#ArabAmerica: Amir ElSaffar leads profound concert at Symphony Center

The year is young, but what likely will stand as one of the more profound concerts of 2018 took place Friday night in Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center. For trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who performed on this stage in the late 1990s as a member of the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, returned in a decidedly more visible and multifaceted role: leader of a 17-member ensemble unlike any other. 

ElSaffar — who moved to New York in 2000, after graduating from DePaul University’s School of Music — since 2002 has been digging deeply into the music of his Iraqi heritage. Numerous and lengthy periods of study in the Middle East have immersed him in ancient musical practices, which he ingeniously has interwoven with the methods of jazz improvisation and composition. 

But more than that, ElSaffar also has applied his knowledge of classical, blues and other musical languages to his aptly named Rivers of Sound Orchestra, which embraces a wide swath of his cross-cultural experiments to date. 

Last year, ElSaffar and this magisterial ensemble released “Not Two,” the recording’s title referencing the composer’s desire to break free of the jazz-meets-Iraq dichotomy with a more all-encompassing approach to creating sound. That’s the music that Rivers of Sound played in its Orchestra Hall debut, and not even the sensuous character of that recording could compare with the pleasures and provocations of hearing this work in concert. 

The sheer breadth of orchestral expression, diversity of musical technique and detail of instrumental articulation rendered this a singular event. ElSaffar began as the “Not Two” album does: with the gentle orchestral undulations of the “Iftitah” tone poem. Before long, ElSaffar’s clarion trumpet lines were crying out above a wash of symphonic color. 

Classical strings, Middle Eastern ouds, jazz horns and multifaceted percussion converged, not in a clash of cultures but an intermingling of them. In effect, ElSaffar had conjured sheaths of sound, one layer of instrumental color enveloping another and another. Yet thanks to the delicacy of ElSaffar’s writing, the listener never encountered monumental textural blocks that this thick scoring might have implied. 

Instead, the music here, and throughout the performance, proved translucent, with specifics of pitch, color and rhythm easily discerned. And despite the chantlike melody and rhythmic repetitiveness of so much of this music, each movement conveyed a distinct message and a clear contrast to what had come before. 

So the surging energy of “Penny Explosion,” with Aakash Mittal’s incantatory alto saxophone solo unfolding over pulsing percussion, eventually gave way to the regal solemnity of “Ya Ibni, Ya Ibni” (“My Son, My Son”). In that movement, one marveled at how long strands of melody from Mohamed Ibrahim Saleh’s English horn, shimmering passages from John Escreet’s piano and the gently stated tintinnabulation of Jason Adasiewicz’s vibraphone could not only coexist but also come together. 

Similarly, one wondered how so many forms of building music — Western and non-Western scales, alternate tunings, microtonal pitches and what-not — could cohere without producing harsh and ungainly dissonance. Add to this ElSaffar’s solos and accompaniments on santur (a kind of hammered dulcimer), and listeners absorbed more sonic information than one might have thought the ear was capable of processing. 

When ElSaffar produced vocal chant above all of this in “Layl” (“Night”), and elsewhere, his melismatic lines and subtly bent pitches soared above the orchestral swirl. In these passages, there was no question we were in a vast musical landscape merging Eastern and Western sensibilities with high craft and devotional intent. 

Each member of this ensemble contributed significantly, with particularly lustrous tone from cellist Naseem AlAtrash, bracingly angular phrases from tenor saxophonist Ole Mathisen and tender lyricism from violinist Dena ElSaffar (the bandleader’s sister). Because ElSaffar is just 40, it’s appropriate to consider his Rivers of Sound an early foray in what could be a lifetime of innovation. 

Surely his breakthroughs deserve consideration for a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. The evening opened with Chicago drummer-bandleader Mike Reed reprising his “Flesh and Bone” suite, an abstract, multimedia response to a life-threatening event Reed and colleagues suffered in 2009 amid a neo-Nazi skinhead rally in the Czech Republic. 

The suite — with its taut instrumental writing — seemed well-suited to the intimate confines of Constellation, where Reed and colleagues performed it last April. But the musicians persuasively expanded its scope in Orchestra Hall, thanks partly to the dramatic recitations of Marvin Tate, who has mastered the apparently elusive art of reciting poetry alongside jazz instrumentalists without being overrun by them. 

by Howard Reich

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