MUSIC REVIEW | ROSWELL RUDD AND MAMADOU DIABATE
When Cultures' Sounds Don't Match, but Echo
By KELEFA SANNEH

Published: February 18, 2004

How do you tune a balafon? At an engrossing concert at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn on Friday night, the trombonist Roswell Rudd gave the answer: you don't.

The balafon is a wooden West African instrument that resembles a xylophone, and every balafon produces a slightly different set of notes. So the members of Mr. Rudd's hybrid band made sure their instruments matched Balla Kouyate's balafon. The only way to stay in tune was to be slightly out of tune.

The concert grew out of a 2002 CD called, "MALIcool" (Sunnyside/Universal), a collaboration between Mr. Rudd and the Malian kora player Toumani Diabate. (The kora is a 21-string instrument with a long neck.) For the current tour, Toumani Diabate has been replaced by another kora virtuoso, his cousin Mamadou Diabate, but the spirit remained the same. Mr. Rudd and his bandmates explored a world of musical assonance, where instruments echoed one another without quite falling into lockstep.

Mr. Rudd sometimes amused Mr. Diabate and Mr. Kouyate by unleashing wildly off-kilter trombone slides. When he swung his instrument while emitting long warping notes, he looked and sounded like a drunken elephant. Other times Mr. Rudd just sat back and watched, swaying in time to the swinging polyrhythms.

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