With a song in their heart

The five-day event takes in over 30 documentaries, from Israel and around the world, featuring seven Israeli premieres.

By BARRY DAVIS
Iranian kamanche player Kayhan Kalhor and Turkish singer Aynur Dogan find a common musical language in the Silk Road Ensemble (photo credit: THE ORCHARD)
Iranian kamanche player Kayhan Kalhor and Turkish singer Aynur Dogan find a common musical language in the Silk Road Ensemble
(photo credit: THE ORCHARD)
These days, there is nothing particularly revolutionary about a musician from a particular genre making exploratory forays into other areas of stylistic endeavor.
So, what’s the big deal about Yo-Yo Ma reaching out to co-professionals across the globe to create sounds which he hoped would amount to more than the sum of the parts? For starters, the 61-year-old, Frenchborn American classical cellist never does anything by halves. That is abundantly clear from The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, a fascinating documentary that will be shown at the Galilee version of the 2016 DocAviv Film Festival, which takes place at various locations in Ma’alot-Tarshiha November 8 to 12.
All told, the five-day event takes in over 30 documentaries, from Israel and around the world, featuring seven Israeli premieres. There will also be plenty of quality live musical entertainment, courtesy of Ziv Yehezkel, Bint el Funk and the Alaev Family, as well sessions with filmmakers, an art exhibition, workshops and guided tours of the local environs. The Music of Strangers will be shown twice, at the local Performing Arts Center, on November 11, with a free outdoor screening at 7 p.m. the following day.
There are a number of factors that make Yo-Yo Ma’s cross-cultural escapade more noteworthy than dozens, nay hundreds, of other genre boundary- leaping excursions presented across the global music circuit. There is the aforenoted single-mindedness of the project leader. Add to that the fact that he is one of the world’s most acclaimed classical musicians who, over the years, has also gained a reputation for fearlessly striking out into all kinds of extramural fields.
Ma’s cohorts take in musicians from China, Syria – including a Muslim and a Christian – Iran, the Galicia region of Spain, Japan, the United States and India.
Naturally, there is also an Israeli connection, in the form of Moscow-born Johnny Gandelsman, a violinist who spent most of his formative years here before emigrating to the States following his violist-composer father Yuri’s decision to join the Milwaukee-based Fine Arts Quartet.
The project leaders culled an impressive bunch of musicians for the exercise, who not only incorporate a wide range of styles, genres and cultural backgrounds, but they also bring with them plenty of emotional baggage to the fray.
Morgan Neville was also fully on board the project, both in a professional and a personal sense. In fact, the filmmaker was not initially meant to be at the helm of The Music of Strangers, which was still a twinkle in Ma’s eye when their paths first crossed.
“I met him about five and a half years ago to discuss a concert he was doing and wanted to film,” recalls Neville.
The director and cellist hit it off from the word go, and Neville found himself well and truly charmed by Ma’s energy and personality.
“We ended up having a three-hour conversation that covered everything from politics to philosophy to children to dirty jokes. There were drinks involved,” Neville laughs. “I came away from there thinking I would follow him with a camera anywhere.”
Neville knew he was in for an exciting ride.
“Yo-Yo is an intensely curious person, and he is always trying to figure out what his art has in helping to understand, and maybe change, the world,” the director continues. That ethos struck a chord with the Neville.
“As a filmmaker I asked myself those questions all the time. So I felt, in a way, that his journey was my journey.”
In creating The Music of Strangers, journey they did, in tandem, across the globe. The documentary takes us from the US to a remote village in China, to a refugee camp in Jordan, and to Iran and Galicia. We learn about local culture and mores in each place, and enjoy snapshots of street level life, including some intimate family circumstances.
There are some intensely emotive moments in the film and some bellyache laughter-inducing slots too.
The documentary went through a protracted and meandering gestation period.
”I had no idea, when we began all those years ago, where the film would take me,” Neville notes. “At that point, the Syrian revolution hadn’t even started.”
The said political upheaval and ensuing ongoing humanitarian tragedy left its heavy imprint on the life, and art, of Syrian Muslim clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and violence in Iran shattered the life of kamanche (spike violin) player Kayhan Kalhor.
Betwixt and between, the film takes the viewer on wide emotional pendulum swings, with some of the most endearing lighter and comic moments provided by Chinese pipa player Wu Man, both in her relentlessly joyous take on her craft, as well as in a delightful vignette in which she spends some time with the talented members of the Zhang family in a far-flung region of China.
Neville says working on the film was an object lesson in going with the flow.
“It was really a bit like stepping off a cliff and hoping to catch an updraft, and saying let’s just follow this and see where it goes.”
The seed of the idea for the musical odyssey was sown in the late 1990s, and started taking corporeal form shortly afterwards.
“The first gathering was in the summer of 2000,” Neville adds. “That was the first time he got musicians together. It was just different ideas, and over the years it has been refined and changed. So, for Yo-Yo, it has been almost 20 years [on the project].”
Following that initial get-together, Ma kept the embers of The Music of Strangers burning brightly in between his numerous other creative undertakings, traveling the world, meeting musicians in the US and on their home patch, and experimenting to see what worked best for all concerned. All told, there have been no fewer than 65 musicians, speaking 13 languages, who have passed through the project radar range.
The Music of Strangers takes the viewer on a sonic and emotional roller-coaster and leaves you with plenty of food for thought. While brewing strong Arabic coffee at his New York home, expat Azmeh ponders the meaning of home.
“Is it where your friends are? Is it where your family is? Is the place where you grew up? Is it the place where you want to die?” It is a pertinent quandary for a musician who does creative business with fellow professionals from all over the world, and who is currently unable to return to his country of birth.
And it is probably also a recurring theme among people anywhere who have migrated to a different country and cultural milieu, and something that probably resonates with many olim too.
Neville feels that the international cross-cultural synergy so deftly engineered by Ma over the years has positive implications for one and all, particularly with regard to this part of the world.
“I think music and film are incredible mediums of empathy and understanding. Each tends to humanize the other, and to [help] understand other people’s predicaments, and not in a Pollyanna way,” Neville muses, referring to the principle posited in Eleanor H. Porter’s eponymous children’s book that came out in 1913, whereby people have a tendency to recall pleasant instances more readily than unpleasant ones.
“The arts don’t wash these things away,” Neville continues, “it is just that the lack of cultural understanding leads to the opposite.” Then again, Neville does not believe that undertakings such as Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble project offer a miraculous panacea for all the world’s ills.
“It’s not that playing a song is going to fix the world in a kind of holdinghands- circle-of-music way. But we can certainly try.”
For tickets and more information about the Docaviv Galilee Documentary Film Festival: (04) 957-3050 and www.docaviv.co.il