Idan Raichel Concert

Idan Raichel was playing in Atlanta the other night with Vieux Farka Touré, a musician from Mali.  It was exciting to go see them since I had been introduced to Idan Raichel in Israel a couple summers ago, but hadn't seen him live before.  I really enjoyed the concert although they didn’t play much of his stuff that I was familiar with. I think he was trying to go for a new feel to the music combining his and Touré’s styles.  The result was a mellow, free form sound that was pretty effective.  It was almost like listening in on a jam session of the four musicians there.  Actually, some of it probably was. Idan Raichel played the keyboards, Touré played the acoustic guitar, a Malian played the calabash, and an Israeli played the bass. They had to deal with a few technical difficulties, but that didn’t detract from the show too much. 

I was really impressed with the musical creativity, especially from Idan Raichel.  He was set up in the middle of three piano/keyboards. He started off playing a grand piano, but he had a really unique style. He played the keys with his right hand and plucked the strings inside with his left.  He even used the key cover as percussion in one piece.  Then he started to play the other types of keyboards (I wish I knew what types they were – they each had a distinct sound).  Then he even played a different one with each hand.  It was pretty epic.

I also really enjoyed the percussion.  Someone from Mali was playing the calabash, a large gourd made into a traditional African drum. He was able to get a wide variety of sounds out of it, which I found intriguing.  Usually it had almost a clicking sound to it, but he was also able to make a rich, deep stoke to emphasize portions of the song.

Probably my favorite pieces were when Idan brought up a friend of his from Atlanta, India Arie.  She was incredible.  I’m going to have to keep a look out for her.  She played the flute and sang.  In the encore, she sang some songs I was familiar with such as “Im Telech” and “Bo’ee” (Idan actually sang that one).  The audience was really excited about that part too.  I wish he had played more of his well-known songs, but I guess that wasn’t his goal with this concert.  It was good anyway.

There were lots of Israelis there.  It was great.  People were speaking Hebrew everywhere.  A couple people even walked over to us and asked if we spoke Hebrew.  You could notice the chutzpah and Israeli attitude in the audience too such as disregarding things like assigned seats.  There was a group behind us that kept growing as more people came over to socialize.  It took the ushers several tries to finally get them to be quiet and disperse.  I loved it, but some people probably got annoyed.  It made me miss Israel.  As I was listening to the concert, I had the desire to go visit Africa and Israel.  So I guess they succeeded in their fusion concept of “Two Cultures, One Voice”.