November 29, 2005
Text and photographs by Banning Eyre

Maybe the most telling barometer of the state of world music today came during my trip home from the 11^th annual WOMEX World Music Expo, held last month at the Sage in Newcastle, England.  In Heathrow Airport’s main international terminal, the most prominent eatery, Giraffe, advertised “Gourmet Coffee, Global Food, World Music.”  Oliver Mtukudzi of Zimbabwe was playing over the public address system, and by the cash register was a case of Putumayo CDs on sale.  Putumayo’s niche marketing prowess is well known, but the main terminal of London’s principle international airport is some niche.  Needless to say, no counterpart to Giraffe can be found at New York’s JFK.  And in a nutshell, this is why WOMEX takes place in Europe, not in the US.  With such a density of nationalities, languages, skin tones, currencies, and colonial legacies, the world is simply more present in Europe, and more and more, music is prominent in the mix.

Newcastle itself does not put out a worldly vibe.  It is beautiful, friendly, party-hardy, and loaded with history, but aside from the WOMEX crew, it seemed about as ethnically diverse as Bellingham, Washington.  However, step into the curvaceous parallel universe of the Sage, and all sense of physical location easily evaporated.  In these concert halls, conference rooms, and theatres, or even walking the endless aisles of the vast WOMEX trade fair, you could have been just about anywhere—India, Iran, Spain, South Africa, the Balkans, Uzbekistan.  They call the Sage “the silver slug” for the way it looms wavelike over the river that slices through Newcastle.  It is a spectacular edifice, full of light and ever changing perspective on this handsome city. 

More to the point, its three performance venues offered perhaps the best solution yet to WOMEX’s perennial challenge of presenting acts as diverse as the serene Indian guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya and the loud and rowdy Ivory Coast reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly, all sonically isolated and within easy walking distance.  For the first time in my memory, there were virtually no complaints about the sound, despite the fact that on the three main nights of the conference, four groups performed on each stage.  With the venue and the WOMEX tech crew both exceeding expectations, that left things to the artists and the delegates, who faced the impossible task of trying to see and hear it all. 

WOMEX is overwhelming.  Intentionally so.  If even a single great world music performance has the capacity to blow an audience away, this barrage of talent is enough to spin the heads of world music’s hardest hard core.  Even parceled out in 45-minute sets that do not always provide a long enough runway to musical ecstasy, the WOMEX showcases are so full of surprises and of staggering talent that it is hard to remain jaded for long.  Of course, some manage.  There are some among the WOMEX regulars who truly have heard it all.  And few are shy with their opinions.  Socializing is the other great charm of WOMEX, after the live music.  The 2000-plus delegates this year included adventurers, entrepreneurs, writers, broadcasters, scholars, and enthusiasts of every stripe, from professionals to those who simply can’t help themselves.  The common thread is a passion for music, and shared passion easily outstrips cultural and geographical divides.

Afropop Worldwide’s WOMEX 2005 radio program offers a jam-packed hour of live music, interviews, and audio snapshots.  For Americans, WOMEX offers the chance to see artists on stage who have not yet, and may never, reach our shores.  Moreover, it offers access to an absolute gold mine of CD recordings that also have not, and may never, reach our shores.  Afropop listeners will reap the benefits of our WOMEX gleanings for many months to come.  This feature aims to compliment the audio experience with photographs from this year’s WOMEX showcases, and excerpts from interviews we conducted there.  Our program and this feature focus on African and African diaspora artists.  This is no dis on the great European, Asian, and other musicians represented at WOMEX.  But just keeping track of the African track kept us quite busy.  The subjects and perspectives covered here are all over the map, like WOMEX itself.  There is no unifying thesis or arch of thought in what follows, just impressions, anecdotes, opinions, and images from what has to be one of the richest cultural gatherings anywhere in the world today.

Robert Plant and Justin Adams (who played the opening night of WOMEX 2005, and held a symposium for the delegates the following morning.)

Robert Plant: “From my viewpoint, world music carries a kind of slur, because there are areas of music and musical promotion, and attempts at material gain, which are basically pumping out such crap.  Never mind the pop world.  It's the same in all the different spheres.  Because it's a money machine as well.  The sad thing is it's a small percentage of what is called world music that is sullying the whole picture of it, I think.”

