Pan African Orchestra Of Ghana
By Joseph McLellan

Saturday, October 18, 1997; Page C07
The Washington Post

Visually, the scene was uniquely African when the Pan African Orchestra of
Ghana performed in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on Thursday night.
The musicians, barefoot and clad in African dress, played folk instruments
such as the antenteben (bamboo flute), gonje (African violin), gyile
(xylophone), a variety of drums (hit with hands or sticks) and metallic or
wooden percussion instruments. When the music and instruments allowed, some
of the players danced as they played.

But if the sight of this nine-year-old orchestra on its first U.S. tour was
something you don't see in Washington every day, the music often had a
charming air of familiarity. The audience was being shown the roots of a
substantial part of America's musical tradition.

The program's biggest surprise was the strong resemblance of some of the
music to the fashionable postmodern sounds of Philip Glass and other
minimalist composers: tight little ostinato motifs repeated over and over
with occasional interruptions and very slowly emerging changes.

Intercontinental musical influences go both ways -- one number was in a
style that conductor Kweku Kwakye called "Afro-rock" -- but most of the
time, the music in this program sounded like a prototype of various forms
of American jazz, as well as Caribbean and Latin American popular dance
forms. The rhythms were often more complex than what you hear from most
American musicians, and the sound textures produced by the African
instruments were different from American musical sounds. But the forms,
structures and underlying spirit of the music -- its soul, we might say --
were things that have been passed on from Africa to America, things that we
have long loved in our own music.

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