27 April 2010
Review
Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: The set design for “Darbuka & Dehollo” was a simple one. A trio of microphones poised around a pair of lights, situated upon a couch on the stage of the Babel Theater. When it was decided enough time had passed to allow the audience from Bi-Pod to drift down from Hamra’s Masrah al-Madina, Turkish percussion master Misirli Ahmet (aka Ahmet Yıldırım) strode onto the stage.
He picked up one of the lights, radiating through the skin of Ahmet’s dehollo drum – a larger version of the more-familiar darbuka (derbake in Lebanon) – and began to caress the skin with the palm of his hand and fingertips. He performed his first high-energy number while in silent eye communication with his sound engineer – manning the sound board immediately in front of the stage. Once any sound bugs had been squashed, Ahmet proceeded to treat his audience to a master class in contemporary solo drum technique.
Actually, the concert was comprised of a selection of duet and trio performances, with the percussionist playing alongside contributions by various Egyptian collaborators – all of them recorded and played back by the anonymous sound technician.
Playback can provoke sneers from audiences who feel they’ve been conned when they put down good money for a concert performance and get lip-synching. An entire concert of playback may be questionable – though several one-man-show performance artists have made good use of the form.
But the practice of playback from one or two instruments to accompany a core group of players has been legitimized by a number of A-list acts. The concerts of the Kronos Quartet, for instance, regularly find the strings accompanied by the playback of their innumerable studio collaborators.
Anyway the Babel’s audience didn’t seem to mind too much, suggesting Ahmet’s technical skills are dazzling enough to relegate the playback to aural cosmetics.
“Darbuka & Dehollo” was one of the performance events being held around Beirut for Home Works 5, the forum on cultural practices held biennially by Ashkal Alwan, the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts. A percussion concert may seem an odd fit in this context, especially if you associate critical artistic practice, and seminars about it, to be hostile to mass entertainment.
Darbuka is hardly an exotic instrument hereabouts – being an integral part of the orchestras accompanying pop performers like Majida al-Roumi and Kazem al-Saher and ubiquitous in orient-themed bars and restaurants. Indeed, several facets of Ahmet’s performance look quite populist – not only the internal lighting plugged into his two otherwise un-electrified instruments, but his showmanship.
In one number, Ahmet plays darbuka and dehollo simultaneously (one drum per hand). During the final tune of the evening, he divides his audience in two and calls upon them to accompany his playing with their own mass-percussion contribution.
All that aside, Ahmet represents a serious school of darbuka. As one biography has it, the 46-year-old Ankara native has been devoted to percussion since he was 17 years old – his epiphany apparently coming over during a wedding. After commencing his studies in Turkey he was unhappy with the shallow approach to the form, so his training took him to France and Egypt. Egypt proved a consciousness-expanding experience for Ahmet. In 2007 he opened his own school of darbuka, the Misirli Ahmet Rhythm Academy (in Istanbul’s Galata district – thereby raising the artistic stature of darbuka practice in Turkey.
Clearly the best-loved tune of the evening at the Babel was Ahmet’s third number, redolent of belly-dance rhythms, performed with the assistance of a spectral Egyptian accordionist. Heads bobbed in time and hoots and shrieks issued from several members of the audience as the tune gathered steam.
At the end of the one-set concert, the audience demanded Ahmet return to the stage and put out a bit more. He and his sound man complied with an encore that revisited the belly dance tune. There was little variation and the audience seemed to appreciated it.
Home Works continues through May 1 at various venues around Beirut.
Copyright The Daily Star 2010.