Justin Adams:  “Maybe it's our taste, and the technology the people find.  When Muddy Waters came to Chicago and plugged in an electric guitar and started working with distortion, it was absolutely amazing and fantastic.  And the same thing with the Ethiopian guys that we hear on those Ethiopiques albums; we just love the stuff that they're playing on Hammond organs and bass guitars.  It sounds great.  What's depressing is the kind of Casio thing, or perhaps even worse than that, the expensive keyboard thing, all the cleaned up drum machine things, and the loops.”

JA: (Answering a question about the first African music that moved him.)  “Fela, ‘Upside Down.’   It was tough.  I wasn't really taken with that very happy sound.  I need to this misery in my scales to get me going, and I think Robert is kind of the same.

RP:  “I'm miserable as Hell.  I really am, from Robert Johnson.  I still can cry with the right amount of gin…. It’s a great thing to say misery, but if you hear, say, Etta James singing ‘Something’s Got Ahold of Me,’ or Nina Simon singing ‘I Put a Spell on You,’ those tips, the way the vocal slides between notes, from the middle of my time, my mid-twenties, I always tried to get that glissando, that sliding between notes.  I took a vacation to Marrakesh when I was 23, 24, and suddenly I was hit from all angles by this really amazingly overblown dramatic orchestration that then shuttered to a halt, and then applause broke out, and then you knew, that obviously someone had walked out onto the stage, and then Umm Kulthum started singing.  I was gone.  I mean, no more rock God…  You know it is classical Egyptian music, so it is strange in a way.  What does it have that’s African?  I don't know.  It has her, and it has her background, her story and where she came from to get to where she was.  I found all that out later. 

“But really from there, I very seldom go to orchestrated music now, because I'm so in touch with that music from the Atlas…  When we go to Barbes in Paris, it's terrible.  The guys say, ‘What are you talking about?  You want that music?  No, not here.  We've got this little belly dancing CD for you, sir.’  But things have to move on.  And the people on the street in Paris, or Brussels, or in Casablanca or Marrakesh, they want things to sound contemporary, just like the kids in Detroit wanted Rick James.”

Justin: (Answering a question about cross cultural collaborations.)  “It’s something I think about myself.  One thing I can't abide is banging out a straight 4/4 rhythm and then sticking a load of ethnic music on the top of it.  I've really had it with that.  I think there are certain rhythms, certain scales and melodies, certain tones that work really well together that might come from disparate places, but when you're working with musicians, you've really just got to see what flows, what feels right, what's easy.  So for somebody just within their tradition and that's all they can do, then don't mess with it.  But somebody who comes from tradition might hear a track by Snoop Doggie Dog, and just go, ‘I'm obsessed with this track.  I want do something with it.’  Great!  Let them do it.  Maybe they can come up with a new angle for hip-hop.  So there shouldn't be any law that things must remain pure.  But keep it so that it sends shivers down your spine.  That should be the law.”

RP:  “…give them boom boxes, beat boxes, give them everything that they can.  But tell them not to lose the original strain of what they were doing, and habit immersed in some kind of formaldehyde, which is happening unfortunately and a lot of the what you might loosely call, and I hate that term world music, but you just got to keep like it's real, like everybody comes out of the room and they say, ‘Man, we bled for that.’”

Mariem Hassan: (Sahraoui singer from the disputed territory of the Western Sahara)  “I have hawul in my songs.  It's a very slow, quiet, traditional way to begin our concerts.  Only people Mauritania and the Sahara have this kind of traditional singing.  It is a very quiet thing, sometimes without guitar.  So in our songs, sometimes we use the hawul.  Though at times they are just modern songs.  I used to sing traditional songs, talking about love between women and men, and also about the Sahara, about children without parents because of the fighting, and the suffering of our people.  On my new album, Deseus (Nubanegra), I have a song dedicated to three brothers who died fighting the Moroccan army.  “Chouhade—Three Martyrs”   And another song about my own situation battling breast cancer.  I feel much better now, after chemotherapy treatment.  My doctor says I am really okay.  I have to think every day that I'm very happy to be alive and better.”

