Balla Kouyaté & Mike Block mark off for absences at Crystal Ballroom on Sunday, 3 December 2023.

The two faculty at New England Conservatory instruct and enchant with music from intertwining traditions.

The organizers behind Global Arts Live earn their soup by bringing musicians from around the world to local New England stages.

But sometimes the performers live right in our own backyard.

Such was the case on Sunday night at Crystal Ballroom when balafonist Balla Kouyaté and cellist Mike Block rolled through Davis Square to mix and match cultural inheritances in sound.

Among a million other hats worn by the musicians, both are faculty at the New England Conservatory and both have ties with Yo Yo Ma’s Silkroad project.

Balla Kouyaté & Mike Block

Balla Kouyaté specializes in the balafon, which is a kind of “gourd-resonated xylophone.” Thanks, Wikipedia! The artist, born in Mali and raised in the Djeli tradition, has a connection to the instrument that goes way back.

His family looks after the oldest known balafon, reportedly somewhere from 800 to 1,000 years old. Sounds fragile!

Is it really the “first balafon,” as claimed in Kouyaté’s NEC bio? Difficult to track provenance over the course of a millennium. But if it’s true, we’ll just assume that all subsequent balafons grew from a rib taken from the first while it slept.

First or not, the instrument has been dubbed a UNESCO Artifact of Oral and Intangible History.

You won’t see or hear Kouyaté taking that antique on tour. But you might catch him playing a chromatic version of the instrument he created by joining two balafons together.

And you might hear him use digital looping, like he did on Sunday night, to build up layers of percussion accompaniment to augment his dynamite balafon solos.

Cellist Mike Block layered pulls of the box atop the percussive foundation to create a hybrid sound that you might call East-meets-West.

Except if we’re saying that Block was schooled in the European tradition and Kouyaté cut his musical teeth in western Africa, aren’t we talking more of a North-meets-South situation? Geography!

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