment, and how those effects endanger not only plant and animal species, but also jeopardize the survival of peoples and cultures.

I hail from a tribe of indigenous gong-players in that part of the world, or close by, in neighboring Vietnam. It’s easy to see that brass gongs were a commodity throughout Southeast Asia, because they’re ubiquitous from Java, to the Philippines, to the mountainous interior of Vietnam — the land of my mother’s tribe. Similar to the plight of the groups in Song of the Bird King, Vietnam indigenous groups face problems about land rights, health risks from the new bauxite mine, and  deforestation. Indeed, efforts to preserve ethnic minority culture seem like an afterthought.

For this reason, we need the works like Song of the Bird King, artists like Susie Ibarra — and a serious wake-up call and rearranging of our priorities, in my opinion, thank you very much.

Links:

• You can give a listen to Dialects, Susie Ibarra’s album of electric kulintang, described as “Filipino trip-hop.”
• Here’s a vid of Vietnam’s ethnic minority Gong Culture. Check out mom’s tribe at 1:32 — considered the dancers and singers of the Central Highlands. Must have something to do with my thing for polyrhythms…

• If you’re going gaga for more gongs, click here for a photo slideshow that I produced on the amazing GAMELATRON, a robot that plays like an Indonesian gamelan orchestra, and the guy who fiddles with the remote control, Zemi 17.

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