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A Cappella Fantasy Land
On Thursday my friend Trina mentioned that there was some percussionist
that was going to be in town on Friday night, playing with some a cappella
group. "Hmmm, sounds pretty interesting" I thought. So we went to the
box office to see about the details...
...turns out that it was the Kings Singers and Evelyn Glennie in concert
together. The Kings Singers, in case you don't know, are perhaps the
premier a cappella group in the world; they came to Earlham during my
sophomore year and I was thoroughly entranced by their music. Evelyn
Glennie was born in Aberdeen but has established herself as one of the
world's greatest percussionists, winning many honorary doctorate degrees
and receiving many Scottish "Woman of the Year" and "Woman of the Decade"
awards for her accomplishments.
And they all deserve their prestige. The concert was really neat. The
name of the tour is "Street Songs"; all of the songs they sing were
written for the tour and for the combined performers, and focus mainly on
South African music and the themes of death and resurrection associated
with life there. Several of the songs were the Kings Singers accompanied
by Evelyn on a large vibra-phone type thing, but they also did various
solos. Evelyn in particular had these incredible drum solos, with two
different drum sets, where she would just start banging away and ended up
making incredible sounds for 5 or 10 minutes of drumming. At one point
she did a "snare drum solo" (I never thought there could be such a thing)
that was absolutely captivating.
They finsihed the concert doing several songs from Paul Simon's
"Graceland" and "Spirit Voices" and I'm always in the mood for Paul
Simon...
I felt really lucky to have been able to see the concert; it was really
well done and the music is so significant, both in its origins and its
message. And what beautiful, powerful music!
Chris
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