WOMAD 2012 review by Lindley McKay

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Some cynical analyists have said all that’s needed for a band to be successful in the world music scene is a great back story. But wouldn’ some really good music help? The kind that gets under your scalp and haunts your head like tinnitus?

Melodies rare as rain in the desert, rare as a band born out of the militia camps of Qaddafi’ Libya? Ok, Tinariwen has a hell of a back story, you probably know about their beginnings on cassette passed from hand to hand across the Sahel, and the evolution of their name meaning in the Tamashek language “deserts’ from “children of the desert’; and perhaps you’ve seen them in Australia before. But Tinariwen at WOMAD 2012 was not like previous times. With the release of their collaborative album Tassili last year, the group (belatedly) sighted new oases of arrangement and mood. Enough to make their WOMAD performance potentially more interesting than ever. Yet it seems fate found that insufficient and saw fit to strand two band members in Mali, including only remaining foundation member Ibrahim Ag Alhabib. This year we were permitted to see what rare musicians all of Tinariwen are, in a pared down outfit of four, and to witness live the expansion of their musical foreground via onstage collaboration with French/Berber outfit Lo’Jo. The two bands are no strangers, first meeting for the much-lauded Festival in the Desert (Mali 1998), and onstage their enmeshment is a stalwart of cross-cultural empathy … but the music. It’s the bottom line. Those lazy twangy licks are like moonlight on rock and sand, the restraint in pace and voice follow the slow movement of palms against a blue-black sky. How fitting and how strange to imbibe this against a backdrop of towering Gondwanan pines. You are welcome to the desert, said Tinariwen to the crowd. Perhaps they heard it echo back, from this audience perched on the rim of a continent of aridity and bulldust.


Tuareg icons, Tinariwen in the rarest of all performances: free of lynchpin Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.

Every time, WOMAD is like being let loose in the imperial treasury, like finding a cave in wild mountain where without warning, sublime sounds of flute meander from an unseen source, a masterful voice floats above the chill air and double-ended drums accompany with impish little frenzies. Only, at WOMAD we see the generators of these sounds, and more, we saw dancer Shantala Shivalingappa appear, as close to a deity as humanly possible, symmetrical as a lily, her motion of eye, hand and limb tied with such perfection to the percussion that it almost seemed the two were the spontaneous fancy of her omnipotence. How young girls in the crowd sighed to see her leap more lithely than a centaur, to pose more whimsically than any poet’s dalliance, to perform at the apex of anatomical art. No wonder: Shantala’ mother Savitry Nair was a pioneer of south Indian dance in europe, her guru Vempati Chinna Satyam reshaped aspects of Kuchipudi classical dance, and Shantala’ life in France has seen her harvest contemporary dance in choreography, collaboration and solo. Of course, she was very beautiful so as to mesmerise her audience. Every portion of her form and every motion were charms, celestial. Whimsical one moment, wrathful the next. And like all deities, departing her audience to a sense of confusion, delight, and loss.


Shantala Shivalingappa, born in Madras, raised in Paris

Everyone’ got a back story. Very often its discipline, straining for success, wringing the last drop of blood from passion, a lifetime of hard work. The Trio Joubran of Palestine, oud players and brothers, seemed at ease even when exchanging bantering riffs at cheetah’ pace, exhibiting the kind of calm that comes from training since childhood. At their workshop performance the Trio expounded a little on the mentors and classical traditions of the middle east. Samir Joubran, eldest of the three, related the words of their father. Tradition, he had once told them, was not about repeating the past, but about creating the best composition, which others would play into the future. The trio’ performances were polished, demeanours relaxed, unblemished recitals belying their technical complexity and lulling the audience. Trio Joubran have five albums since formation; their aura is of a group still ascending.


Samir Joubran, of Nazareth, Palestine

WOMAD has created as it has presented. Anjelique Kidjo’ legacy was strong this year, powerful-lunged rich-toned divas Grace Barbe from the Seychelles and Dobet Gnahore from Cote D’Ivoire. Left field is still firing full rounds, this year serving up experimental Finnish accordion player Kimmo Pohjonen, a crafty old veteran of re-discovered sound and perpetrator of notorious events such as Accordion Wresting (a contemporary take on the bygone tradition of accordion-accompanied wrestling, in partnership with the Helsinki Nelson wrestling troupe), Earth Machine Music (live melding of accordion/sounds and farm machinery emissions) and stage collaborations with a swag of sideways-thinking musos including Ukraine avant-garde pin-up girls Dahka Brakha (Berlin, Nov 2011). For a modest WOMAD stage Kimmo was this year alone and gigantic, steeping his slew of power drills and mouthpercussion with the attitudes of a demented Norse god. The documentary of his efforts to date, entitled Devils Lungs aka Soundbreaker was also in its premiere season at WOMAD, with the festival oozing into film as a new appendage of world music. And speaking of dementia, how about a reggae artist who’s spent the last 33 years making his own dub and doing no doubt an incredible amount of trip-toeing through the off kilter rhythms of his own head? The irreproachable Mad Professor, apt late night closer for the Saturday eve. He might have bamboozled and eerily distorted our ideas of reggae, but isn’t that just what we need him for? So too the following night, with Japanese DJ Krush’ slabby beats only just shy of arythmic. A fitting touch of nasty urban modernism for an event daring to call itself WORLD.


Two permutations of Ivory Coast power pack Dobet Gnahore


Valhalla at WOMAD with Kimmo Pohjonen

The beauty of WOMAD’ chaos and sprawl is that at any turn one might be presented with a surprise to change your musical existence. It seldom comes from where expected. Instead, between disabled Congolese Staff Benda Bilili in a dance marathon and gypsy-skabilly favourites Barons of Tang blasting horns and energy like a collapsing star, a stumbling swoop past the taste-the-world tent serves up real Jamaican girls sleazing up a chook, Solomon islanders creating bamboo panpipes with a carton-knife or Grace Barbe singing campfire-folk from the Seychelles. Instants of colour and sound which tumble into the mind and become part of our selves! For me the most sublime shards are kora player Mamadou Diabate’ ozzie socks in 2010, the icy skittering of the bow down the strings of Dahka Brakha’ celloist on a hayfeverish 2011 afternoon, and this year, twentieth anniversary of WOMADelaide, the curling red feet of living dance goddess Shantala Shivalingappa. WOMAD is part of me. As ever, the only real problem is the impossibility of seeing all the things you might want to, and that we have to endure another year before the next great incomparable WOMADelaide.

Words: Lindley McKay
Images: Adam Skinner

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  1. A fantastic capture of an awe-inspiring swim in World music that was Womadelaide 2012….thanks Lindley and Adam!

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