Daniel Bernard Roumain, Elan Vytal give unconventional but rewarding Kravis show

04.04.08
Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR)
Daily News

This isn't your Mama's concert," announced the violinist. He was wearing bright orange shoes, but was far too slender to be Mario Batali. He had played several pieces Wednesday night in the Rinker Playhouse at the Kravis without comment, and by this point, that information was superfluous.

Daniel Bernard Roumain bills himself simply as DBR. His colleague, on turntables (yes, turntables), is Elan Vytal, a.k.a. DJ Scientific. The concert, without a set program and without an intermission, was titled "etudes4violin&electronix." What's an aging white guy to make of all this?

Well, first of all, the comment "This isn't your Mama's concert" isn't wholly accurate. In fact, DBR and DJ Scientific have music grounded not only in contemporary hip-hop traditions but deeply influenced by the 1960s and '70s avant garde.

First, let's talk about the instruments. DBR plays a violin with six strings and a MIDI attachment that allows all manner of echoes, octave displacements, tonal expansions and alterations. He also plays piano. The violin can electronically play the notes and timbres of all the bowed strings, including the double bass. DJ Scientific's "turntables" are in fact a complex electronic terminus with the capacity to produce electronically generated sounds, sampled voices or instrumental excerpts ... even percussion generated by the DJ's mouth.

What do these artists do with these tools? Quite a bit. They can produce an astonishing range of sounds, kaleidoscopic, surreal, compelling, fascinating ... if not completely original (is anything in the arts?). Echoes abound: Laurie Anderson's electric violin in Home of the Brave, Luciano Berio's Sinfonia, George Crumb's Microkosmos, Meredith Monk, Philip Glass (with whom DBR has collaborated) and Steve Reich, Gubaidulina and Schnittke, Benjamin Britten's bitonal arpeggios ... not to mention Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix and Steve Vai. He even played a piano polonaise, apparently improvised and perfectly in the style of 19th-century salon music.

DBR in concert is personable, engaging, even loving as he guided the audience through his world. He was born and raised in Margate, the son of a Haitian family, so his West Palm Beach premiere was quite a homecoming for him. Plenty of friends and family were present.

He is a composer, and his music is only partially improvised. The most fascinating work was his Sonata for Violin and Turntable, a six-movement work of which he played four. The work showed that not only is he capable of imagining a unique and wildly varied sound world, he also knows how to build, inexorably, to devastating climaxes. The architecture of his pieces was magnificent.

More accessible were his Hip-Hop Studies and Etudes, patterned after such didactic works as Bartok's Mikrokosmos or Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. These were designed to teach young players musical values in the language they themselves spoke. The works in d minor and Eb major (really!) had the same command of structure and drama as all of DBR's compositions.

The pair has performed worldwide, from the Sidney Opera House to Fayetteville, Ark. ... and DJ Scientific presented his own composition, aptly named Fayetteville. The result was something like a meeting of Doc Watson and Frank Zappa.

Danny Roumain (he couldn't escape his childhood name now that he was back home again) and DJ Scientific are creative artists with an amazing range of expression. This concert may have been wildly unconventional, but it was also wildly rewarding.

But perhaps the most amazing moment was Roumain's encore, a deeply felt violin solo of Amazing Grace, coupled with something that might have been Molly Malone. All this, and a Celtic fiddler, too?