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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

The exclamation point in the ensemble’s name is justified. Jigu! Thunder Drums of China (pronounced jee-GOO) performed to an all-ages crowd of close to 1000 on Friday night at Yardley Hall as part of the Johnson County Community College Performing Arts Series.

Ranging in age from 18-30 and hailing from China’s Shanxi Province, 20 talented musicians made up Jigu!'s roster. Initially, I was prepared for a conformist performance – stick heights matched, plastered-on ear-to-ear smiles, pristine playing positions – and frankly, a forced sense of musical pleasure and enjoyment. Instead, I was thrilled to witness that those capable musicians (for the curious, 8 women and 12 men) brought their individual personalities to the performance and, as a result, I was more engaged. That’s not to say the playing was sloppy, it and the choreography were uniformly tight throughout, but to see certain members groove more than their neighbor and spontaneous, natural smiles cross faces was a welcome relief.

Before the concert began, the grumbling was already present. Complaints of “This is only drums?,” “It’s going to be soooooooooooo loud,” “Maybe we should just listen through the doors,” and their ilk were for not. I did not see one person get up and leave and no one around me covered their ears. Instead, the audience was rapt with attention at the masterful performance and plethora of sounds that emerged from Jigu!’s drums. I also imagine that many of the children in the audience enthusiastically begged for drum lessons afterwards.

Of the fifteen pieces performed, I found Li Zhen-Gui’s Yellow Ground Music, Wang Guo-Jie’s The Bull and the Tiger, and Zhang Lie’s Lady Warriors of the Yang Family and Boatmen of the Yellow River the most successful in composition and performance. Yellow Ground Music for solo zhan-gu (war drum) was performed on a drum with a diameter of what had to be at least 4 feet. It was a MASSIVE instrument, yet the performer was able to elicit very delicate upper partials from the edge of the head to full-on thunderous, bass tones.

Wang Guo-Jie’s The Bull and the Tiger for two zhan-gu was magnificently staged with powdered drumheads and deep blue backdrop. The performers embodied their respective animal as they struck drums leaving a powder cloud in their aftermath. “Bull” played with pointed deadstrokes (leaving the stick in contact with the head instead allowing for natural rebound), while “Tiger” performed more sweeping gestures, at one point even playing with his hands.

Zhang Lie’s stand-out works straddled intermission. The costuming of Lady Warriors of the Yang Family were marvelous, embellished silken robes with pheasant feather headdresses. The lead woman grabbed the five-foot-long feathers and, as a mystic-sorceress-maestro, commanded the combined forces in the grand fashion of wonderfully organized cacophony. I thought it would be hard to top Lady Warriors but Boatmen of the Yellow River managed the task. Though it opened with a glorious tenor voice singing a traditional Chinese boatman work-song, it was the giant zhan-gu that stole the show again. The mallet used to play the drum was more akin to a baseball bat than a musical implement and it was evident that this mallet had caused the smudged hanzi character that adorned the drum. It was a piece of raw power unleased. These two pieces should be mandatory listening for percussionists, world music enthusiasts, and composers alike.

The performance was not without its flaws, however. Though the gimmicks in the humorous lighter pieces were clever, the pieces themselves were too long; the exception to this was Guo Min-Zhi and Liu Jin-Zhu’s concise Dogs Chasing Ducks for cymbals. There were also noticeable missed cues, cutoffs, and counting in Drums of Freedom.

If you are able to catch Jigu! in your area, do so. Bring your friends, children, and grandparents as the performance will delight them all.

REVIEW:
Johnson County Community College Performing Arts Series
Jigu! Thunder Drums of China 
Friday, November 12, 2010
Carlsen Center
Yardley Hall
12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, KS
For more information visit http://www.jccc.edu/TheSeries

Top photo: The Bull and the Tiger by Brittany App.

By Lee Hartman

Editor-in-Chief; Traditional and New Classical Contributor

Lee Hartman holds degrees from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (D.M.A., M.M.) and the University of Delaware (B.M.). At the University of Delaware, he received a Dean's Scholar position enabling him to pursue an individually designed academic program combining music education and composition. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City he served for three years as the Assistant Director to Musica Nova, the conservatory's new music ensemble, while teaching a variety of composition classes.

In 2007 he was invited to both the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavík, Iceland and the Sichuan Conservatory in Chengdu, China to give lectures and master classes in composition. In the summer of 2009, Hartman served as an orchestra manager for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and Aspen Opera Theater Center for various performances. He serves on the National Executive Committee of the Society of Composers, Inc. as Submissions Coordinator. His primary composition instructors include James Mobberley, Chen Yi, Zhou Long, Paul Rudy, John Beall, and Jennifer Margaret Barker. He currently teaches music theory at the University of Central Missouri and general music classes at Park University having previously taught at UD (2007–08) and UMKC (2006–07).

His compositions can be found at http://www.leehartmanmusic.com