WOMAD is the UK’s leading world music festival. The name originally stood for World of Music Arts and Dance, but has now just become known as WOMAD. Founded by musician Peter Gabriel (lead singer of 1970s rock group Genesis) and held annually since 1982, this was the 44th edition. It’s been held in various locations, but after 17 years at Charlton Park, this year was the first time in the grounds of Neston Park, an estate and farm quite close to the beautiful Real World Studios Peter Gabriel created and the record label he founded to release world music. I ran into him walking round the site, gauging people’s opinions. Of the need for WOMAD, he says: “In a world in which many bad actors seem to be achieving power by fanning the flames of hatred, racism and division, a meeting place for all the world’s cultures and dreams, built on mutual respect, seems all the more precious.” This year there were 460 performers from 38 countries. The new site is obviously smaller and there are fewer stages than at Charlton Park – 40,000 down to 30,000 seems to be the reduction – but years of experience meant that everything ran to time, there wasn’t noise interference between stages and there were plenty of options for all ages and tastes. They were all there from babies in carts, toddlers, teenagers and a more senior clientele - often in
psychedelic outfits - than at most music festivals. Everybody’s experience of the weekend will be different, but these are my highlights informed by my musical interests and plenty of festival serendipity. One of those encounters was with five-piece Korean bluegrass band Country Gongbang, who initially learned to play their instruments - guitar, violin, mandolin, banjo, double bass - from online videos. They have become South Korea’s leading bluegrass band, which might not be saying much, of course. But they’re been enthusiastically welcomed by their idols in Nashville and elsewhere in the US and no surprise. They are superb virtuoso musicians, singing both in English and Korean. The latter is much more fun with songs like ‘Born to be Chicken’ about a chicken that looks at the sky and wants to fly, but sadly flies only in a fast food delivery box!
A band I had listened to and read about, but never seen live, was Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimșek. Very entertaining but they come with a serious message. Derya is a third generation Turkish immigrant to Germany - her grandparents came as ‘guestworkers’ in the 1960s. Dressed in a glittery top, she plays saz (or bağlama) that quintessential Turkish instrument, alongside swooping keyboard, electric guitar and a female drummer. She sings some songs from the 70s about the problems the Gastarbeiter
faced and says, although things have improved, there’s much that stays the same. From their latest album Yarın Yoksa, she sings the anthemic ‘Dirine Dirine’. She says: “If we stick together we can do something and folk music can help us do that.” The colourful music is what’s inevitably described these days as Turkish psychedelia. The ‘headline’ show on the Friday night had to be Mádé Kuti and his band The Movement. Mádé is the son of Femi Kuti and the grandson of Nigeria’s most notable musical hero Fela Kuti, the founder of Afrobeat. Early on Mádé says it’s his debut at WOMAD and he’s playing Afrobeat, emphasising the singular, as Afrobeats has become the term for popular, often bland, West African pop. The tight pink outfit he was wearing was clearly a reference to Fela, and when he threw off his waistcoat and bare-chested picked up the sax - unfortunately just after the photographers’ permitted slot - the lineage was clear. He had two energetic, butt-waggling, dancing ladies and a formidable band - with a four-piece horn section that he’s often directing with his back to the audience. There are also great solos spots for band members centre stage on trumpet and (I think) bass sax while Mádé subs for them in the band. There aren’t the same urgent political messages of Fela, but Mádé clearly says that in Nigeria they have to
spread Love, Unity and Togetherness. He plays his fathers’ Femi ‘Beng, Beng, Beng’, one of his popular hits, and Fela’s ‘Water No Get Enemy’, about the importance of water, possibly even more important now than when it was written in 1975. In his final number Mádé, circular breathing on trumpet, blew a continuous note probably as long as one of Fela’s spliffs! There was another musical dynasty present at WOMAD with a set from Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali. She’s from a hereditary griot musical family, known in Mauritania as iggawen. Noura has a super-powerful wailing voice with a touch of desert rasp. She’s the step-daughter of Dimi Mint Abba (1958-2011), the first Mauritanian singer to get known in the West, released on World Circuit in 1990. She last performed at WOMAD in 2006 and at the BBC Proms. I saw that performance and Dimi played the traditional ardin lute, only played by women, accompanied by electric guitar, keyboard and calabash percussion. Noura performed her first songs with ardin, but then put it aside. Her sound was much more funked up with electric guitar, electric bass and a full drum kit. She got the audience to sing along with ‘doop doo be doo doop’ phrases, which I don’t think Dimi would ever have done. This is how music evolves over the generations. But Noura’s
substantial wrap-around headscarf seems identical to what her step-mother wore. This modest personal presentation seemed absolutely unchanged. Alongside the main musical stages at WOMAD, there are workshops, poetry sessions discussions and all sorts of other events. Still on a musical theme, one of the most enjoyable is “Taste the World”, when the musicians in the festival are invited to cook a dish from their country and talk about the food, their music and play a few songs. They often give an insight into the personalities of the musicians and the culture of the country beyond what the concerts can do. One that I hugely enjoyed was by Portuguese fado singer Gisela João, who has twice come to perform at our Songlines Encounters concerts in London. I didn’t like her WOMAD performance of songs from the Carnation Revolution of 1974. “Our revolution is poetic as fuck,” she said, I think meaning there were many great lyrics behind it and that came out of it. The songs sounded interesting, but the keyboard and guitar accompaniment were just too heavy and destroyed the subtlety of the music. However, her stories and acoustic performances at “Taste the World” were terrific. We learned that she was the eldest of seven in the north of Portugal and grew up looking after and cooking for her siblings. “Sometimes we only ate
eggs and parsley and I remember hearing my mother crying upstairs and I tried to make a lot of noise in the kitchen so my brothers and sisters couldn’t hear.” She says they ate bread and pretended it was roast chicken! Her father was a pigeon fancier and so she learned to whistle to attract the pigeons. She did some virtuoso whistling while cooking her bacalao cod-fish.
