Freshlyground's feelings of joy: Group from South Africa's jam town comes with eclectic mix of sounds
By: John P. McLaughlin

SPECIAL EVENT
VANCOUVER FOLK MUSIC FESTIVAL
Where: Jericho Beach Park
When: Friday-Sunday
Tickets: Various, see thefestival.bc.ca

A few years back USA Today ran a top 10 list of music festivals in North America and had Tom Clynes, author of Music Festivals From Bach To Blues, do the ranking for them. Three were actually Canadian, including little Kaslo, B.C., which was nice, Quebec City and, yep, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival.

Clynes goes on about the seven stages at the festival, the constantly eclectic musical fare available and the food and crafts but, quite oddly, doesn't mention the, you know, beauty thing. Not to get all conceited or anything but, I mean come on, it's not like it's a secret -we are flat out, hands down gorgeous. And we like to be told.

This is the 34th iteration of the VFMF and 33 of them have been held at the flat out, hands down gorgeous Jericho Beach Park. The first, fondly remembered festival was held in Stanley Park but the chances of city hall letting that happen year after year were not excellent, so Jericho Beach has worked out just fine.

This year the talent pool is deep as ever, featuring the likes of New Orleans' Mary Gauthier, Justin Townes Earle -Steve's boy -former Sudanese child soldier Emmanuel Jal, the Jayhawks, Haiti's Ti Coca & Wanga Neges, Roseanne Cash, Gillian Welch and tons of others.

Freshlyground are not so well known in these parts but in their native Cape Town, South Africa they are superstars. They're a seven-piece Afro-fusion, multi-racial band led by the incredibly dynamic Zolani Mahola from near Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Everybody is from South Africa, Mozambique or Zimbabwe, which explains the eclectic mix of feels and sounds. Everywhere they go, Freshlyground exude a joy that is the very antithesis of the cruel and absurd epoch of apartheid.

Cape Town is notable as a jam town, which is essentially how Freshlyground got together. It started with the keyboard player and guitarist who worked in the same bookstore playing together and built it up to six members from there.

"I was studying theatre and one of the guys in the band saw me singing in a play and invited me to go and see them," says Mahola. "So I went to go see them and he calls me up onto the stage and I started singing, just improvised. And then I started going to rehearsals. That's how I got involved with the band."

Their sound is a mix of African folk music, some jazz, blues and a little kwela, a street level, jazzy pennywhistle music and improvisation seems to be their favoured method of composition. They find a feel, develop a melody and Mahola comes up with lyrics. A fun and typical example would be "Potbelly" in which Ms. Mahola intones: "Even though I got fat thighs, flabby arms; a pot-belly still gives good loving." Nothing clichéd there.

They've gone on to sell tons of records and concert seats all over the world and are currently on their biggest North American tour yet. Their biggest break came inauspiciously enough when the band was in New York mixing their fourth album. In a studio on another floor Colombian singer Shakira was recording "Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)", the theme for the 2010 World Cup.

"She wasn't physically present," says Mahola. "It was her producer who was in a studio a couple of floors below and he had heard that we were going to be around. He'd checked out our music and liked the style.

"A prerequisite that FIFA put on the song was that they had to collaborate with an African artist.

"It was a bit of the right place at the right time and he happened to like us.

"He gave us the track to work with and we came up with a bridge section and that was that, really. We didn't hear anything for a couple of months and just before the World Cup they told us we were on the song." If you watched the World Cup you saw Freshlyground. This is sure to be a big highlight of the festival.