Drum Sketches

ALL ABOUT JAZZ

Percussionist Susie Ibarra is an artist whose compendium of work is defined by an exquisitely global essence. It includes a profound respect for indigenous people and their music, coupled with a cutting edge sense of the avant-garde. Her works are not a distillation or homogenization of various cultures but a celebration and appreciation of diversity. Ibarra has been refreshing both in her ability to integrate and groundbreaking in her use of ancient instrumentation and form within the most postmodern of platforms.

As a percussionist and composer, Ibarra is at the forefront of the young group of musicians that continue to nourish NYC's fertile creative music scene. She is much in demand by its leaders and has regularly lent her skill to sessions by saxophonists John Zorn, Assif Tsahar and David S. Ware, pianist Matthew Shipp, guitarist Derek Bailey and bassist William Parker. She is a jazz drummer but also a kulintang master, a musical style that is built around a series of eight differently pitched bowl-shaped gongs.

Born in California, raised in Texas and of Filipino ancestry, Ibarra reflected on her move to jazz and first meeting with Parker: “I have sort of been into Filipino music since I was a child. As a percussionist I was naturally drawn to a lot of percussive based music and as a teenager I started playing Javanese and Balinese gamelan (an Indonesian musical grouping that can consist of percussive, string and wind instruments). I had a friend in the gamelan and she invited me to play with a kulintang group. I almost went at that time to Java to study gamelan... I was doing that as a teenager and that kind of stayed with me even though I was going into jazz and free jazz and improvised music and more experimental music. I had come out of playing in punk bands but the gong music stayed with me... I was a student in Mannes and after school I came to one of his (Parker's) rehearsals over on Avenue A, a Little Huey rehearsal. My ex-husband (Assif Tsahar) was a saxophone player and he said to me why don't you come to this rehearsal and I came in and I then began rehearsing with him on Mondays after school.” On the solo work Drum Sketches (Innova, 2007), natural sounds such as crowd and animal noises are wonderfully integrated into the soundscape. Ibarra reflected on her use of the environment: “I have an affinity for it. They are real sounds. I have peepers on there, those are frogs. I love them, they blend in. I like to create cinematic content; sonically I like to have that kind of element in the music as in a way it is a sonic narrative. They are not all narratives, I like abstract form too, but I like that cinematic element in music so often I bring that in because I heard it and I needed it.” Ibarra's work crosses musical, artistic and diverse cultural boundaries; this coupled with her high degree of comfort in the international arena, augers that her impact on the direction of jazz and art in general will continue to increase in the coming years. As international artistic boundaries continue to blur, artists like Susie Ibarra will begin to occupy more of a position in defining the mainstream. If one believes that we are in an age of globalization and technology, then Ibarra is an artist for this new millennium. Her vision is one of egalitarianism, but an egalitarianism that preserves heritage and culture. As such, in a world that is plagued by violence and political unrest, she and her contemporaries are bright spots for the future.

by Elliott Simon

EXBERLINER

Former drummer for William Parker and David Ware, Ibarra later shifted over to John Zorn's tent, Zorn being a man of certain proclivities. But this does not take anything away from Ibarra, who was the strongest young drummer of the 1990s. She does seem to have drifted away from the scene, and this record- ing of her 2007 solo concert at the Brecht Forum suggests that she's possibly found a way to mix all her subcultural leanings into a package in which she can financially sustain herself without an audience. This is, after all, what all jazz performers of an experimental nature must do: The descendents of Albert Ayler need their own Richard Mellon Scaife. Ibarra is subtle as usual - she's a virtuoso with a bird-like touch that didn't always suit the Ware Quartet - though she atypically cranks it up a bit on a few tracks. But what moved me most was the way crowd noise would fade in and out like a low rumble, a rhythmic loop in itself, implying the fading of history and allow- ing Ibarra to become a docu- ment of our shared, mislaid past.