(On the current situation in the Western Sahara.)  “Ooof.  I never want to talk about these kinds of things, but the only thing I can say is imagine the people of the country living for 30 years outside their own land.  It is really very, very difficult.  Imagine children who have grown to the age of 30 years old without ever seeing their home in the Sahara… My music is to encourage people, people who are living in the mountains, children and women.  It's a kind of letter, an ambassador, to let everyone know the people of the Sahara… I remember many years ago playing with the Fighters in the Sahara have, playing music concerts with them and for them, and they felt so happy because of the music.  And now, when younger people living in the occupied cities hear these songs on the radio, they feel like they have wings to fly to the refugee camps.”

Tiken Jah Fakoly (Ivory Coast reggae star):  “I am actually the young son of a war chief called Fakoly Coumba Fakoly Daba, who was never a griot.  So I am not a griot.  But I am practicing true griotism.  Because in the time of our ancestors, the griot was the only person who could tell the truth to the king.  He could look the king in the eye, and say, "You must not do that.  You must think of our people.”  So through reggae, I tell the truth to the powerful, to the organizers.  I am not their counselor, but I tell the truth.  So I represent a true griot.  But I called my group Les Djelys (The Griots) because griots have been the victims of a lot of injustice in Manlinke society.  For example, when a griot wants to marry a girl, someone will say, ‘No no, no.  I don't want that, because he is a griot.’  So I decided to defend griots.

“I have been living in Bamako now for three years because there is war in my country.  My music became politicized, because I took the position of the people, sometimes against the organizers and powerful, and against the decisions of the government.  So I said to myself, ‘I must leave, because it is becoming dangerous for me.’  I can spend the whole day without eating, but I cannot spend a day without saying what I think.  So that's why left.” 

(On why there are so many popular reggae singers fromIvory Coast.)  “It is partly because reggae sounds good in the Malinke language.  And because also, there was someone who opened the way, and showed the path: Alpha Blondy.  Also, this all corresponded with the time of trouble in Ivory Coast.  If you look at the explosion of reggae and Jamaica, it also came the moment when there are problems there.  When the problems started in Ivory Coast, there was Alpha Blondy, Ismael Zav, Serge Kassy, Ahmed Farras.  I was one of the last to arrive, Tiken Jah Fakoly.  Alpha Blondy came in 1992.  I came in 1996.  And then the problems started, and the artists had to express themselves.  The music that is the best way to pass this kind of message to the people is reggae.  So I think these are the two reasons.”

(On his song “Africa Wants to be Free.”)  There seems to be a conspiracy against Africa.  First there was slavery, then colonization.  During the years of slavery, Africa was pillaged …and during, it was the same thing.  Today, the cooperation between America and Africa, between France and Africa, Great Britain and Africa, is what?  When there is a market, these powers impose their enterprises.  England, France, America.  That's it.  So I said to myself, even though we have independence, we are still not independent.  Our freedom has been confiscated.  We need our own political and economic freedom.  So this is what I try to reclaim in this song.  Africa wants to be free, like the birds in the air, like other countries.  Let's take an example.  Mali is a great producer of cotton.  We know we are the Chiefs of cotton.  But then we put it in boats and send it to Asia and America.  They make clothes there.  Why have we not build factories to make the clothes here in Africa where the cotton comes from?  This could employ so many Africans.  This would avoid so much unemployment.  Why do Africans want to immigrate?  Because it's too hot at home.  So it must find a solution that allows Africans to stay home.”

(On the changing role of musicians in Africa)  “On the level of freedom of expression, and the level of information, musicians can change a lot.  We get around to saying things that were not said before.  I have said things in interviews and in my songs that if I had said the same things 20 years ago, I would have been put in prison.  Young people everywhere are saying these things.  But we're a difficult situation.  Things won’t change just because of musicians.  A hungry man is not a free man.  When you're hungry, you don't listen to anything.  You just want to eat.  Everything has been done to put Africans have a situation where they don't think about anything but just eating and staying alive.  There's been a strategy to put people in that situation. 

“This is why it is hard for artist to change the situation.  I can tell you that I think artists have the power to change the situation.  But the other one can say, ‘If you say yes to me, I will give you food.’  A person who hasn't eaten in two days.  You know what the person will do.  But at the same time, I think that there are not many musicians who are willing to speak out in Africa, probably only five or six who really speak out.  Most of the big names say nothing.  I can't tell you why they don't talk.  But it is really too bad, because if all the artists in Africa today started to talk straight to these guys, things would move faster.”

