Sapto Raharjo to perform in France
By Izabel Deuff
JAKARTA (JP): Sapto Raharjo, one of the country's most innovative gamelan players, is currently in southern France to join a series of summer festivals.
Upon the invitation of Aide aux Musiques Innovatrices (Aid to Innovative Music) in Marseille, Raharjo and his Yogyakarta-based group will collaborate with French musician Miqueu Montanaro for a performance today in the MIMI Festival at Theater Antique in Arles, Provence-Alpes-Cte d'azur.
The collaboration will continue on the next day, when they are scheduled to take part in the Festival de Groux Les Bains in Groux-les-bains.
Raharjo and his group will entertain the public again at the Festival Musiques Sacrees du Monde at St. Pons, Languedoc- Roussillon, on Sunday, Aug. 2.
Besides playing gamelan instruments made of brass, they will also play the krumpyung, which is made of bamboo. This bamboo gamelan is made by Sumitro from Kulon Progo, Yogyakarta.
France is not a new area for the 43-year-old Raharjo.
Two years ago, Raharjo was invited to the Banlieues Bleues music festival, where he performed a jazz and gamelan music concert titled Borobudur Suite.
Since then, he has always been connected to France and collaborated with French jazz players.
In late-1996, at Central Jakarta's Taman Ismail Marzuki, he played in a gamelan ensemble with French saxophonist and clarinetist Andre Jaume and guitarist Remi Charmasson in Du Gamelan dans le Jazz. He was joined in the gamelan by Sonny Suprapto, Poernomo Nugroho, Gatot Djuwito and Setyaji Dewanto.
This same group, except for Gatot, who has been replaced with Setyanto Prajoko, is accompanying him in this summer's French tour.
The success of his two-and-a-half hour show near Paris for the Banlieues Bleues music festival, as well as sales of the show's four CDs, should herald well for this summer's performances.
The collaboration with Miqueu Montanaro brought a new color to Raharjo's world music style, as it could be listened to on Stupeur et trompette, a CD which was released in 1996.
MIMI Festival, which is being held for the 12th time, started on Thursday. According to Arielle Galand of Aide aux Musiques Innovatrices, the event is divided into five nights, depending on the musicians and the style of music they play: the Belgian-Czeck night, the cafeine night, the sweet 'n sour night, the night of the northern samba and one note night.
Raharjo and his gamelan will play on one note night, when you are invited to the wedding of Provence and Java, which reveals the magic of distant cultures. Miqueu Montanaro plays galoubet, flute, accordion and saxophone serving as vehicles for Provenal flagrance, beautiful landscapes and cicadas' chirrs, while Raharjo and his gamelan will weave exotic and soft musical sounds.
Apart from participating to those festivals, Raharjo is to study the radio coverage and the organization of a much bigger festival, Le Festival Interceltique de Lorient (The Inter-Celtic Lorient Festival) which is one of the most famous summer festival in France.
Raharjo, as a broadcaster for Radio Geronimo FM, will be accompanied by Pandan Yudhapramesti of Radio Mera, Bandung, Setia Buddy of Radio Nebul, Palu, Esther L. Siagian, an ethnomusician from the Jakarta Institute of Arts, and Hanefi, an ethnomusician from the Indonesian Karawitan Music Academy, Padangpanjang. They were selected from 20 students taking part in advanced courses for traditional art broadcasting production in Yogyakarta.
The radio coverage is sponsored by Radio France International and the Ford Foundation.
According to Jean-Pierre Richard, director of the Inter-Celtic Lorient Festival, about 350,000 people are expected to attend the 10-day fiesta, which take places at 12 sites in Lorient during the first half of August. It will have 4,500 musicians, singers, dancers, visualists, artists, professors and film producers from Celtic countries.
Not only do these artists, coming from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Galicia, Asturia and Britanny, feature present-day Celtic cultures through traditional, jazz, rock, country and symphonic music but also through visual arts and films.
The success of this event is all the more noticeable in that it has been organized for 28 years by a 400-member non-profit organization, which gets 73 percent of its budget, up to US$3.3 million (Rp 43 billion), from festival revenues.
There are 260 events in the festival with publicity delivered in 35 countries.