Paul Dresher Performs “With Friends”

Last night Paul Dresher streamed a free concert entitled With Friends Like These. One of those friends was pianist Sarah Cahill, performing “Two Entwined,” a work that Dresher had composed for her in 2011. The other friends were “colleagues” in performance, duo partner Joel Davel, singer/musician Rinde Eckert (who, by my calculations, has been working with Dresher for about 40 years), and Vân-Ánh Võ performing on three traditional Vietnamese instruments, dàn tranh, dàn bầu, and dàn t’rung.

In addition to Cahill’s solo, the program presented three trios, all involving the Dresher Davel Invented Instrument Duo. Two of the selections involved the Duo accompanying Eckert’s vocal deliveries of traditional Indian music. In the remaining offering the Duo improvised with Võ playing all three of her instruments. The entire performance lasted for about 40 minutes.

Unless I am mistaken, Cahill’s offering presented my first encounter with music by Dresher that did not involve him as a performer. The piece evolved as an elaborate texture of polyphony in which the interplay of rhythms was as engaging as the entwined melodic lines. The result was keyboard virtuosity on a grand scale, music that deserves multiple listening experiences before one can even begin to recognize the many innovative devices lurking on the score pages. From a personal point of view, I was left wishing I had the piece on a CD to allow me to get under way with those multiple listening experiences.

There has been so much diversity in Eckert’s performances than I have given up on having expectations. I am not familiar enough with Indian music to know how faithful he was to original sources or even whether such fidelity mattered to him. For one thing, in his first offering, “Hindustani,” he accompanied himself on accordion, while Dresher provided another melodic line on electric guitar. Most interesting was how Davel adapted his Marimba Lumina to serve as a tabla, thus providing a compelling evocation of traditional Indian accompaniment. For the other selection, Eckert had his own drum; and Dresher provided thematic material with his Quadrachord.

The Quadrachord was also his instrument in the Duo’s improvisation with Võ. This provided particularly imaginative video work, using a three-way split screen to provide the best view of each of the performers:

Vân-Ánh Võ playing dàn bầu, Paul Dresher playing Quadrachord, and Joel Davel on Marimba Lumina (screen shot from the video being discussed)

I have to confess to a personal attachment to the dàn bầu, since I was given a lesson in how to play it on my first trip to Vietnam. The interplay of music and video made this one of the most engaging improvisation sessions I have encountered, and the ways in which Võ utilized all three of her instruments made the experience all the more absorbing.