There’s an easygoing, shambling looseness about the Silk Road Ensemble, the multicultural pickup band that cellist Yo-Yo Ma assembled in 2000 with musicians from across Europe, Asia and the United States.
“The Music of Strangers,” a restless shaggy-dog effort by director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom”), offers a profile of Ma’s project, more or less.
Neville’s camera roams across the world, making stops at the Tanglewood Festival in Western Massachusetts (where the scheme was first hatched), Iran, Syria, China, Spain and more — sometimes leaping across oceans with head-spinning abruptness.
There are archival episodes, musical interludes (exciting and all too brief), landscape videography and plenty of talking heads.
Ma’s early career as a cello prodigy is glanced at, as are the political turmoil in Iran and Syria, and homilies about cultural appropriation.
There are the scintillating Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, the equable Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and Cristina Pato, the charismatic bagpipe superstar from Galicia in Northern Spain, who is hailed as the Jimi Hendrix of her instrument.
