Posts Tagged ‘World Music’

“I don’t get it,” said Nell, eyeing me with that expression of untraversable cultural distance which 16-year-old girls reserve only for their fathers. “You’re going to a festival of brass band music with seven total strangers. Like searching for Wallace and Gromit music. With all your goatee mates.” Clearly my attempts to fill the house with Gypsy brass music over the years had failed to provide evidence of the kind of wild sounds I was seeking out by travelling to Guca, deep in the overgrown forests and orchards of west Serbia. I’d been wanting to visit Guca for ages. But this year, its 50th year, was going to be something special and Songlines were planning a tour.

I’d encountered Balkan brass music years before, through the Rough Guide CDs. Its sticking power for me was its perfect tempo for keeping a steady pace on my local gym’s treadmill machines. I can’t tell if that sense of hurtling forward in the music is in its nature or because I heard so much of it while desperately trying – and failing – to keep my desk-job belly at bay.

I’d built up some fear myself of ‘the goatees’ but as it turned out, the group was far from it. A mixture of hardened gig-goers and part-timers like me. By far the most exotic were (as they were to be affectionately referred to throughout the week) “the Americans,” – a retired professor of music, his wife and son from North Carolina. They turned out to be the source of some of the best timed and most urbane jokes of the week.

After a great meal in Belgrade under the wing of tour guide Vlad, it was soon apparent that we were in for something amazing. Namely, Vlad. No quick sketch can do him justice. A man physically halfway between Borat and Bruno, his razor-sharp humour with a definite camp edge had us crying with laughter the whole week. On our first night I learnt a valuable tip from him: how to quickly get rid of those annoying flower sellers that sidle up to your restaurant table offering plastic-looking roses, and more often than not barge into the middle of a great conversation. They always manage to either make you look cheap and tacky for buying their roses – or unromantic and Neanderthal for refusing them. Vlad simply pointed to his female companion: “Allergic,” he said. The salesman slunk away. This was one of those staccato ripostes that cropped up many times during the week; to one hapless flower salesman, Vlad pointed round to a whole table of us. “Allergic,” he said.

Us honorary pollen intolerants had much to thank him for. Vlad was a man who managed to make things happen. The morning after an amazing gig by Boban Markovic with DJ Shantel from Germany, we spotted Boban sauntering through the town. “Boban! Bobay!” shrieked the crowd around him. Boban sauntered on, in his own bubble. “Songlines!” shouted Vlad. Boban turned on his heels and beamed. Seconds later, all of us are posing with the great man for a photo. A few hours before the Goran Bregovic concert to a crowd numbering tens of thousands, Vlad managed to shepherd us all backstage to natter with the legend about projects past and future.

The highlight of it all, though, was an evening when Vlad told me, in a low voice: “Stay here, in this café, trust me.” Looking out over the town I could see revellers partying in every direction. Shots of rakia being hawked in test tubes by leggy girls and necked by good-natured youngsters, bopping along to hundreds of vein-bursting brassmen. I could see flag-waving from a kid perched on top of the town statue. I’d promised to meet up with a lady photographer I’d met, and somewhere out there was beautiful Maryam, from the Persian section of the BBC. There was a lot tugging my centrifugal nature away from this rather boring café. “Please Joe, trust me. Sit here, at this table,” said Vlad. Moments later, I could see bouncers appear at the doors, keeping newcomers at bay. And then it happened. A Montenegrin millionaire’s party at the table four feet from ours was suddenly joined by the entire Markovic band with Marko leading a three-hour private set into the wee hours, his golden trumpet just an arm’s length from us. Our little Songlines tour group spent the night dancing on the tables – it had to be the most euphoric musical atmosphere I have ever been a part of.

