world music
caspar.gomez
If there’s a patron saint of WOMAD it must be Bob Marley. His visage, serious but gentle, peers out from more T-shirts than I care to count. And all the festival-goers who don’t have WOMAD-standard long, white, straggly hair sport dreadlocks. The silliest haircut goes to a fellow in (again) WOMAD-standard travellers’ pantaloons who sports small knots of hair, each tied with a different coloured elastic band.But I digress. After a night where my pals Finetime and Ted Ted led me off the beaten track, sampling the DJ at Molly’s Bar spinning everything from dubstep to Balkan beats, I rise very Read more ...
caspar.gomez
I am a WOMAD virgin. “Princey will be here later, he usually frequents this bar,” a man with straggly white hair tells me as I wander aimlessly about. I think he means Prince Rogers Nelson, the diminutive rock star who sang “Purple Rain”, and I grow vaguely animated. He starts telling me about how last year he advised Prince not to shoot civilians and begins a short diatribe about how Prince is falling into the ways of his father and his grandfather. My mind is slow. The sun and the marijuana has done its work. He means Harry, doesn’t he? My excitement fades.WOMAD is full of gentle, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Various Artists: Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton StoryWithout Shadow Morton, Amy Winehouse could not have made Back to Black. The songs the enigmatic sonic wizard wrote and produced for The Shangri-Las in the mid Sixties were integral to what made Back to Black tick. Amazingly, Sophisticated Boom Boom!! – The Shadow Morton Story is the first career-spanning collection of Morton’s work. For that alone, it would be, at the least, exciting. But with its massive, well-illustrated booklet, the involvement of and interviews with Morton – who died in February this year, before he Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Fly into Morocco on Royal Air Maroc, and as in-flight entertainment on the overhead screens you’re treated to Charlie Chaplin shorts from the 1910s, still sharp as a tack, the little guy goosing authority, the law, the rich, the powerful. The Little Tramp must remain a figure with resonance in Morocco: the base of operations for legendary band Nass El Ghiwane was the back room of a tailor’s shop in Casablanca dominated by a poster of Chaplin.Their songs were about the same "little guys" that Chaplin’s comedy immortalises, the struggle of poor Moroccans and the search for poetry in a new urban Read more ...
joe.muggs
If anyone in British music still deserves that rinsed-to-death term "maverick" it is Battersea-born "Dr" Alex Paterson. From roadie for postpunk industrialists Killing Joke in the early Eighties, he went on to work as an A&R then - originally collaborating with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty - formed The Orb in the heat of the acid house explosion to bring the world "ambient house". Inexplicably the loose collective, which has featured Berlin producer Thomas Fehlmann as a key member, became huge, their dub basslines and loony-tunes samples somehow encapsulating the psychedelic oddness of the Read more ...
Tim Cumming
This is the third Songlines Encounters festival at Kings Place. Wednesday’s programme featured Balkans, Polish and Georgian music, Thursday had Egyptian Baladi Blues and Louisiana’s Sarah Savoy, and Friday featured West Africa, Spain and Palestine.Malick Pathé Sow opens with a short solo set on the Senegalese ngoni, the hoddu, singing in a high, clear, declaiming style, the big, deep ghimbri-like bass notes of the large hoddu punctuating and emphasising the verses. Then he is joined by Senegalese kora player Bao Sissoko, with touches of percussion on the calabash, for a song representing “the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“He who sings frightens away his ills.” Cerys Matthews has spent a lifetime heeding the wise counsel of Don Quixote. Born at the tailend of the Sixties, she grew up in the Welsh tradition of musical surroundsound before veering right into the heart of Britpop as the wailing amber-topped siren of Catatonia. Four albums and many stadium triumphs later, the painful break-up more than a decade ago was fed through the distorting prism of the tabloids. Since then Matthews has worked on a remarkable reinvention that reaches a new crest in 2013.The life of post-Catatonia Cerys has been built around Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Lake Chapalá begins just south of Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco. In case there’s any doubt we’re in Mexico, a mariachi band are propositioning the families who stroll along the waterfront and doing good business in their silver tunics and red cummerbunds. A shoeshine boy with his box and brush is pointing hopefully at dusty footwear, and another boy is selling hammocks. Couples are sweetly holding hands on their Sunday-morning paseo. It’s a tranquil scene.Glittering dark birds skim the surface of the water and waterfowl wallow in the reeds. Swallows swoop and elegant white egrets perch Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's pretty impressive that at 74 years old, the drummer Jaki Liebezeit should still be one of the most vital musicians on the planet. Maybe not all that surprising, though. From the moment in 1968 when he switched from free jazz to the narcotic jams of Can, he pioneered a rolling rhythmic style that suggested infinite patience and a man comfortable in his body, and it feels entirely natural that his beats should keep on rolling into old age. “Liebezeit” translates literally as “Love Time”, and it feels like he really does.Though he's collaborated with all kinds of big names including Brian Read more ...
joe.muggs
We're extremely happy to be able to offer a free download of this live track by New York collective Mice Parade to mark the release of their seventh album, Candela, today. In its six minutes, this version of "Couches & Carpets" encapsulates much of the diversity that has made Mice Parade a cult act over the past decade - from indie introspection to expansive post-rock guitars, jazz-funk grooves to melodies and techniques influenced by anagramatically eponymous band leader Adam Pierce's wide research as an ethnomusicologist. In last week's review of the album, Thomas H Green found Read more ...
garth.cartwright
I've been to countless UK Womads yet have never before made it WOMAD Taranaki. Which is almost something to be ashamed about considering I'm a Kiwi. But this expat is never in the South Pacific mid-March. Until, that is, this year. The 11th New Zealand Womad is held in the small city of New Plymouth in Taranaki, a gorgeous West Coast hump in the central North Island. Mt Taranaki towers over the site - this beautiful mountain is often used as double for Mt Fuji, so sublime is its symmetery - and surfing beaches are 20 minutes walk away. The site - the Brooklands Bowl - is a vast park full of Read more ...
Thembi Mutch
A crowd of men and younger women in full burkahs gathers, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in West African “Mumu” (khaftan) and a covered head, playing Ghazals (Islamic calls to prayer). Accompanied by an acoustic guitar, a clear voice, sitting on a café terrazza, Nawal transports us: until it is broken. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?!” cries out a dishevelled street vendor, visibly upset. “But you use keyboards in your praise of Allah” she retorts calmly.It is 1pm, several hours before the Sauti Za Busara festival is about to begin. From the 12th-century Omani fort Read more ...