Bos kira!

TOUTED as “the beginning of a fresh, new experience in the movement of contemporary Malaysian Music” — Let’s Go Mamak (The Cultural Common Ground) was a show I couldn’t get my head around.

I wish Mamak speak was used for the brochure, which would have read “semua orang duduk jamming”. Essentially that was what it was — and an incredibly good show at that.

Co-musical director Julian Chan said it best: “Essentially you have the best talent in western and traditional music on stage”. There were 13 musicians with saxophones, guitar, bamboo flute, tabla, Chinese drums, guzheng, violin and cak lempong (percussion) but not for a minute did it look busy.

There was also 13 pieces that Friday night and all had quirky names like Mamak With Tiffany, Piano Sonata in ‘M’ Minor and One Flight Back to Bolehland born, no doubt, from the depths of composer Ken Hor’s eccentric psyche.

The artistes quickly went to work with their first piece, Inner Voices, after the name of the ensemble. Three songs later and Julian, who is also a New York-based saxophonist, introduced us to each piece and the story behind them.

With only a few people short of a full house on opening night last week at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre, it was easy to feed off the enthusiasm generated by the relaxed and polished performers, all clearly masters at their own craft.

The caklempong-piano combination on Let’s Go Mamak, the second song, was brilliant, although when the Chinese drums got going the sound literally bounced off the walls of the small Pentas 2 in KLPac, making it almost painful to listen to.

Not only were the musical instruments reflective of Malaysians, but in the artistes we had bamboo flautist Sesatre Krishnan with a rastafarian flavour, Eddie Wen on trumpet with his VCD-seller blond hair, Shamsul Zin the “Pakcik” on cak lempong, New Age rockers Martin Ngim and Daniel Foong on drums and bass, Prakash Kandasamy doing his classical Indian thing on the tabla and Bambee (Lim Hui Chieh) looking ever so demure on the guzheng.

To have the audience bopping and swaying to the music is always a good sign.

We Love It was the obvious crowd favourite and the musicians spicing up the melody with grunts at appropriate pauses at the more recognisable rhythms, proved the guys were able to get down and spice things up that night.

Add to all this, the comedic antics of the whole group, and in particular Shamsul who might just have been jet-lagged, and what you have is indeed a truly Malaysian sound — familiar to us but to any foreigner, exotic and amazing.

Ken Hor, with his insightful and narrative arrangements, has managed to make it all work, a little bit of dhall, a little bit of roti and a teh-o-ais limau to top it all off.

Just as it is in the mamak shop, it was a group of friends coming together to chat, the only difference being that the medium was music, not words. Malaysian music which, if it could speak, would say “lepak lah boss”.