I’m in the film business and my current project, Life in a Day, involves masses of material gathered by amateur filmmakers, so I was inspired to try my hand at documentary camerawork and capture something of the festival. I arrived at Guca tooled up with a little digital camera and a sound recording device. Like the Ancient Mariner, I now corner friends and show them my little shot of Marko Markovic, taken between the bouncing legs of the Serbian giant on the table in front of me, the sound emerging from a poxy, pinhole speaker. How can one capture this way the unbelievable noise of two Gypsy brass bands fighting to be the loudest in one tiny enclosed space? Or the vision of girls dancing on the table as their boyfriends slap spittle-wettened banknotes on horn-players’ foreheads to urge them to play on? If I’ve learnt anything significant from my experience in Guca this August, it was this: put the camera down. Don’t be at any remove from such experiences. Take part!

www.songlines.co.uk/music-travel

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Tags: Boban Marcovic, Brass Band, goran bregovic, guca, music, Serbia, songlines, songlines music travel, Travel, World Music.

The last issue of Songlines [#62], saw the first listing of the brand new Official UK World Music Album Chart, a chart compiled by the Official Charts Company (OCC) from sales information gathered across all key distribution (or entertainment) channels including all major high street retail chains, independent stores, supermarkets, mail order internet retailers and digital music service providers, representing 98 per cent of the total UK albums market.

It’s already causing controversy! Murmurs of disapproval (and approval) and even the old issue that has dogged world music since the term was coined – is English folk music world music? – have been appearing on internet forums and blogs.

Robin Denselow’s Guardian blog Why I welcome the new world music chart praises the attempt to raise the profile of world music artists, but questions the criteria for inclusion. Where, he asks, is all the folk music? Martin Simpson, whose new album was the biggest seller at Cambridge Folk Festival this summer, is strangely absent. The OCC’s Phil Matcham has said that while there are no set rules, the Official UK World Music Album Chart is ‘mostly non-British’. But that hasn’t excluded London klezmer band Oi Va Voi from the opening chart, begging the valid point made by a contributor to the fRoots online forum that to discriminate against folk music for being of Anglo-British origin is surely as wrong as to discriminate against folk music that is not.

All charts evolve, and at the same time all charts must decide on what they will cover. The beauty if music is that it will endlessly elude our categorisations but it will all continue to delight – whatever it’s called.

Let us know what you think by emailing letters@songlines.co.uk

Catch up with the new Official UK World Music Album Chart in the latest issue of Songlines

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Tags: chart, World Music.

As featured in the January/February 2009 (#57) issue of Songlines, Nigel Williamson unearths the endlessly rich source of archival world music footage available online at YouTube.

You don’t have to look very hard and you will find that just about the entire history of what we have come to call ‘world music’ is there on YouTube.

You never got the chance to see Fela Kuti, Celia Cruz or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan live in concert before they died? Never mind, there are dozens of YouTube clips waiting to enlighten you.

If you want to remember what a stunning figure the youthful Miriam Makeba cut when she first left South Africa 50 years ago, the memories are all readily available.

And all those old guys from Buena Vista Social Club who are no longer with us? Well, they’re up there at different stages of their long careers, and you can also check out footage of Beny Moré from half a century ago and see why most Cuban musicians to this day still rate him as the greatest of them all.

At the link below, Songlines presents their favourite YouTube world music moments. But they are the tip of the global iceberg. Write or email with your own favourites…

http://songlines.co.uk/youtube

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Tags: songlines, World Music.

From December 9, the music video ‘The Price of Silence’ – featuring such stars as Hugh Masekela, Angelique Kidjo, Rachid Taha, Emmanuel Jal and Natacha Atlas – will be available for download through iTunes in 22 countries worldwide.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948, Amnesty International have teamed up with Link TV and a host of musicians from Tibet’s Yungchen Lhamo to Indian-Canadian Kiran Ahluwalia, Mexico’s Julieta Venegas to Zimbabwe’s Chiwoniso, to produce the track ‘The Price of Silence’ – a plea for the values of the declaration to be applied to the billions who still live without them.

The video for the track is a work of visual effects wizardry in which the artists were filmed separately in studios around the world and then transplanted to the UN building in New York, where they play to a full house of UN delegates (played by actors). The results, as the uplifting rhythms bring an initially sceptical auditorium to their feet and dancing, are a pleasure to watch.

http://www.linktv.org/silence

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Tags: songlines, World Music.