Bela Fleck and umsLOBBY

Last Wednesday was quite a night to remember, as Bela Fleck brought the sound of Africa to Ann Arbor with his Africa Project, in which he traced the roots of the banjo. He brought different groups from Africa, each representing a form of music or playing musical instruments that influenced the creation of the banjo.

I was working and thus stepped into Hill after the concert had begun. Upon entering, I heard the virtuosic sound of Anania Ngoliga playing the ilimba, which is a type of thumb piano. I didn't realize until he was walking off stage, that he was blind! A friend of mine later referred to as "the Ray Charles of thumb piano," a great description!

Anania Ngoliga with his ilimba

After Ngoliga's performance, we switched gears as Bassekou Kouyate, one of the masters of ngoni, stepped on stage. Kouyate and his band, many of whom are family members, played all 4 types of the ngoni, which is a stringed banjo or guitar like instrument. At the Arts and Eats event prior to the performance, the guest speaker compared the ngoni to the saxophone family, with an alto, tenor and bass.

The several different sizes of ngoni

Kouyate played "the soprano" version, as he led the group like a rock star, with his leg rested the amp, strumming virtuosic melodies even Zeppelin would be jealous of. The atmosphere of Hill during the performance was much more like that of a rock concert than of a classic world music concert, with high energy and lots of laughs.

Bassekou Kouyate with Bela Fleck

The rest of the concert consisted of a blending of the many different styles of music we heard that night. An impressive and once in a lifetime kind of show.

But the performance wasn't the only thing UMS had going on that night. It was also the kickoff event to our new website, umsLOBBY.org, which takes the best parts of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Blogs and brings them together to create a social media hub all about the art and culture of UMS. And the whole idea is simply to get people to talk. In addition to the online portion of umsLOBBY, we will have events like the one at Bela Fleck, where we simply want to get people to talk about what they are experiencing.

If you were at the concert, you may have seen the walking highlighters, decked out in green and orange, all of whom were all members of UMS staff team. As one of those highlighters, I wandered the crowds chatting with people about what brought them to the concert, their expectations and their experience. When talking to one group of students, they told me they only came because their friend had tickets and couldn't use them, so they were free and had no idea what to expect. Another group of students overheard them say that, so jumped into our conversation and told them all about Bela Fleck and the Africa Project. A much more knowledgeable bunch than I, I simply listened and learned. That experience was the epitome of umsLOBBY, turning this performance into a social experience as well as a cultural one and into one heck of a Wednesday night.