Energy by the Drumload

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Israeli percussionist Chen Zimbalista is a throwback to the days when “entertainer” wasn’t a pejorative term. He radiates energy onstage, tells stories, indulges in audience participation, choreographs the beginnings and endings of pieces in true showman style, mines a wide variety of musical genres from around the globe, and exemplifies the old Italian art of sprezzatura, making nearly impossible technical challenges seem easy.

Withal, he has incredibly quick hands, impeccable technique on a variety of instruments, and a sure sense of musical form that results in improvised solos that have shape, ideas, and purpose. Although classically trained by several prestigious teachers and institutions, including Juilliard, his concerts range far beyond that repertory and into world music. He has given concerts for peace in Africa, and some of that music appeared on this program.

You would think, given America’s fascination with star performers and personalities, that the Zimbalista breakthrough here is only moments away. But solo percussion has a more select audience than piano, violin, or voice, so for now, the local place to hear Zimbalista last Thursday was St. John’s Presbyterian Church, as a guest of the Jewish Music Festival, put on by the Jewish Community Center of the East Bay.

The idea was to celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary through a performance of works by contemporary Israelis. Zimbalista complied to some degree, but his musical interests are too wide to be contained, and he was wise about how much contemporary percussion music his audience would be willing to handle. I suspect that this explains the appearance of Rhapsody in Blue on the playlist.

It also explains the presence of a standard Zimbalista encore, the “Badinerie” from J.S. Bach’s Second Suite for Flute. In his adaptation, which benefited from José Gallardo’s steady hand on piano, the piece begins with a driving bongo and drum pattern. With that established, Zimbalista dramatically switched to the marimba, and zipped through the Baroque dance at an astonishing tempo.

The pieces Zimbalista performed that were written for him also show evidence of being shaped partly by his interest in world music. To Mimi, by Menachem Weisenberg, is built around a developing melody which, by its style, seems allied with Israeli folk music. The melody is again played on marimba, but it is interrupted by a groove on bongos with woodblock accents on top. Later a jazz/rock-influenced break on rototoms (tunable tom-toms) with lots of cymbal intervenes, and then subsides into the melody again. It’s an effective piece, tailored to Zimbalista’s exuberant, jazzlike performing persona.

Grooves Made to Order

The percussionist’s own pieces showed some similar tendencies. One of them, a study in two-against-three polyrhythm, is improvisatory, controlled by some shaping guidelines, like a gradual crescendo. It is conceived for Zimbalista’s expanded drum set, which includes two sets of bells, a Chinese gong, and temple blocks.

The basis for the rhythmic groove is steadily present in the left hand, tapped out on the deep tom, while the right hand develops the triplet rhythm until a consistent, layered, West African-sounding beat emerges. Zimbalista then pushes out of this comfort zone, quickly increasing the tempo and the layers, until the piece ends in a furious rush and clatter. Although a few audience members were dismayed by the volume level, the virtuosity of the performance brought a storm of applause.

In between these more formal numbers, Zimbalista improvised or played pieces from other cultures. He performed one on the Afro-Brazilian cabaça, a cylinder with strings of metal beads that is turned with the wrist. Another piece was performed on the dumbek, an Egyptian drum with a broad head and tapered body, originating in the Sinai. He had bargained it off a trader who, he said, had offered to buy his daughter for 300 camels. With his percussionist partner, Katya Cooper, playing another broad-head instrument between her knees, they drove into a mixed-meter Middle Eastern rhythm with an abandon that just got stronger and wilder as they began to add improvisatory riffs to the basic patterns.

With pianist Gallardo, Zimbalista hashed through an unsatisfactory performance of the Rhapsody. In addition to playing the marimba arrangement from the score — which necessitated broad ritards whenever he had to discard a page — the idiomatic piano passagework just doesn’t transfer well, even to the four- or five-octave marimba he was playing. Notes were dropped, balances were off, and the whole thing seemed a little awkward.

Much more interesting was the trio’s performance of Israeli popular composer Shlomo Gronich’s Go!, a jazzy piece also taken at a seriously fast clip. The gag is that every time the music stops, the audience has to shout “Go!” and then the players run through the tune again in another variation. Given the unstoppable bundle of energy that is Zimbalista, it seemed like the evening’s theme song.

Michael Zwiebach holds a Ph.D. in music history from UC Berkeley.