Review of "Rhythm Is The Cure"
NEW YORK TIMES
Wednesday, January 19, 2000
By JON PARELES

Invocations and work songs, exorcisms and lullabies shared the program of "Rhythm Is The Cure" in a chapel of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. With the austere but kinetic combination of voice, hand drums and rustic connections between styles separated by time and geography but united by the use of rhythm as a source of strength and spirit.

The musicians on Friday night were Alessandra Belloni, a singer and Neapolitan tambourine specialist who has researched ancient songs from southern Italyy that show deep Arabic and African influences; Glen Velez, a virtuoso on frame drums, the percussion family that includes the tambourine and the Irish bodhran; and Siba, the Brazilian band Mestre Ambrosio, which is steeped in the folk styles of north-eastern Brazil. Siba plays the rabeca, a fiddle similar to the rebec, an ancestor of the violin in Europe (including southern Italy).

The three musicians shared and traded songs, nearly all of them driven by tambourine patterns so fast that the drummers' hands became blurs. The old Italian songs- from fishermen, tobacco pickers, pilgrims and women seeking to expel the evil eye - used triple-time rhythms like the tarantella; Ms. Belloni sang in an exultant voice, sometimes punctuating her phrases with rhythmic yips.

A strutting Brazilian 4/4 beat caried Siba's songs, his heartfelt tenor backed by a hoedown drone from his fiddle or the finger-picking of a guitar. Mr. Velez turned to odd time signatures, sometimes patterning one rhythm on a frame drum while tapping another with a rattle strapped to his foot. The songs blazed with an age-old momentum.