GlobalFEST Rocks Webster Hall

by Melanie Wong

Webster Hall hosted the 12th annual globalFEST, North America's largest and most comprehensive world-music festival, on Sunday night—a riotous sold-out event, with three stages and 12 bands performing throughout the five-hour-long music marathon.

My evening began in the Marlin Room with the Como Mamas, a Mississippi-based a capella gospel trio whose deep, rumbling voices and hip, soulful attitudes captured the attention of the festival's early-comers. Before long, I craved some variety and ventured downstairs to the Studio, where Jamaican singer-songwriter Brushy One String's raspy voice and one-stringed guitar playing was dazzling the audience with catchy and pleasant melodies that accompanied lyrics alternating between painful sorrow and uplifting hope.

Australian/Indian Bollywood big-band pop troupe The Bombay Royale gave a lesson in Bollywood-style dancing in the Ballroom. Their upbeat, in-your-face power-pop kept bodies wiggling and ears delighting, while their costumes captured eyes and bewildered minds; among the group there was a maritime sailor sax player, a shirtless drummer, a guitar-playing cowboy, and a brass section of masked marauders. The lead singers and saxophonist were highly entertaining as they danced wildly around the stage.

Downstairs in the Marlin Room, The Wu-Force—a hipster trio who dubbed the genre Kung-fu-Appalachian avant-folk—showcased bizarre, captivating, and often utterly beautiful songs that fused little-known traditional Chinese folk music with modern pop and folk music. ("Uyghur-Gaga," for example, combined traditional music from the Uyghur people with none other than—you guessed it—Lady Gaga.) I can't say their music was exactly my cup of tea, but it was interesting nonetheless, and the performers—banjo master Abigail Washburn, guzheng phemon Wu Fei, and piano/trumpet/guitar/electronics doubler Kai Welch—were truly astounding in their musicianship.

Back in the Studio, Hassan Hakmoun's Gnawa-trance music grooved better with my tastes. The room was packed tighter than the subway at rush hour, which was no matter, because Hakmoun's complex rhythms and hypnotic melodies enveloped the room and held the audience in a wonderfully dreamy daze.

Finally, I made the trek back up to the Ballroom just in time to catch the Ukranian folk-punk quartet DakhaBrakha. It was a peculiar mix of accordions, cello, native drums, and an occasional piano, with the group dressed all in white with guardsman-esque bearskin hats. A truly special experience, their aggressive-yet-mysterious music and intense harmonizations reached deep inside the soul—an extraordinarily powerful music that had a lasting effect on me for the rest of the night.