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Festival report via satellite phone
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The World, Festival report via satellite phone >>
Some time ago, musician Denis Pean of the French group Lo-Jo explained the roots of the group's eclectic sound.
Pean: We played four years with the circus, with caravan, with truck, all around Europe, with the street theater. And we were always open to all the music in the world.
Denis Pean hoped that he and Lo-Jo would take their musical caravan philosophy overland, into the Sahara Desert. Pean's dream was to create a music festival in the middle of the dunes of northern Mali that would travel annually from desert village to desert village. Now, the Festival in the Desert is in its third year. Andy Morgan is the communications director for the festival. And on a satellite phone from Essakane, Mali, Morgan set the scene.
Morgan: There are almost like little villages of tents dotted around these dunes around here where people are staying in these kind of bedouin tents. There's one big stage with great lighting and sound. There's a backstage area. And there's a market as well where people are selling stuff. So it's really quite an incredible sight. And really quite astounding that a site like this should be in a place like this.
It's not all that astounding a site for the Festival in the Desert. The band Lo-Jo happens to hail from Angers in France which is the twin city of Bamako, Mali's capital. So the wheels of cultural exchange were already turning when the festival started in 2001. Add to that Lo-Jo's particular fondness for the music of the Touareg culture of Mali's Saharan region.
The desert region makes up nearly two-thirds of Mali and it's sparsely populated. But it has plenty of musical talent, like the bluesy rock of female vocalist Haira Arby and her band. They performed Monday night. We recorded them in Mali two years ago.
In the late nineties, the Touareg people fought a civil war against government troops over land rights. Both sides finally signed a truce that settled the conflict. But there were a lot of fences that needed mending and villages that literally needed rebuilding. This music festival is aimed partly at raising awareness and funds to do that. Admission to the festival is free for locals. About 300 paying spectators from Europe and America are at this year's concerts. But as festival rep Andy Morgan says, the Festival in the Desert is raising funds and goodwill.
Morgan: The challenge really of the Festival in the Desert is to develop partnerships, collaborations, exchanges between the people of the desert region of northern Mali, and people coming from other parts of the world. But when I say other parts of the world, we would include very much in that other parts of Mali, because there's a lot of work to do to break down barriers that have existed historically between the various people who compose the nation of Mali. And that is one of the major aims of this festival.
This is the last night of this year's Festival in the Desert. The final showcase will be given by Mali's best known desert musician, perhaps the country's best known musician, period.
Ali Farka Toure said three years ago that he was retiring and wouldn't perform anymore. The fact that he's on stage at at an event like this shows how important this festival is to the desert people of Mali.
For The World, I'm Marco Werman. 01/08/03 >> go there
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