Expressions of Culture

The idea behind the grand, citywide endeavor known as “World Festival of Sacred Music--the Americas,” which begins this weekend, is both simple and quite complex, befitting the nature of spiritual matters.

Spawned at the urging of the Dalai Lama, the effort is more than just a music festival with spiritual underpinnings, but part of a global project on the eve of the millennial shift, staged on five continents.

The local component--headed by director Judy Mitoma, who is also the director of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance--will spread its tentacles around Greater Los Angeles. More than 80 venues are involved, from the Hollywood Bowl to parks, local houses of worship, as well as concert spaces in academia and the public sector.

The music itself, of course, is hardly oriented toward the mass media. Among the performers will be the Choir of Tibetan Monks, Sufi musicians Ali Jihad Racy and Ahmed El-Asmer, the Interdenominational Gospel Choir, the Gamelan Sekar Jaya, indigenous Mexican folk singer Lila Downs, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as the keynote aspect of this Sunday’s Hollywood Bowl festival-within-a-festival.

One of the visiting performers flying to the Southland for the festival is Marlui Miranda, a unique Brazilian musician who has devoted herself to researching and performing chants and other musical expressions of the indigenous tribal cultures in the Amazon.

Miranda’s L.A. itinerary includes a brief set at the Hollywood Bowl extravaganza and a more elaborate performance with Mexican American singer Perla Batalla on Tuesday at the Cal State Northridge Performing Arts Center.

Miranda will also appear Oct. 16 at the Warner Grand Theater and on Oct. 17 at the Sinai Temple--a prospect she said excites her because of her Jewish roots.

One of Miranda’s most ambitious projects to date was the 1995 recording “Todos os Son,” released domestically on the Blue Jackel label. It contains her adaptations of music from numerous indigenous musical cultures, realized in collaboration with such notable Brazilian performers as Gilberto Gil and the group Uakti.

“I was trying to capture as large a picture of indigenous culture as possible, to show the diversity here,” Miranda said recently in a phone interview from her home in the small town of Embu, close to Sao Paulo. “It’s almost impossible, because we have in Brazil 220 indigenous tribes. I was working with 13 different groups. It was a drop in the ocean.

“But, you know, I’m not afraid of the ocean.”

She has been working with and studying indigenous Brazilian music for more than 25 years. “It’s very comfortable in a way because I feel that I will always have something to do in my life, in a very nice and pleasant way. This is music that I love.”

At CSUN the audience can expect to hear what Miranda describes as “my own subjective idea of the meeting with those indigenous backgrounds. You have traditional chants and also some contemporary arrangements, because sometimes the people need a bridge to cross into this other musical world.”

Her band will include a keyboardist, acoustic bassist and percussionist, all which add to her own contributions on vocals, percussion and flute.

Miranda offers a bridge between contemporary Brazilian musical reality and the ancient world of indigenous music from the Amazon. “This kind of music overtook me completely, and it’s something that seemed like part of myself, not only by questions of ethnicity, but as a matter of aesthetic taste.

“Gradually, I was understanding more and more about this world and getting more collaborative with the tribes. Now, it’s a life project.”

DETAILS

“World Festival of Sacred Music--the Americas,” various sites around Los Angeles, Oct. 9-17, including the Hollywood Bowl, from 4-8 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $10-$1,500 (for box), (213) 365-6300. Marlui Miranda and Perla Batalla, at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the CSUN Performing Arts Center. Admission: $14 general, $12 for seniors, $10 for students and children, (818) 677-2488.