Well the percussion gig to accompany a literary reading happened yesterday afternoon in the Hollis Cornell Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall, on the Cornell campus. The featured writer was Irakli Kakabadze, a fiction writer, playwright, essayist, poet, and peace activist from the Republic of Georgia. He is the current fellow of the Ithaca City of Asylum Project, which provides a safe place to live and work for dissident writers from abroad who are threatened in their native countries.
My CMEMME musical colleague Maurice Chammah also accompanied, on violin. The three of us had met on two previous occasions to go over the material Irakli was planning to read, and to practice some improvised music to accompany his reading. I found Irakli to be great to work with. He’s very gracious, an excellent communicator, and artistically open-minded and flexible.
There was a pretty good turnout for the reading. The auditorium was almost full. I recognized a few rather illustrious writers in the audience, including Alison Lurie, James McConkey (his novel To a Distant Island is one of my very favorite books), and Ken McClane. Laurel Guy was there, formerly Ithaca Festival director and now an events coordinator for the English Department.
Irakli stood at a podium at the front of the auditorium, and Maurice and I sat to Irakli’s left, in chairs facing the audience, I with my frame drum. Irakli started out with a reading of a long prose piece called “Gurian Story of Ernesto Ecologist vs. Umberto Ecologist.” It’s a story that is a strange and very funny satire on many things, including Georgian intellectuals. During the reading of this story Maurice and I improvised, pretty much totally spontaneously. We played somewhat sparingly, just trying to add a little bit of atmosphere and mood to the reading. I was unsure whether anyone would actually be able to hear me or not (Irakli was miked, but Maurice and I were not). But I tried to just let go of worries, relax and be as intuitive and spontaneous as possible. I thought it went OK, even though I found playing to accompany prose to be a challenge. The problem is the lack of a rhythm to go by, and the utterly open nature of it. When you can do absolutely anything, how do you know what you should do? Still, I thought that we did OK on this, probably as best as could be expected for this kind of reading. Irakli read well, clearly and expressively.
After the reading of the story, Irakli read/chanted/sang two poems. Maurice and I had heard them before. We were both pretty comfortable with making music to accompany these song/poems because they are very rhythmic. Here our playing was not so atmospheric and spacey as in the prose piece. We both played with a sense of definiteness and musical purpose. I played some pretty pronounced rhythms, but with a certain element of improvisational freedom. I felt surprisingly relaxed and free in my playing. In some past gigs I’ve had a lot of problem with stage fright but not this time! Maybe after a few years of playing gigs I’ve finally outgrown my stage-fright problem. While I was playing the frame drum to these poems, it occurred to me how the feeling of playing this drum is actually very much like dancing (but with one’s hands).
Maurice played beautifully, and I thought I played OK. After the reading was over Irakli took a few questions from the audience. Then the gathering broke up, and many of the people went up to the post-reading reception upstairs. Receptions generally don’t interest me much. And I was in a bit of a hurry to get back home, check up on my cat, and do a few little domestic chores before heading out to meet with Julie, so I skipped the reception.