Thandiswa (Singer from the kwaito group Bongo Maffin.  On her use of older South African music genres on her 2004 solo album “Zabalaza.”)  “It's something that has been important to me for a long time, not only in my music career, but just on my own.  Sometimes I write articles for newspapers talking about issues around freedom, and what that freedom means.  For me, freedom has always meant the freedom to the African, because we haven't had that freedom in South Africa.  It was only when Nelson Mandela was released that we felt we now have that freedom.  And obviously, in all these years of oppression, we've lost a lot of who we are, or a lot of our traditions are not practiced as much as they were.  It’s so difficult to find things to be proud of in our history.  But I want to remind especially our generation that all was not lost, and that we were still able to reach into our past and make sure it does not get lost to the next generation. 

Zabalaza is basically a journey into what life is like for me as young South African right now.  It is about that crisis of trying to draw from my past, and trying to draw from my traditional self, and bringing that traditional self into my modern self, who has traveled the whole world.  My experience is a lot wider than someone who has lived all their life in the village.  But the village experience is also something that's very important to me, so in my show, you get that sense of the traditional, and also the cosmopolitan, the new. 

“Ten years ago, all of the radio stations in South Africa were playing mostly American music, but I think with kwaito taking over the industry, all you ever hear on the radio stations now is South African music, so it's not really a problem anymore.  So I don't really have an issue with the fact the world is becoming a smaller and smaller place.  I think the most important thing is that people still remember who they are.  I think young people in South Africa now are very much interested in their own identity, their own South African identity.” 

“Through the kind of work that young people are doing, the kind of art is coming out, the poetry, the music, the businesses that young people are forging right now, the older generation are starting to realize that we are connected to our history.  We realize it's an important moment in history.  So I think that generation gap is slowly being bridged with the realization that we also take our times pretty seriously.  We face the struggle of having another generation before us, the one that overthrew the government, you know I mean?  So our generation kind of feels like: OK, those other kids took stones and overthrew an entire government.  So what can we do?  I think we do take our place in history very seriously.  We do want to leave a legacy”

(On South African hip hop.)  “At first, people didn't want to embrace the whole hip-hop thing.  It felt like it was just young people in Johannesburg taking a culture from somewhere else and trying to make their own, but when you hear the hip-hop now, it's definitely a South African hip-hop.  It's unlike any other in the world.  You know, the great MCs in Johannesburg can battle with any great MC anywhere from anywhere and the world, I think they could even kill some of those MC's, man.  There are some young cats now like Pro Kid.  He is really big right now.  And HHP (double HP), Mapaputzi, Kabelo.  Kabelo is kind of kwaito, hip-hop, because he raps but the beats are not hip-hop.  Their kwaito.  Those are some of the names.  If you listen to these guys, English isn't being used as much as it used to be in South African hip-hop.  People use their own languages because it is much easier to express your own experience in your own language.  And the stories.  Usually, when people are doing hip-hop, they start talking about Brooklyn, but right now, South African hip-hop is all about the ghettos of South Africa.  It's about Soweto, Alexandra.  Joburg.”

Vusi Mahlasela (South African singer/songwriter.  From his showcase performance.)  “I have a song for all the women in South Africa.  Some lost husbands and children in the struggle.  In June, we commemorate those who died in 1976.  One night at that time, my grandmother was ready when the police came asking for Vusi.  She opened the kitchen door, and switched off all the lights in the house.  Then she said, “Vusi’s here, and you are not going to take him.  He is here.  I’ve got a pot of boiling water.  The first one who comes in gets it.”

Atongo Zimba (Singer, molo player, and band leader from northern Ghana, now based in the UK and Holland.)  The instrument, in my language we call it koloko.  In the outside they call it molo.  In Gambia they call it goni.  It has spread all over Africa.  Mostly, I grew up from the village in the northeast of Ghana.  I learned this instrument from my grandfather.  When I started to learn it, I was so good with it.  Normally, it was played in funeral houses, or pito houses—that’s local alcohol we produce called pito, palm wine bars.  That's where the music used to be.  When I started to use the instrument to play around the streets, in the market, people start to think, ‘Oh, this guy is not normal.  He should do something better.  Why waste your time going in playing in the market, a strong guy like you?  You can work.  Playing music in the street is not good.’

