September 18, 2002

An Uphill Effort for World Harmony

By NEIL STRAUSS

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 17 — It is not easy to produce a global music festival in these times, when border security has tightened and suspicions run high. And the second World Festival of Sacred Music, which began here on Saturday and is to continue through the end of this month, has suffered the unwelcome last-minute surprises to prove it.

Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer of traditional Sufi music, had to cancel his appearance at the opening-night gala when his plane was grounded in Lahore, Pakistan, because of a bomb threat. The Whirling Dervishes of Damascus, a 12-member ensemble from Syria, will not be performing at the closing concert on Sept. 29 because members did not receive a response to their visa applications in time for the performance. And Najwa Gibran, a Canadian singer of Palestinian descent, was turned away at the border because her papers were not in order. Festival organizers were unable to resolve the problem and she could not collaborate with the Yuval Ron Ensemble on Sunday night. The concert went on without her.

Meanwhile, festival organizers are appealing a decision to deny visas to members of Cudamani, a 30-member Indonesian gamelan ensemble. "We thought we'd try to get ambitious, and look what happened," Judy Mitoma, the festival director said. "Somebody from the State Department said that this was the worst time we could possibly try to do this festival. Those were not very comforting words to me. The policy of this government seems to basically be just turning all young men away. It's a very sobering moment: I have tried all day long to get those musicians from Indonesia into the country. We have 48 hours before their plane is to leave. If I wasn't a person of faith, I would have given up last week."

Kelly Shannon, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at the United States State Department, said, "We always support cultural exchange within the means of the laws." She added, however, that since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, measures have been taken to improve security. Waiting periods for applicants and the need to obtain opinions from security advisers has lengthened the time it takes to process most visas. But, she said, young men from certain countries are not not arbitrarily being kept out of the United States.

The visa complications have hurt not just the World Festival of Sacred Music, but other programs as well. In Manhattan, the World Music Institute has been suffering from the mounting difficulties of booking international performers. Robert H. Browning, the institute's founder, said the challenges began last year, before Sept. 11, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced new regulations for visa applications and the two-week process of getting a visa began to take as long as four months without a $1,000 rush fee.

Since Sept. 11, the service has become more backlogged. "Then later they said that all males 15 to 45 had to go through security checks if they were from one of about 30 countries," Mr. Browning continued. "We had a group of four people from Algeria that was refused because they were young males, and now we have a Cuban group that is in jeopardy, so it's not just the Arab world."

The government's aggressive stance is also a problem, Mr. Browning added. He said that a Syrian group, whose members were granted visas, decided not to come because they feared that the United States would invade Syria, even though there has been no hint of such action in American news reports. "They were scared for their families," he said. "Newspaper headlines all over Arab countries are reporting that America is not just invading Iraq, so there is kind of a boycott." 

The climate was different at the first World Festival of Sacred Music in Los Angeles in 1999 (it is scheduled at three-year intervals), with the Dalai Lama as the headliner. "We were at that time full of hope," Ms. Mitoma said. "The worst thing you could imagine was Y2K. There was a kind of buoyancy and advocacy at that time. We thought, The world is going to be different and we're going to make that happen. Now look at us. The world is different. How hard it is to bear the reality of that. It's like a loss of innocence."

In a gesture toward world peace, at the festival's opening night at Royce Hall, at the University of California here, the substitute for the Pakistani Rahat was an Indian, the raga singer Lakshmi Shankar.

Also performing at the opening concert were the Zangdokpalri Monks and Nuns, Tibetan exiles from a small monastery in India; the Puerto Rican drummer Cachete Maldonado and his group, Los Majaderos; the Luckman Jazz Orchestra; and Prince Diabate. Mr. Diabate, a virtuosic kora player reared in Guinea, was a clear audience favorite. This is largely because he has tempered traditional griot music with Western, at times New Age, instrumentation, tuning and arrangements. In addition, he is histrionic, grimacing every time he dings a soulful note; sustaining sung vowels until greeted with applause; and dressing himself and his ensemble in colorful garb.

The Luckman Jazz Orchestra closed the evening with selections from the three Sacred Concerts that Duke Ellington wrote during his last decade. The nimble orchestra, led by James Newton, proved that an eclectic virtuoso jazz suite could be as emotionally and spiritually resonant as a Buddhist sutra or a Vedic hymn.

In coming days, the festival is scheduled to include Judeo-Spanish songs, Southern Italian chants, Bach motets, a John Coltrane and Rashied Ali suite, a rice harvest celebration, a drumming workshop, Persian Sufi music, Indian music and dance, Latin American religious songs, and Eastern European choral music.