Drummer Susie Ibarra has long embraced elements of her ancestry in her music. Adopting Philippine kulintang and Balinese gamelan percussion instruments into her already variegated arsenal she’s crafted one of the most creative and recognizable approaches in improvised music. The last few years have seen her shy away somewhat from the more blatantly energized style she favored in ensembles like the David S. Ware Quartet and William Parker’s In Order to Survive. These days composition and an even greater attention to nuance and texture inform her playing. Recent projects have included an opera (Shangri-La) and a small handful of film scores. Folkloriko, her latest release on Tzadik, is a timely litmus for the altered trajectory.
A Sepia-toned photo of two women who might be Susie’s relatives adorns the cover and illustrates precisely the manner in which this music tilts lens both toward the past and the present. “Anitos,” a ten-minute polyrhythmic piece designed for duo percussion, opens the disc and features Ibarra in tandem with her husband Roberto Rodriguez. The pair make for a deeply communicative team, ranging over a small trove of instruments that includes: bass cajon, cajongas, bells, wooden kulintang, Tibetan cymbals and jun juns. Lyrical patterns of beats mesh and diverge over a dialogue of underlying rhythms as mallets, fingers and palms coax sounds from a gamut of wooden, metal and skin surfaces. Neither person touches anything resembling a traditional drum kit for the track’s entire duration and the results end up spaciously organic, devoid of animus.
The remaining four-fifths of the program is filled out by “Lakbay,” a multi-sectional suite subtitled “A day in the life of a Filipino immigrant worker.” Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith joins Ibarra’s core trio of pianist Craig Taborn and violinist Jennifer Choi for its realization. “Gawain Ng Pamilya I” builds from Ibarra’s kulintang and brushed snare into a loping march that ebbs and accelerates at odd intervals. The piece’s second part, set near the disc’s end, adds a muted Smith and becomes a bit cluttered as a result. Choi and Taborn arrive on “Umaga” inserting themselves between the leader’s fluttering whisk accents with indigo-hued chords. Choi’s lines are especially stringent, her bow levering against strings to create keening whines and severe scrapes. Smith’s stern staccato brass holds the center on “Merienda,” as Choi and Taborn flitter and dance around him with insouciant interjections. The sounds of conversing voices can be heard muttering from the stereo wings.
On the dark driving rondo “Awit Sa Trabaho” Ibarra makes the first full use of a kit and she attacks it with audible relish setting up an revolving rhythm with the agile input of Taborn and Choi. “Ang Sayaw” sways like an elegant jazz waltz, offering yet another aperture into Choi’s pathos-dipped arco work. Her duet with Smith on “Palengke” offers the album’s arguable highpoint, a thoughtful and detailed meeting of extended techniques on two instruments that a first blush would appear ill-suited to such close collusion. Taborn’s turn comes with the rhapsodic solo acrobatics of “Paniniwala.“ And so the suite progresses until its haunting melodic conclusion“Lullaby”, a Crayola box worth of colors and hues touched upon along the way. How well the music illustrates the imagery of its subject is obviously open to opinion, but on purely music terms Ibarra’s abilities at fusing far-ranging elements into a sumptuous and often affectingly-lyrical whole seem beyond the reach of slight or doubt.
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