The most extraordinary performance of the weekend - and one that should just tour the world - was that of the Nakibembe Xylophone Troupe from Uganda. In recent years at WOMAD I’ve felt there have been too many ‘festival band’ that tend to sound the same - maybe some interesting instruments, but underpinned by heavy electric bass and heavy drums which just makes an aural fog around the sound. I’m pleased to say, for whatever reasons, this year there were some superb ‘traditional’ performances that stood proudly outside this festival trap. The Ugandan xylophone was the most impressive of these. There is a long history to this music which there isn’t space for here. But there’s one huge xylophone that basically takes up the whole stage and six guys around it playing it. Three down the bass end and three doing more melodic stuff at the top. And there’s call and response vocals over the top. I thought they had a drum as well, because the player at the bottom end had a glove over his hand and was was hitting what
was actually the vast bottom key of the xylophone. The pieces had sudden rhythmic shifts and the rhythms would change, speeding up, slowing down with different accentuations. Maybe it was all learned or maybe it was lead by whoever was in control at a particular moment. Several different people took the role of lead vocalist, but the precision and dynamism was unrelenting and everyone standing around me was simply gasping in admiration. Where else could you see something like this? The one thing WOMAD should have done was to put a camera above the xylophone and project it on the screen behind because from the audience it was impossible to see what was going on. But at the end of this breathtaking performance, the stage MC, guitarist Justin Adams came out and said simply “Uganda just won the World Cup.” Perfect. And there were other potential world cup winners as well. Iranian percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi performed a stunning late night set playing alternatively on tombak, the Persian goblet drum and daf, the large frame drum. These were solo performances on these two instruments, no electronics, but superbly miked. Not a word from him to the audience about what he was playing, so quite ritualistic and mysterious. His tombak performances were full of different sounds and textures - a deep bass from the
centre of the skin and a whole variety of sharper treble sounds from round the edge with all sorts of finger techniques. Sometimes it seemed like arpeggios going up and down and the shadows of the fingers on the drumskin were almost as impressive. On the frame drum it was a more sustained groove, possibly coming from Sufi ritual music, with subtle changes of rhythm and texture that would elicit gasps from the crowd. One solo when on for over twenty minutes evolving and transmuting as it went. Over the weekend people would keep saying: “Did you see the Iranian percussionist on Friday night?” He was Mohammad Reza Mortazavi. Wherever you can, go and see him. Another amazing instrumentalist was veteran musician Noor Bakhsh from Pakistan. He’s one of these figures that late in life (now close to 80) has been recognised as a master musician, in this case on a strange electrified Baluchi zither called a benju played with typewriter keys! It’s a beautiful sound which sounds like a soft, nasal electric guitar with wonderfully intricate patterns - and accompanied by a couple of lute players, one of who helpfully talks abut the pieces. Sadly it was impossible to see him on a tiny stage sounded by hundreds of people, but clearly it was quality stuff. On Sunday, one of the final day highlights was the Garifuna Collective from
Belize. A superb group who’ve been around for 20 years playing a unique mix of West African and indigenous Caribbean Arawak music. They feature intriguing turtle shell pecussion, a lovely light pattering, played by Mohobub Flores. They’ve been associated with top Garifuna musicians like Andy Palacio (who created the band), who sadly died in 2018, and Aurelio Martinez, who died in an air crash last year. But they create a great groove with tuneful songs, both original and traditional that clearly has its roots in Africa but has a clearly Central American or Caribbean flavour. The closing headliner was Mali’s Oumou Sangaré. Is there any country of that size that has produced so many great musicians? Oumou shot to fame with her cassette Moussoulou (Women) around 1990 which was a local sensation because of its references from a woman’s perspective of “shivers of love”. But at WOMAD this year, not her first appearance, she was onstage, not as a young taboo-breaker, but as a great diva of Malian music, probably the most popular musician in the country dressed in black with strings of white cowrie shells flowing from her gown. She’s long been known as the ‘Songbird of Wassoulou’, her native region in the south of Mali, and has always included a local instrument, a sort of hunters’ harp called the kamalengoni (youth harp) in her musical
palette. There were some great solos when Abou Diarra, playing the instrument and dressed in a traditional hunters’ jacket, was punctuating with its sharply plucked sounds. Several of the songs came from her most recent (World Circuit) album Timbuktu, celebrating the library and culture there. She didn’t talk about the ongoing problems in Mali, which began with an insurgency in Timbuktu. But she firmly said “Love is better than War”. Her performance showed the country’s musical prowess is undimmed. And WOMAD displayed a glorious panorama of the best aspects of today’s world.
Simon Broughton
1. Festival attendees soak up the sunshine on WOMAD's new site at Neston Park. The festival returns after a fallow year for one of its strongest-selling year - Ph. Garry Jones
2. The main stage of WOMAD Festival with guests enjoying the sunshine - Ph. Garry Jones
3. Children's Parade travels through its new home at Neston Park, with children showing off thier hand-made weekend creations - Ph. Garry Jones
4. Noura Mint Seymali - Ph. Garry Jones
5. Revelers enjoying the new Neston Park site for WOMAD Festival - Ph. Garry Jones
6. Gisela Joao at Taste the World - Ph. Simon Broughton
7. Nakibembe - Ph. Miguel Santos
8. Womad_Mohammad Reza Mortazavi performs his world class percussion at WOMAD Festival - Ph. Garry Jones
