With Uplifted Voices, globe-spanning artists of Silkroad Ensemble call out for empathy and survival
Hailing from distant musical worlds, the group’s members honour tradition while seeking connection through cross-cultural experiment
Mazz Swift.
The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts presents Silkroad Ensemble: Uplifted Voices at the Chan Shun Concert Hall on March 30 at 7 pm
MAZZ SWIFT HAS yet to ask the other members of Uplifted Voices to play one of her graphic scores, or to improvise on the colour purple. But she might.
“In my mind I always feel like I end up being the challenger,” the African-American violinist, educator, and composer says, laughing. “I’m challenging you to fight through some kind of fear that you’ve had, but I’m going to be with you along the way. I try to do that in the music with my colleagues; I try to do that in my own playing; and I’m also bringing the audience along as well.”
That’s the kind of freedom that Swift, a nonbinary and neurodivergent performer who also identifies as their ensemble’s resident avant-gardist, has in this extraordinary group. A spinoff from the long-running Silkroad Ensemble, formed in 2000 by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Uplifted Voices spans three continents and at least six often very different cultures; other contributors on its current tour include Indigenous singer-songwriter and activist Pura Fé, Japanese percussionist Haruka Fujii, Scottish harpist and composer Maeve Gilchrist, Armenian-American cellist Karen Ouzounian, and French-Lebanese violinist and composer Layale Chaker. With all of these artists enjoying international careers on their own, the ensemble’s musical excellence is guaranteed. But finding a unified ensemble sound isn’t, and that’s another challenge Swift is happy to face.
It’s true, Swift allows, that Uplifted Voices—which plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on March 30—was almost built by committee. The brainchild of Silkroad artistic director Rhiannon Giddens, it began as what Gilchrist, interviewed separately, describes as a way to honour “voices that had been under-utilized in previous iterations,” specifically female and non-binary voices. From there, Swift says, “we just try to figure out ‘How do we sound as a band? What can we do with the artists that are available? What are the composers looking for?’ How can I put it? It’s like ‘If, then’ and we just kind of go from there.
“With different composers coming from different places—from Haruka’s piece about Japanese railroad workers to Maeve’s Scottish-Irish reels and jigs to my slave songs and gospel songs—the danger is it not sounding like one cohesive band,” they continue. “So not only do we learn how to play the music, but we learn how to think like the composer, as best we can. And then, through the filter of our own brains, that comes out differently, of course—but learning it in the way that that person likes to teach it helps bring us along.”
Maeve Gilchrist. Photo by Josh Goleman
So it’s an exercise in empathy as well as musicianship?
“Oh, yes,” Swift concurs. “And that goes socially as well as technically. It’s a very challenging thing, but it’s also something that we all do really well and with a lot of grace! But it’s not an easy thing. Say you’re a classical musician who usually has their music two months in advance and gets to practice every day, and then you come in and I would be the person who’s more like ‘Here, can we just try these things out and see what comes along?’”
Gilchrist, an Edinburgh-born musician whose Irish mother is part of a family of traditional musicians, points out that “the idea of honouring our ancestors” is as much a part of the Uplifted Voices project as cross-cultural experimentation. “In my case, I’m honing in on the women in my family and the role of the instrument, the role of the harp,” she explains. “It’s an instrument that has been carried by the women in my family, but historically it’s also an instrument that they [the British colonial powers] attempted to write out of history. At one point, harpists were being hung in Ireland! It was deemed so powerful in stirring the spirits of the people that they outlawed it completely. So there’s something satisfying about presenting my instrument in this setting, and showing how it can persevere and how it continues to sing.”
Cultural survival through song is integral to the African-American experience, and with Uplifted Voices, Swift will focus on the work songs, freedom songs, and songs of spiritual release that sustained her forebears through hundreds of years of American racism. “We are revisiting one of the work songs that I proposed to the group a couple of years ago,” they note. “It’s called ‘O Shout’, which is my take on a song called ‘Oh Shout Away’, which is a slaves’ work or gospel song; they are all very intertwined. So I’m very interested in the music of my ancestors, and uplifting that as American music.
“There was a time when I first began doing this work, like 20 years ago, when that was a real revolutionary idea, ‘Black music is American music!’” they add. “You didn’t feel like you saw that enough—and that was about the time I met Rhiannon for the first time, and saw her playing with the newly formed Carolina Chocolate Drops, and it was just like ‘Oh, that’s exactly what I want to be in the world!’ So that’s always been a focus for me.”
“In experiencing other people’s connections with their own traditions, it forces me to look back at my own, and it shifts my lens,” Gilchrist says. “It sounds like a cliche to say that the more I hear of other people’s stories and experiences, the more connections I find between our cultures. It really does make the world feel like a smaller place, when you can sit down with a Lebanese-Palestinian woman who’s using very different harmonic material than I am, and a different approach to rhythm and time, but find these empathetic crossover points.
“It’s so easy,” she adds, “to find connecting points!”
If only that were true in the wider world—and perhaps it is, if we can only listen. 
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