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Concert Review - GLOBALFEST: Individualists, Straddling Cultures and Exporting Ideas
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New York Times, Concert Review - GLOBALFEST: Individualists, Straddling Cultures and Exporting Ideas >>
By: JON PARELES
World music performers often present themselves as emissaries from a single exotic country. But at the fourth annual Globalfest, a world-music showcase with a dozen acts at Webster Hall on Sunday night, many of the musicians cited dual origins: Cape Verde and Lisbon for Sara Tavares, Colombia and New York City for Lucia Pulido, Cambodia and Los Angeles for the band Dengue Fever, Mexico and Minneapolis for Lila Downs. These are not traditional musicians; they are individualists who happily blend and straddle cultures.
As Ms. Tavares explained, living in Lisbon puts her in contact not only with Cape Verdeans but also with musicians from Angola, Mozambique, Brazil and Lisbon itself. That adds up to finely drawn but elegantly propulsive rhythms, plucked on acoustic guitar, behind vocal lines that can be light and girlish or sweetly imploring: imported ideas sharing an urbane grace.
Ms. Pulido sang new and old Colombian songs with a band that mixed the rustic — clattering rhythms played with sticks on the sides of drums — with complex touches of jazz harmony and odd meters. Often they used both at once in smart proportions. But her voice stayed raw and tearful, true to the sentiments of love songs announcing a wounded heart.
Ms. Downs, whose songs revolve around the dignity of Mexican immigrants, presented herself like a rock star, with a screen showing images (like immigration protest marches). Her songs that dipped into heartland rock or, better, held echoes of Mexican traditions. A video shown as she sang “La Cumbia del Mole” — celebrating the dish with an electrified cumbia worthy of Los Lobos — deserves heavy rotation on the Food Network. Julia Sarr and Patrice Larose, a Senegalese singer and a flamenco-loving French guitarist, played gentle songs that verged on preciousness.
Lenine, one of Brazil’s leading songwriters, played solo with his electric guitar. In songs that celebrated Brazilian culture’s roots and worldwide connections, the music was a glorious meditation on rhythm, as Lenine plucked resonant, unswerving syncopated guitar patterns while his voice swiveled through them with aerobatic skill.
Exuberance was the prime tradition for the Israeli band Boom Pam — which used two guitars, drums and tuba to make oompah-happy connections between surf-rock, Balkan dance tunes and the hora — and for Babylon Circus, a 10-piece French band driving songs of comedy and politics with the beats of ska, swing and Gypsy music.
Two bands offered pop time travel. Les Primitifs du Futur, from Paris, played jazzy cabaret tunes harking back to the 1940s and earlier, bubbling along with xylophone and accordion for a cartoonish charm. Dengue Fever has a superb Cambodian singer, Chhom Nimol, and a fondness for the 1960s Cambodian rock that reflected American psychedelia; even their own songs are driven by vintage Farfisa organ lines and fuzz-toned guitar behind Ms. Nimol’s quivery, curlicued vocals and supple, Southeast Asian gestures of arms and wrists.
There were a few traditionalists at Globalfest. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are young African-American musicians reclaiming the brisk fiddle and banjo tunes of the Piedmont region’s string-band tradition; they performed vigorously with endearing shtick, although their versions of the tunes grew repetitive.
Le Trio Joubran — three Palestinian brothers, all playing oud — reach back to Arab classical style for their modal melodies. But a trio of ouds is not a traditional configuration, and in their own compositions they volleyed quick lines with the concentration of heavy-metal guitarists shredding away. Their heads swiveled as if to watch the notes zooming across the stage.
Andy Palacio, from Belize, preserves the music of the Garifuna people, descended from escaped African slaves who ended up on the coast of Central America. His band, the Garifuna Collective, played electrified Garifuna music, with a guest appearance by a 78-year-old Garifuna patriarch, Paul Nabor, who had a cutting voice and some sly dance moves.
The music shuttled across the Atlantic: breezing along with a beat akin to calypso and rumba, then bearing down with unmistakably West African drumming. The Garifuna were repeatedly forced into exile, and Mr. Palacio introduced one song by summing up its lyrics: “Here is the land that used to be our home,” he said. “Today it is inhabited by killers.” Not all cross-cultural encounters are as benign as world music. 01/23/07 >> go there
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