tripped hopped

I saw Electric Kulintang Tuesday night, which is a collaboration between legendary free jazz drummer Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez, a heretofore-unknown-to-me drummer and electronician. (Despite the reference to Sean Lennon in the above link, he was a no-show; whether or not he's part of the group or was just involved with the aforementioned performance, I have no idea.) I last saw Ibarra ten years ago in a duo, and her contribution was overpowering, a percussion maelstrom that was somehow organized coherently, like a dangerous weather pattern operating with scientific precision but chaotic fury.

So imagine my disappointment that on the few times Ibarra bothered to sit down behind a drum kit, she didn't even pick up a set of sticks. Mallets and brushes were as far as it got, and even then at the edge of subduedness. Her attention was more often directed towards what I thought was a gamelan but apparently is a kulintang, eight tuned metal bowls of varying shape. She also availed herself to a wooden percussion instrument (varying lengths of resonant wood, somewhat laid out like a dumbed-down marimba) and a keyboard at various points. While Rodriguez spent most of his time behind a laptop, adding percussion on his wooden seat beneath him, the actual high point of the show featured him behind the drum kit with Ibarra taking his seat at the laptop/mixing board. As he laid out a pretty interesting rhythmic exploration behind the kit, Ibarra took his work, looped and processed it, and brought it back into the mix. It was a dense and engaging stew and really fucking impressive.

But overall, it was hard for me to appreciate the self-described "Filipino Trip-Hop", diverting though it was, when thinking about what I'd seen Ibarra do before. This is a woman who is generally considered the best drummer the David S. Ware quartet had to offer, who could hold her own against Ware and Matthew Shipp and William Parker. When the highlight is her sitting behind a laptop ... well, it was sort of like going to see Iron Maiden, only to have them announce that they were doing a "back to basics" tour without any big stage show elements. (True story. I saw them on the NO PRAYER FOR THE DYING tour in 91, I think.)

So what musicians have you seen that, by doing what they love, strayed far afield from what you loved about them?

(Although I haven't done it yet, sound clips of the Kulintang can be downloaded here, as can bits of Ibarra's other projects. Perusing her web page further, it appears that she has several other projects on the hop, so it's not so much that she's forsaken her other work, just that us in New Zealand only got to see this project. But really: when's the next time I'll get to see her in New Zealand?)