“When I finished my learning, I started to create my own idea, because then I started to listen to different foreign music.  So I was having a different feeling.  Then I used to listen to James Brown a lot.  I could feel, this is something like a Fra Fra man.  He really has the same way that we sing our songs.  And then I heard Fela.  And I said I would like to be like this man.  I got all this influence.  I wanted to make funky, Afro-jazz, but still with my molo.  I didn't want to sound only like Fra Fra.  I wanted to sound from all over the world, one time, with the bush sound in it.

“So 1982, I left home for Nigeria.  I was 15 years old.  I didn't have a passport or an ID card.  The only thing I had was my instrument.  When I got to the border, I played for the Customs people.  They opened the border for me.  They even gave me some money, because they liked the music.  I started playing my music in the street in Lagos.  I stayed with Fela.  I watched Fela.  I never stick on the same brain as my father.  I forgot all of what they used to tell me not to do.  I stick with what I learned on the street.  I became a different person, a more open person.  I never played with Fela directly myself.  But every Friday at the Shrine, I would open the show before Fela comes, all alone with my molo.  And every time Fela plays, I am there, listing to the sound.  I am young, I learn things quick.  I stayed in Nigeria for three years.” 

(On the release of his 2004 album, Savannah Breeze, on Hippo Records)  “When I went to Ghana to launch my album, I was so impressed.  All the top, top press were there.  Because a lot of people had heard about my story.  They wanted to see me now when I came home with this album.  And the following day, all the press was talking about me.  Spreading the word.  It's really, really different for me, the first time Ghana's top, top press was talking about me.  I wanted to go and show my people what I have got.  I was very happy.”

Charlie Gillett (Legendary BBC broadcaster, and compiler of the 2-CD, 2005 world music collection from Wrasse Records, “Sound of the World.”)  “People accept the idea of the album.  They think is about the album.  But I think they've been tricked.  That's why think the whole MP3 thing, I-Tunes and so on, is taking off.  It's about that magical song.  It gets into your heart, into your thighs, or wherever it is.  And most people can only do that once in their lives.  Most artists have one song that they get right, and then they either do the same thing over and over again until you lose interest, or when they try to do something different, it just doesn't feel so good.  So that is an extreme position, but it is a position, and it's what I believe, and I think it's one reason why in the whole world music thing, people find it so difficult to sell more than one album by an artist.  Because we don't know the words.  We don't know what the songs are about, so they either sound a bit like the other one, which is the case with King Sunny Ade , or if, in the case of Salif Keita, he tries to do something different, and follows his own interest, we say, ‘No, no.  That's not what we want at all, Salif.’  And then of course he does Moffou, and we’re all happy again.”

“I resisted WOMEX for awhile.  I've got a complete block on the whole idea of trade fairs and meeting a lot of people and same place.  I find the idea very claustrophobic.  But when I went to the one in Berlin about five or six years ago, I must say, it was a very strange sensation.  It was a bit like going to a school reunion.  But I was bowled over by how many people I literally knew or knew who they were.  It was nice to put a face to a name.  So now I've been lured back every time except for when they went back to Essen, which I found unsatisfactory.  I don't have a sort of business reason to be here at WOMEX. Somebody who’s a promoter of live artist, or somebody who's a record company comes to promote all his artists around the world.  For both parties, that's a fantastic thing to do.  So I don't have those reasons.  So I had to persuade somebody else to pay the expenses of my be here, which is always a trick for the freelancer.  I'm a cuckoo who has constructed the nest, and then said can I come and live in it?  I'm quite proud of this manipulation.” 

“I think the world music scene is fundamentally a live music scene, and that is what is growing.  I was just talking to some people who are running a festival stage in Budapest.  This is a large festival with all kinds of music, and they're doing the world music stage.  This year, they had five days of which the headliners were—I mean in one sense, it's very predictable—Khaled, Mory Kante, Youssou N’Dour, Salif Keita, but nevertheless the fact that they had all of those guys, one day after another as the headliners at a world music event in Budapest is interesting news.  I didn't know such things existed, and I think the point is that there things like this growing all over the place.  There are festivals in Croatia.  And so it doesn't necessarily turn into record sales, to the great frustration of the people putting the records out and keeping these artist going.  But you know, in every country, there are people, whether it's the national or local governments, who somehow feel the value of this music, which makes connections to other cultures.  WOMEX is fantastically useful for such people.  All these things may only have been able to happen because of WOMEX.  So that’s its great value.