News and Views on Tibet

Voices of Ireland, Mali and Tibet unite in concert

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By Andrew Gilbert
Special to the Mercury News

At first it might seem like an exercise in futile feel-good cultural diplomacy, presenting three seemingly unrelated international acts on the same bill, artists separated by culture, language and custom.

But look a little deeper at “Women of the World,” a tour that makes the last of four West Coast stops Wednesday at Stanford University, and the program resonates in several surprisingly evocative directions.

The sold-out concert brings together three performers from far corners of the globe, Mali-born Mah Damba, who lives in Paris and is making her California debut; Yungchen Lhamo, a Tibetan singer based in New York whose name means “goddess of melody and song”; and Dublin-born Susan McKeown, a leading force in Irish traditional music who also lives in New York. The vocalists will sing short, solo a cappella sets and then perform together in each other’s languages.

“Potentially I’ll be singing a chorus of something in a Malian dialect,” McKeown says from her apartment in the East Village. “I’ll be teaching Yungchen and Mah a song in Gaelic, a very simple lullaby which has some lovely soft Gaelic sounds. So they’ll be singing in Irish and I’ll be singing in Tibetan and a West African language.”

Perhaps the singers’ most profound point of connection is their experience as expatriates. With China’s longstanding occupation of Tibet, Lhamo’s situation is the most extreme, as she had to flee her homeland in 1989, taking a treacherous path through the Himalayas to India. Fighting to preserve one’s culture in the face of a foreign power’s domination, however, is also part of Ireland’s and Mali’s history. “We’ve all got songs of occupation,” McKeown says.

Lhamo gained fame in the mid-’90s as one of the foremost singers keeping Tibet’s embattled culture alive. Her repertoire, documented on two albums for Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records, “Tibet, Tibet” and “Coming Home,” consists of spiritually charged chants, devotionals, lullabies and laments.

Storyteller tradition

Damba, daughter of the late Baba Sissoko, a revered griot, is the scion of a long line of storyteller-musicians who trace their lineage to the court of the great Malian empire that reached its peak in the 14th century. Though she performs extensively throughout Europe, this is her first U.S. tour.

McKeown is better known to Bay Area audiences, both through her performances with the Irish traditionalist band the Chanting House and duos with the Scots master fiddler Johnny Cunningham. The pair toured widely with the Mabou Mines production of “Peter and Wendy” that played Berkeley Repertory Theatre several years ago. McKeown also was responsible for the music in the acclaimed 2001 San Jose Repertory Theatre production of Irish playwright Marina Carr’s “By the Bog of Cats” with the band Lunasa.

Although the singers have been shaped by the wrenching decision to live far from their homelands, there are other thematic and stylistic connections among their music, particularly a rich a cappella vocal tradition. And they have found that the cultures they celebrate flowed from the same source.

`Similar themes’

“We all learned our songs from our mothers,” McKeown says. “And even though we’re from different places, these songs all have similar themes. We have songs of love, and each of our cultures has lullabies, even though our Irish lullabies are often slow and ones from Mali can be sung faster. There’s definitely something universal about what we’re doing.”

The seeds of the tour were planted during a casual encounter at a Natalie Merchant concert where McKeown and Lhamo were performing as her guests. Meeting backstage, they struck up an acquaintance, and discovered they were practically neighbors in the East Village. Though work kept them out on the road much of the time, they began to hang out when they found themselves in town.

“We started just going around to each other’s houses for cups of tea,” McKeown says. “That’s how we got to be good friends. We’re in similar situations, living in the big city.”

Lhamo had met Damba while touring together in Europe, and while they don’t share a language, they formed a tight bond. The four West Coast concerts mark the first time they’ve shared the same stage, and these three women of the world expect to continue their collaboration with an extended East Coast tour in the fall.

Women of the World

Where: Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Stanford University

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Tickets: $30-$34, sold out; (650) 725-2787, livelyarts.stanford.edu

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