She doesn’t totally convince but, by contrast and in the same language, up-and-coming Portuguese fado singer Carminho absolutely steals the show. Before the rain, the young Brazilian samba-ragga artist Flavia Coelho comes on strong with the infectiousness of a female Manu Chao. Saturday dawns fair but the weather loses its grip mid-afternoon and Osibisa’s “Sunshine Day” is not to be. There is late night stuff in the Siam tent from the Polish strings of Kroke to the sweet naive harmonies of the Malawi Mouse Boys. Accompanying him were some veterans of the genre, the shekere master in particular shaking the rhythms into transcendence. Seun starts with less of a bang but builds in intensity, the leader writhing and contorting, stripped to the waist – the very image of his old man. The big gig tonight is Seun Kuti and it provides an interesting comparison with Femi Kuti’s widescreen extravaganza at the same venue last year. More diversity!Ī surprise substitution took me off-guard and I missed much of the set of contemporary indie-samba auteur Lucas Santtana. For me, though, the band are a half-beat ahead of themselves and don’t carry the deep roots of the originals so I wander off to graze amongst the World Food options.
And now it’s Max Romeo and Lee “Scratch” Perry, Max in tremendous voice on “War Inna Babylon” and a host of classics. Unruffled and purposeful, they belie the trouble back in Mali with an impressive set of measured electric blues-rock.įive hours on the trot now, moving smartly from the BBC Radio 3 stage in its tree-lined hollow to the huge blue Siam tent, and backwards and forth to the Open Air Stage. The Touaregs are next, and there are none more current than Tamikrest, the heirs to Tinariwen’s throne.
OUM KALTHOUM ALBUM GUITARS ON FRONT FULL
But the class shines through pretty soon and Riley’s accordion sucked and blew in full swampy effect. It can take a leap of faith sometimes to bridge the cultural gaps and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, one of the giants of Cajun, initially sound a bit two-dimensional after the swing and swerve of Ondatropica. Three hours down and we’re getting into our dance stride. There was also Ondatropica, the Colombian project of Will “Quantic” Holland and Mario Galeano, featuring some of that country’s rootsiest veterans in an infectious brew of cumbia, salsa and ska. There was no let-up from the opening London-based Mavrika, who bring an indie-guitar muscularity to their reworkings of Greek rembetika, to Jagwa Music from Dar Es Salaam, with their wild percussive attack, thrillingly accented with Casio keyboard and the MC vocals of Jackie Kazimoto. He blew open the gates in style with a combination of new songs from the “Zoom” album, which reference both Oum Kalthoum and Elvis Presley, old standards such as “Ya Rayah” and major crowd-pleaser “Rock the Kasbah”.įriday was the hottest day in every sense, with burning sun and smoking music. While the cultural diversity of the audience doesn’t quite equal the musical diversity, there is considerable diversity of age – babies to grandparents and beyond – and the overall atmosphere is as generous and sunny as the weather…which took a bit of a nosedive on the Saturday, of which more anon.įor the earlybirds, Algerian punk rai-rocker Rachid Taha was the main event on Thursday evening. We had the long-established quartet Huun Huur Tu from the plains of Tuva in Central Asia, the young successors to Tinariwen in the form of Touareg guitar band Tamikrest, the Pakistani Sufi qawwali group led by Asif Ali Khan and Brazilian Tropicalia legend Gilberto Gil. In fact, much of what we hear at Womad is at the very apex of cultural achievement in its country of origin. Cultural diversity is the musical menu and it is one of the wonders of Womad to witness the warmth generated between practitioners of some distant little-known musical genre and the appreciative open-minded punters that swarm to this mecca of interculturalism. Nigel hosts the Ear to the Globe radio show on Dublin City FM every Monday from 10pm to midnight.įounded by Peter Gabriel and others in 1980, Womad has run festivals in many parts of the world, but Charlton Park in the English countryside has been its home stamping-ground for the last seven years. Nigel Wood reports from last weekend’s Womad music festival at Charlton Park across the Irish Sea in Wiltshire.
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