The Wonderful World of WOMAD

ONCE A YEAR BANDS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD COME TO BRISTOL AND GET PEOPLE DANCING. JOHN LEWIS WAS THERE. STEVE MITCHELL STOOD STILL LONG ENOUGN TO CLICK HIS SHUTTER.

Guy Warren (or Kofi Ghanaba) who took african drumming to american jazz in the fifties, once said "Our artists leave home in search of a new sound, and they end up by going back home". The process continues back and forth. It takes in the Carribean and Latin America and so becomes a circle of influence, drum shaped. This circle of international cross culture is what WOMAD hope to give us a glimpse of at their annual festivals. The rest of the year they release and distribute records, organise workshops and educational aids, attempting to extend the circle like a Garifuna dance from this years festival.

The Garifuna are singers, dancers and drummers from a culture which is a blend of Cari Indians and escaped african slaves, with some colonial influence overlaid, but whose music primarily reflects its african origins in the call and response format of the singing and drumming. Their MC told us that the time to cut the wood for the rim of a drum is one week after the first quarter of a new moon. Carriacou Big Drum's spokesman was more eloquent on the subject of the drum in his introduction to their music, again carribean and of african derivation; "... The circular form of the drum tells us these drums are primitive, they are ancient... Africans believed long ago that the world was round. And we know, we mathematicians sitting here today know the content of the circle and the concentricity of it and what geometric and calculatic things come out of the circle. And the drums are cylindrical.

So we are dealing with mathematics.
... we are dealing with religion.
... we are dealing with history.
... we are dealing with psychology.
... we are dealing with cosmology.
... we are dealing with theology.

And that is not all the disciplines, because I can come up with medicine. I can come with therapy phy... sio... therapy and the like neurology and the like.

All these are buried in this (the drum) and we will share with you the rhythms that have no language, the rhythms of the world"

Then they evoked their ancestral spirits. Right there in the blue marquee. Some of his logic lost me, but the emphasis on the drum and what it can symbolize by its circular nature is relevant (in a roundabout way) to the weekend and to the aims of Womad.

Carriacou Big Drum were the most fiercely african of the carribean cultures represented; "we take pride in our primitiveness". Their rites are virtually unchanged since their ancestors were forcibly removed from Africa and every aspect of the music has meaning. Drumming and dancing is believed to be a direct bridge between them and their ancestors. However, along with Petite Savanne from Dominica and the Garifuna from Belize they were intent upon sharing as opposed to performing their music, and all danced freely with the audience on and off the stage. It is the danceability and democracy of african music which makes it universal and irresistible. That is why it is the origin of virtually every popular western music this century (black, white and two-tone) from the banjo minstrals, through ragtime, swing, blues, latin american calypso, jazz, rock and roll (and hence all rock) to reggae, soul and funk. All of them drew at least the rhythm, and usually more from Africa.

The reason that the source does not run dry is because african music is capable of taking a musical form, restyling it with 'africanness' and infusing vitality (witness the Congolese catholic mass). Bands like Bhundu Boys and Super Diamono de Dakar represent a second stage, when rock/pop, popularised in the west but of african origins, has been imported to Africa, shaken in a calabash and brought back reafricanised, presumably to pick up new influences and technology and repeat the process.

The Bhundu Boys are from Zimbabwe and like Thomas Mapfumo, draw on the mbira tradition of the Shona people. Mapfumo was the first to popularize the use of guitar to play mbira lines, Bhundu Boys use a similar formula with funk snaps from the bassists Steinberger and mbira and xylophone sounds on a DX7. Super Diamono used a DX7 similarly, and this possibly marks a development in the use of synths by african bands where previously the tendency has been to limit them to fairly crass swishing psychedelia. The Senegalese Diamano also reflect in their sound the popularity of latin american music in French speaking West African, another african-derived music being reincorporated by African musicians into their own sound.

Yousso N'Dour et les Super Etoiles de Dakar are also from Senegal but their performance (which it was generally agreed was the high point of the festival) has more in common with the Wolof tradition whose rhythms are based around the tama drum, (now I know where the Japanese manufacturer got the name from). Their brass arrangements echo the distinctive melodies both vocal and instrumental of senegambian kora music, as played by the Gambia National Troupe, the most traditional of the african artists at Womad '86. Using the balo (xylophone), drums and gourd cabassas as well as the kora, a 21 string harp with two rows of strings (10 and 11) one for each hand, attached to a single neck protruding from a large gourd over which the strings are mounted.

Representing another stage in the cyclic movement of music to and from Africa is the reggae of Aswad and Misty in Roots, which not only provides the obvious spiritual/lyrical 'return to Africa' theme but is influencing african bands (like Thomas Mapfumo who is keenly aware of the use of reggae as a vehicle for political comment by Bob Marley and others).

Super Combo also use some reggae rhythms, although they are generally close to the highlife and meringue styles. They are based in this country having left Sierra Leone more then ten years ago with several records to their name but were forced to discard their then unfashionable style with which they could get no work. They have reverted with relief, but find now that being based here is a disadvantage, that they are overlooked in favour of african bands who are not necessarily any better. They had everyone dancing too and their teenage, homegrown (their word) drummer and guitarist Emil Agoo particularly excelled.

Hugh Masekela provided yet another variation with an african jazz fusion. Now resident in the U.S. the south african Masekela sounds sophisticated but still african and active with a plea for Nelson Mandela's release. In a week where many of the countries declining to attend the Commonwealth Games had a presence at Womad, music and dance were shown as more effective ways of forging bonds which ignore political boundaries than competitive sport with massive sponsorship. (But then we knew that). Bhundu Boys thanked the audience for moral support in the South African struggle and the audience seemed pleased to have someone acknowledge their embarrassment at Our Leaders' behaviour. The atmosphere of the weekend pleased the organizers as much as it did the people who went. The musicians were hosts as much as the audience.

The provision of a contrast makes anything easier to define and the contrast here was provided by the alienation between audience and performer caused by Siouxsie and the Banshees' false mystique and heavy stage security, unlike the days when they started out and the 'punk ethic' invited everyone to play. Perhaps it is a lack of purpose in the Banshees music, which is made in order primarily to be sold, which reduce it to hollow theatricals, but the fault is not just their's. They just happened to be the unfortunate representatives of a culture which puts on youth rallies for concerts, as opposed to having music inextricably bound up with every aspect of living like Carroacou Big Drum, whose lecture on drums is only odd if you have merely thought of drums as something to hit so that everybody plays at the same speed.