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Castanets and Slide Ukuleles, Looking for a Chance to Be Heard
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The New York Times , Castanets and Slide Ukuleles, Looking for a Chance to Be Heard >>
By JON PARELES
GATESHEAD, England, Oct. 30 - In a downstairs screening room at the Sage Gateshead arts center here, there was a screening of the documentary DVD "Congotronics 2: Buzz 'n' Rumble From the Urb 'n' Jungle" (Crammed Discs) showing Congolese bands playing electrified thumb pianos through raw, distorted homemade amplifiers. Upstairs in an auditorium, Debashish Bhattacharya was playing his uniquely designed slide guitars and slide ukulele: new instruments for Indian music.
His richly involving pieces were rooted in the age-old modes of Indian ragas, moving from sighing, meditative lines to hard-riffing finales with a touch of rock. He was joined for his finale by the French button accordionist René Lacaille, who pumped in some jazz harmonies.
That mélange of tradition, technology, roots and breakthroughs was a typical Saturday afternoon at Womex, the annual World Music Expo, which has moved around Europe and took place this year at the Sage Gateshead, a new, curvilinear riverside arts center designed by Lord Norman Foster.
Womex is a gathering for musicians, recording companies, booking agents, managers, promoters and disc jockeys determined to present music from around the globe. (It also runs a "virtual Womex" Internet showcase at www.womex.com.) With limited commercial prospects - although every so often it yields an international smash like the Buena Vista Social Club - world music is largely ignored by the mainstream recording and concert business. But its advocates are tenacious. At Womex they commiserate, trade advice, tout favorites and strengthen the formal and informal world-music alliances that Womex has helped build. For many participants, the annual convention is both reunion and strategy session.
It is also, said its director, Christoph Borkowsky Akbar, "one of the gateways for musicians who try to get into the international market." Musicians who perform at Womex are heard, and often booked, by international promoters, and albums make their way from local release to wider distribution. Hermes Records, a label based in Tehran that releases music from Iran, used Womex to find distributors in Turkey and Japan, said its managing director, Ramin Sadighi.
And for some concert promoters, music heard at Womex turns into a substantial part of the next season's bookings. CD's change hands nearly as fast as business cards.
"I'm going home with a suitcase full of CD's," said Banning Eyre, from the syndicated radio show and Web site Afropop Worldwide (www.afropop.org). Because albums are released unpredictably in various countries and markets, he said, "Here you can get a jump on the rest of the year."
Womex was started by Mr. Borkowsky Akbar, who was trained as an anthropologist. He also runs the Piranha Musik label, which releases albums of klezmer, Balkan brass bands and Egyptian drummers, among others. In the early 1990's, he got tired of being asked for advice. He decided, he said, "Let's create a concept where everybody can ask everybody."
Florian Fürst of Profolk, a German clearinghouse for various kinds of traditional music, said: "We can't do what the major labels and major bookers can do. So we all learn from each other."
The first Womex, held in 1994, drew 200 people; this year, there were 2,200 registered participants plus 300 musicians. "People get sucked in and hooked on this music," Mr. Borkowsky Akbar said, "but they find a way to survive." Over its four nights, musicians from Cuba, India, Tanzania, Spain, Brazil, Morocco, the United States and Britain, among other places, performed with overlapping sets on four stages. Robert Plant, who sang with Led Zeppelin and has long delved into African music, brought his band for an opening-night concert.
"We are in a very dynamic stage of the development of world music," Mr. Borkowsky Akbar said. "This is easy to understand as the dynamic of globalization speeds up. Whatever you think about globalization, world music is the soundtrack of globalization."
Womex is not a gathering of purists. There was some traditionalist music, like the accordion-powered vocal harmonies of Actores Alidos from Sardinia. But hybrid music was all over the festival, sometimes in kitchen-sink combinations, but often in synergistic ones. Les Boukakes, with a lead singer from Algeria and members from Tunisia and France, put rock dynamics behind impassioned lyrics about social conditions and the long, gutsy vocal lines of Algerian rai music; at one point, the rhythm of metal castanets intertwined with a modal line played on wah-wah guitar. The Unusual Suspects, from Scotland, turned traditional-style songs into chamber-pop, complete with a small string orchestra and horn section.
The term world music is always contentious, although no one has come up with a better replacement. Mr. Borkowsky Akbar considers the term "cold," but some musicians embrace it. Pedro Luis Ferrer, a Cuban songwriter who performed on Saturday, approves of the term, envisioning world music as a realm where multiple cultures can "coexist, but keep their own codes."
"The problem," he added, "is to establish an equilibrium, a kind of conversation in stereo."
Mr. Ferrer's own set was pristine and propulsive: fine-meshed songs carried by plucked guitars and percussion. His songs draw on old Cuban traditions, particularly the changui and the Cuban son, but subtly change instruments and emphases to make them thoroughly untraditional. His lyrics hold multiple meanings; one was called "Artificial Insemination," in which a cow and a bull complain that they prefer the natural method. "It's a protest against experimentation," he said, smiling. "Cuba is a country that has undergone a lot of experimentation." Mr. Ferrer said he would like to perform in the United States, where he has appeared before, but American immigration restrictions prevent him from bringing his full band.
The peak of Saturday night's showcases - and not just in volume - came from a Brazilian rapper, Marcelo D2, who is already a major star at home. With a band that included a disc-scratching D.J., a percussion section and a rock trio (whose guitarist doubled on cavaquinho, the little samba guitar), Marcelo D2 rapped in a jovial, syncopated growl while his backup moved from funk to rock to samba to jazz. The music was smart and thoroughly global, looking for its gateway to the wider world. 10/31/05 >> go there
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