Skip to main content

Womad review – from gnawa to Turkish protest songs, world music celebrates

Charlton Park, Wiltshire
Township vocals, percussion, hip-hop and rousing bass riffs rang out as musicians such as Maâlem Hamid El Kasri, Gaye Su Akyol and Mari Kalkun took to the stage

African music has always played at major role at Womad, and the most impressive newcomers this year were a young seven-piece from Soweto, South Africa. BCUC have shaken up the country’s tradition for harmony singing with a style that combines township vocals, hymns and spirituals with furious, insistent percussion, hip-hop, punk energy, and a real sense of danger. They started gently, then switched to a frantic percussion workout from bass drums, congas, whistles and shakers. The music built furiously, then ebbed away, allowing for fine, soulful vocals from their female singer Kgomotso Mokone or intense lectures about the spirit world of the ancestors from singer Jovi Nkosi. Then the barrage of percussion returned, driven by insistent, sturdy bass lines, as the crowd followed the band’s instructions to go “a bit crazy” and Nkosi declared that the frantic scenes were “beyond our wildest dreams”.

This was an entertaining Womad, dampened slightly by the rain, but with a typically eclectic lineup. Headliners included Leftfield, with an engagingly fresh revival of Leftism, and the ever-reliable Malian duo Amadou & Mariam. But it was the lesser-known artists who made this festival special.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2LLqllq
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more