157: Sacred Riverside Gathering @ Monasterio de Santa Cristina, Galicia, by Davide Salvado, Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, David Rothenberg and Miguel Hiroshi

Davide Salvado, Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, David Rothenberg and Miguel Hiroshi (Spain/Lithuania/USA/Japan)
Sacred Riverside Gathering @ Monasterio de Santa Cristina, Galicia (2014)
9 tracks, 53 minutes

This is another Album that is not really an album at all. It was a concert that was live streamed and – wondrous! – has been archived in full on YouTube. You can watch and listen to the entire performance there, together with some interviews and speeches, or, if you prefer, I have also turned all the musical sections into an mp3 album that you can listen to on the go. Get in touch and I’ll send you those files.

This album/video/stream or whatever you want to call it is the record of a unique musical meeting. Organised by the eco music platform Wapapura to coincide with that year’s WOMEX event, the concert was held in the beautiful 12th century Monastery of Santa Cristina along the banks of the River Sil in Galicia, Spain. In the monastery’s cave-like church, four musicians and a very small audience gathered for a one-off collaboration.

Two of the musicians come from traditional backgrounds – there’s Davide Salvado, a Galician folk singer, and Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, a Lithuanian singer and kanklės (zither) player – and two come from the world of experimental music – David Rothenberg is a jazz clarinettist who is most well-known for his work with naturally-occurring music, most recently performing with nightingales in Berlin, and Miguel Hiroshi is a Japanese-Spanish percussionist who works with rhythms from all over the globe.

Together, the musicians take turns performing pieces from each other’s repertoire and expanding their own traditions to accommodate the particularities of their collaborators’. They take part in collective improvisation in a calm and relaxed manner; although one musician may lead a particular section, none takes a precedent over the others. In the hushed church, every smallest sound is crystal clear and reverberates around the space for a long time, meaning that the barely amplified music often plays with dynamics of quietness as opposed to the dynamics of loudness that we usually expect. In the ancient, holy surrounds, it all gives the concert a meditative, even mystical feeling, and one that is obviously shared by the audience, who click their fingers rather than clap at the end of pieces so as not to break that spell. It’s the perfect music for the perfect location.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like to experience this concert in the flesh. Although I was nearby at the time, in Santiago de Compostela, I unfortunately couldn’t go – I was working instead. It’s really great that Wapapura not only live streamed the whole event (using only solar power, no less) but continue to host it online for us all to enjoy this magnificent one-time collaborative event.