Boisterous Bliss in Celebration of an Iron Tiger Year - New York Times

You don’t see much stage-diving at Carnegie Hall, but a stage-dive was exactly what the shirtless Iggy Pop did as he started “I Wanna Be Your Dog” on Friday night. Backed by the Patti Smith Band and the Scorchio String Quartet, he was headlining the 20th annual benefit concert for Tibet House US, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving Tibetan culture. And if “I Wanna Be Your Dog” seemed like a punky, unruly song for a concert that always starts with the sacred chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, Mr. Pop pointed out what “d-o-g” spells backward.

The annual Tibet House benefit, which is timed to coincide with Tibet’s lunar New Year, has become a New York City kind of ritual: a polycultural miscellany, lofty and boisterous. After the saffron-robed monks (from Drepung Gomang Monastery in India) chanted, with the bottomless growl and overtones of throat-singing, Robert Thurman, the Columbia University professor of Buddhist studies and president of Tibet House, provided the philosophical overview. He described art as a nirvanalike “vision of bliss” that reveals oneness.

Then came the musicians, chosen by the composer Philip Glass, whose contacts span classical, rock and world music. Patti Smith has been the benefit’s other mainstay, and by the time she closed out the concert with her fist-pumping “People Have the Power,” people were dancing in the aisles. Many had left their seats earlier, when Gogol Bordello plunged into its Gypsy-punk rave-ups.

The benefit ended up as a rock concert, but one with sober underpinnings. Mr. Thurman pointed out that in Asian astrology this is a year of the Iron Tiger, adding that it can be “a rough year, so be careful.” In the last Iron Tiger year, 1950, China invaded Tibet, driving much of its Buddhist culture into exile.

At the benefit songwriters chose lyrics that touched on faith, freedom and the power of love. A grinning Ms. Smith started her set with the O’Jays hit “Love Train” and went on to sing about oblivion and transcendence in “Beneath the Southern Cross,” with its mantralike drone, and about divinity and desire in “Gloria,” dancing across the stage as its two chords accelerated. Gogol Bordello, led by the Ukrainian-born New Yorker Eugene Hutz, played a hard-strumming, foot-stamping, quick-fingered set that had girls squealing but that also included an ironically jaunty song about surviving ethnic cleansing.

Regina Spektor, whose piano playing invoked Russian Romanticism, sang about fears in “Après Moi” and “The Sword and the Pen” — which wonders, “What if nothing is safe?” — and about human conceptions of God in “Laughing With.” Pierce Turner, a piano-playing Irish songwriter with tinges of opera and Joni Mitchell, sang his “Yogi With a Broken Heart,” joined by Mr. Glass on keyboard.

Bajah + the Dry Eye Crew, a three-man Sierra Leonean hip-hop group relocated to New York City, tore into socially conscious party music that draws from both sides of the Atlantic: African and Caribbean grooves, three-part harmony and raspy dancehall toasting, denunciations of “hypocrites” and “bloodsuckers” and calls for love and dancing.

On the classical side Mr. Glass internationalized his “Etude No. 10,” originally for solo piano, by adding Mick Rossi on hand drums, bringing out its Indian-influenced rhythms. Mr. Rossi and Mr. Glass shared one piano keyboard for “The Chase,” which had the ornateness of ragtime and old silent-movie accompaniment.

The Scorchio String Quartet played “Quantum” by the quartet’s leader and violist, Martha Mooke, with songful melodies accompanied by tremulous chords and Asian-flavored glissandos. Jesse Smith (Ms. Smith’s daughter) on piano and Michael Campbell on homemade marimbas — one with glass bars, one with metal tubes — played pleasant ditties suggesting simplified Philip Glass pieces.

Tenzin Kunsel, born in Southern India and now a New York City high-school student, was the concert’s clear-voiced symbol of Tibetan tenacity. Elegant in a traditional dress, she sang one song backed by Tibetan instruments and the next — about “missing my homeland” — with Ms. Smith’s rock band. The old culture has not been forgotten, and by now — with rituals like the Tibet House benefits — it’s also coping with New York City.

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