(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 22, 1998) -- Not even a lousy combination of snow and ice on the roads stopped concertgoers from turning out in droves to hear the African Troubadours on Saturday night in the fourth and final concert of the Clark Art Institute's month-long, "From the Old World to the New" world-folk series.

Those who braved the elements were not disappointed, either, as the trio of musicians taught a little bit and entertained a lot about three distinct musical traditions from the African continent.

By the end of the evening, after a series of solo performances, the musicians combined their various instruments and traditions into a rousing selection of dynamic world-beat, fusing the particulars into a universal style that communicated beyond language and borders.

Yaya Diallo of Mali kicked the evening off with a set of rhythmic music from the Minianka people. Playing several hand drums, including the djeme, the tama, or Talking Drum, and the bafoko, made of a large calabash fruit covered by a goat skin, Diallo was as humorous as he was charismatic. He made the point that even in his native Mali, he is considered an old-timer, the subject of teasing at the hands of his children, who have adopted the manners, music and mores of American pop culture.

James Makubuya, of Uganda, walked onstage bowing the endingidi, a one- string tube fiddle with a five-note scale. While Makubuya was professorial in demeanor, he also leavened his lecture-demonstration with levity and a bit of dancing. He played a wedding song on the ndongo, an eight-string bowl lyre which was a kind of proto-guitar, and also demonstrated a modernized version of an adungu, a nine-string bow harp. He ended his set with a piece played on the madinda, a 12-slab log xylophone.

After an intermission, Hassan Hakmoun, from Morocco, performed several songs from the Gnawa tradition of healing music on vocals and sintir, a three-string lute that to Western ears sounded like a cross between a guitar and a bass. Hakmoun also used the sintir as a percussion instrument while churning out riffs atop which he sang his muezzin-like Arabic melodies, 500-year-old tones that suggested the shape of sounds to come when Robert Johnson would play the blues and Bob Marley would sing reggae. Hakmoun also demonstrated some tap-dance steps and the qaraqeb, or metal double-castanets.

For the most part, the evening stuck to the Old World side of the equation -- the New World was represented in terms of the electronic hookups and pedal effects applied to the ancient instruments, and the subsequent technical difficulties those inevitably engendered. Hakmoun in particular is noted for exploring the roots of Gnawa music -- which at times came across as a style of proto-funk -- in a more contemporary context with his New York-based avant-world-fusion group Zahar. Perhaps the Clark might bring that group back in a subsequent concert series.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on March 24, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]