Concert: Idan Raichel Project at Lisner Auditorium (March 25, 2009)

I attended a really great concert last night, with smillaraaq. Israeli artist Idan Raichel, who sings and plays keyboards, brought three vocalists (male Middle Eastern, female Sudanese Israeli of Ethiopian ancestry,* female Ashkenazi Israeli), a Uruguayan percussionist, a Georgian (as in, Transcaucus, not U.S. South) oud/guitar artist, and a Moroccan guitarist, along with a couple of other fellow Israelis on drums and bass. The music is rooted in traditional melodies from a wide variety of cultures - most strongly Near Eastern and Ethiopian (Raichel learned a lot of what he knows from Ethiopian musicians in Israel).

It's delicious, passionate, complex, multi-layered, and often very danceable - more than half the audience erupted from their seats to run down and groove in front of the stage and up the aisles (only to be shooed back to their seats by the Lisner security staff). There were too many lovely moments to remember off the top of my head, but the instrumental showcases that stood out for me were: Rony Iwryn's remarkable percussion solo involving terracotta bowls of various sizes filled with water - he poured it back and forth, tapping and drumming on the bowls with his fingertips and palms, calling forth ravishingly beautiful sounds; Eyal Sela's solos on flute, clarinet (Klezmer-style), and other woodwinds; and Mark Kakun's beautiful instrumental on electric guitar played more like a classical guitar. All three vocalists had immensely powerful melodic voices and were fun to watch as well.

• MySpace page with streaming music and concert tour dates
• Idan Raichel Web site with pictures from the current tour (scroll down - it's the first picture set, the one that's showing in the enlargement frame)
• An amateur video that will nonethless give some idea of what the concert was like (from an earlier concert)

*ETA: I've been reading around the Intarwebs and found out some more about the singer that Raichel introduced as coming from "the refugee camps of Sudan": she is Cabra Casey, born to Jewish Ethiopian parents who had fled to Sudan and eventually ended up in Israel. So my bad, and I certainly made some near-sighted assumptions. >sigh<. Fail better, cho ... .