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For Kua Etnika, tradition is evolution
Sounds of music: Kua Etnika entertains music lovers in a concert to support its latest album, Gending Djaduk (Djaduk Melodies)
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span class="inline inline-center">Sounds of music: Kua Etnika entertains music lovers in a concert to support its latest album, Gending Djaduk (Djaduk Melodies). The group held concerts in Yogyakarta and Jakarta before it ends its tour at the upcoming Sawahlunto Jazz Festival in West Sumatra on Aug. 24.
Melodies plucked by electric guitar pierce the quiet, teasing, before a wooden flute responds, swaying like a charmed cobra.
Suddenly, the full band ' a drum set, electric bass, keyboard and a trio of traditional Javanese percussionists ' barges in, invading with some brusque, mid-tempo swing version of a hello.
The jazz eventually gives way to a bass solo set over a duo of shimmering Balinese saron instruments ' this holds for a few seconds before the whole thing breaks into an open jam.
Just a few minutes into its first number, Kua Etnika ' which was performing a concert in support of its latest album, Gending Djaduk (Djaduk Melodies), at the Graha Bhakti Budaya concert hall in Cikini, Central Jakarta ' already had the crowd scratching its head.
For Djaduk Ferianto, founder and chief composer for the 18-year-old Yogyakarta-based group, this is all a part of the fun: He wants to turn ideas about traditional Indonesian music on their head, and he starts by rejecting the term 'Indonesian music' itself.
'We don't really have anything you can call Indonesian music,' said the multi talented musician before the concert, also held to celebrate his 50th birthday. 'What we do have are lots of music [traditions] that exist in what you could call Indonesia.'
Djaduk says the new record is his opportunity 'to recall the different traditions that are here in the archipelago ['¦] and communicate to the public that it's important to study the traditions' before they're gone ' obliterated by the distortions of what he calls music 'industry'.
He approaches songwriting the way an anthropologist might study culture ' wary of generalizing but striving to find commonalities.
He believes that through serious study, he can internalize the essence of multiple traditions and learn to, 'express it [them] in a new language'.
This new language is Kua Etnika's sound, what midway through program had earned the right to be called polyglot.
Employing a huge textural range ' from twinkling chimes down to booming bass ' the group somehow managed to whisk Papuan-inspired reggae, melancholic keroncong-like style and Achenese groove into something whole.
Djaduk appreciated the need to pause, however, and let the crowd digest; interspersing the songs with extended comedy that recalled the clown scenes of the wayang kulit (shadow puppets).
There is a gamelan pulse at the heart of the Kua Etnika sound, despite the band's many moving parts. This gives the high-altitude twists and turns of its compositions a solid foundation.
The pulse comes from Puranto and Sukoco, the group's other co-founders, who are the band's center of gravity ' like the banyan tree in the alun-alun (town square), offering trusted shade or port of call.
Sukoco, who plays kendang drum, can explain the subtle differences between the kendang of the East Javanese and the kendang-playing of Sundanese further west, having studied all the different styles of Java in his younger years.
One day, he says, he realized: 'Kendang is a tool of music, not a tool of the gamelan.'
That penchant for convention-breaking is born from the band's belief that traditional music is, in Djaduk's words, 'not just something old'. And like any cultural product, it dies when it stops evolving.
Djaduk is hypercritical of the idea that traditional music should be staid and resistant to change.
'There are traditions in traditional music to maintain, and we honor that. But if we eat and digest [other music], later a new culture will emerge,' she says.
'But it's the young that will make this new tradition.'
Getting youngsters excited about traditional music is Kua Etnika's true raison d'être and partly explains why the band introduced rock n roll instruments in 2006 after a decade without them: Simply put, it's what the top young talent in Yogyakarta was playing at the time. Now, these players are essential to the overall sound.
If Djaduk is Kua Etnika's brains and Puranto and Sukoco are its heart, then Dhanny Eriawan (bass) Benny Fuad (drums), Indra Gunawan (keyboards) and Arie Senjayanto (guitar) are the muscle and the bone ' giving the band the dexterity to move through all the different styles with competence.
Djaduk hopes the athletic format projects a progressive image embodying a central precept: 'Youth, not old people, are the creators of tradition.'
For him, the last progressive 'truth' left in modern society is buried deep inside cultural traditions, which themselves are agents of ' and subjects to ' change.
'Today I only believe in music, because it's the only language I can trust.'
- Photos by JP/Tarko Sudiarno
