Awards for World Music

Awards for World Music

21 July, 2008
by: John Ellingsworth

Radio 3's 6th Annual World Music Poll Winners' Concert took place over four and a half hours at The Barbican this Bank Holiday, with Verity Sharp of Late Junction introducing six live acts. Our reporter John Ellingsworth took in the whole show.

Debashish Bhattacharya is an Indian raga slide guitar player so unsatisfied with the challenges of regular slide guitar that he has invented three of his own. Accompanied by his brother Subhasis on tabla, the first thing that hit me was just how much sound was emanating from two people. The music itself was typical of a rag in its pace and superdensity, but with extraordinary flexibility from Debashish, who changed modes and play styles so frequently and easily that I cannot imagine what the intellectual experience of playing music is for him. Debashish's last performance on his most recently crafted guitar (the four-string Anandi) saw a switch to a sadder, slower, sweeter sound, metallic and lonely.

Gotan Project are now established as a global club phenomenon, but I do wonder if they've now found themselves in a space that will ultimately suffocate them. Their tango remixes are accompanied by live DJs; in this instance there was a sort of castle of decks behind the performers, from which flowed wave after wave of techno beats. For me these became oppressive and I went somewhere else, the music a soundtrack to my fantasies. Not an unpleasant way to respond, but hardly the shared unique experience you come to expect from a live gig. Gotan offered occasional flashes of brilliance or recognition, but never quite enough. The crowd applauded, but the six desert nomads sitting in front of me were more or less comatose throughout. It might have been different if it had not been the Barbican and there had been no chairs, or maybe even if they had just been the last act, but the social dimension of their music, i.e. its power to make people jump up and bop, was not allowed to operate.

Ghada Shbeir sang Middle Eastern folk and Arab/Andalusian songs, Syriac and Ancient Maronite chants, with a genuinely beautiful voice. There were moments when I was super-cognisant of that fact, but it might be for me that the emotional tonality of music like this depends upon narrative for its completeness. I could hear repeated refrains and melodies that I knew to carry the dramatic impact of the song, but, unable to understand anything more, I ended up being frustrated. I was dropping out of the performance when Shbeir took a step back and let her supporting musicians strut their stuff. The way it went down is the five instrumentalists were sitting on stools in a line and were taking it in turns to do their bit -- first a guy with some kind of guitar, then a guy with some kind of a bigger guitar, followed by a flute type instrument that was not a flute, a violin, and finally a solo tambourinist.

It takes some time to go down the line and the guys with the serious instruments are nailing it and getting huge rounds of applause and you're starting to worry for the tambourine. You're thinking maybe they're just going to skip him out. He seems to be smiling and enjoying himself, but to what extent is this is a bluff? You imagine the storm in his heart… the violin finishes his solo and after an all-in stanza or two the tambourine man shows what he can do and it is incredible. You feel like cheering. I'm fascinated by moments like this, and by the dynamic of improvised performance, like conversation in that it depends on expressions of individual character in a context of group invention and extroversion. It's something that's hard to really get from a recording.

Unfortunately Mogadishan rapper K'naan (winner of the Newcomer Award, and for me probably the biggest draw of the night's line-up) was unable to attend. I had hoped to hear a live performance of In the Beginning; whenever I listen to it I feel I am on the verge of fully visualising the rough-edged Disney movie to which it is the culminative track. It would have been a treat to see the bounce and camaraderie of the song acted out on stage. But mostly I wanted to decide if my opinion of K'naan, that he's too caught up in the dull emphatic stress patterns of mainstream hip-hop when he has the talent and the heart to be more, held up in a live performance context. K'naan is an open heart lyrically, but I think he is not yet able to consistently vocalise the emotions he describes.

Maurice el Medioni & Roberto Rodriguez gave a performance that wasn't quite right in many respects. Medioni's charming stage presence (he was the only performer to wear a suit and bowtie and would get up from his stool and bow slightly to the audience whenever they applauded him) was a mismatch for the cluttered stage and roaming mini-spotlights that someone had decided to project down on him. Plus, his collaborator, Cuban drummer Roberto Rodriguez, was unavoidably absent, and I don't he ever really gelled with the replacement. Often one would throw a glance at the other which would go uncaught, and the percussionist seemed sometimes a little lost. But it was still a huge pleasure to hear Medioni play, his improvisations pulling stride and boogie and who knows what else together into a thrilling line of invention. The fact that you couldn't catch the hundred styles or melodies he alluded to didn't really matter, one way we keep our music is to index it against the places or times that have particular significance to us. I think what Medioni does is open up his life's album and give you fleeting or shadowy impressions of cities and people you have never known.

Mahmoud Ahmed overcame some hideous slime-green hypno-spirals that were projected onto the floor, plus a slightly dodgy graveyard rock opener, to be the night's most exciting live act. Ahmed has an amazing voice, but the supporting band (drums, keyboard, two saxophones) wouldn't sound so great in the confines of your room. Ahmed benefited though from being the last performer, and when the audience were told to get up and dance, everyone was more than happy to obey. I won't be able to hear it now without remembering the whole audience dancing about and clapping, shouting Avec! Avec! while Mahmoud (aged 66) busted moves with extreme vigour. A shoulder dance went into a jumping dance and into a jig. The nomads were up and bopping. There is nothing intrinsically worthwhile about seeing the musicians you admire in the flesh, but when they have the power to create a connection between you and a bunch of strangers in a darkened room, well, that's what live performance is all about.

THOSE AWARDS IN FULL
Africa Award, Mahmoud Ahmed (Ethiopia)
Americas Award, Gogol Bordello (USA) -- can you imagine this in the Barbican?
Middle East and North Africa Award, Ghada Shbeir (Lebanon)
Asia Pacific Award, Debashish Bhattacharya (India)
Europe Award, Camille (France) -- disappointed she couldn't make the concert; check her out.
Culture Crossing Award, Maurice el Medioni & Roberto Rodriguez (Algeria-France & Cuba-US)
Newcomer Award, K'naan (Somalia)
Club Global Award, Gotan Project (France/Argentina)
Album of the Year Award, Ali Farka Toure, Savane -- R.I.P
World Shaker Award, Yusuf Mahmoud & Hildegard Kiel

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John Ellingsworth