Maybe standing all day drains the blood from the brain. Maybe heat and dehydration are to blame. Maybe the clashing sounds and bright plastic tat cause sensory overload. Whatever the reason, it is an uncomfortable truth that the collective intelligence of a festival audience is lower than that of a concert audience. We like things simple; we can grasp them easily.
Consider, for example, the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. They are the eight sons of the avant-garde Chicago trumpeter Phil Cohran; having not quite sired a sports team, he had to settle for a brass octet. They stood line abreast, swaying in unison, bracing themselves against the power of their music blowing them off the stage. The funky Blaxploitation riffs came bright and hard, and the deep sousaphone squelched and rumbled. One brother led chants that would not tax a football crowd. It was, for a scant hour, quite marvellous.
Rokia Traoré, by contrast, found the wind scything in from the Bristol Channel blowing the words of her subtly whispered new songs back in her face. But she built up into mighty dance numbers, her bass player slapping and sliding for all he was worth. “Dounia”, usually limber, rose to a climax that was almost belligerent. At the end, Traoré sang an extended version of Fela Kuti’s “Lady”, and leapt acrobatically into the air. Detours into Gershwin had been quizzically received; this was cheered roundly.
“In North Ethiopia, we dance only from the waist up. In South Ethiopia, they dance only from the waist down,” explained Sintayehu ‘Mimi’ Zenebe. When she appeared with Dub Colossus, there was rapturous dancing of all sorts, Mimi shaking her shoulders as if testing whether they would fall off, the Horns of Negus pumping out brass figures, jazzy piano vamps and the unearthly cry of the horse-hair fiddle.
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| Youssou N’Dour’s passionate performance was a festival highlight |
No one can have expected what followed: a version of Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” stripped of its Sotho swagger and transformed into a glacial drift over piano and strings. Another cover came next, before the karaoke evening gave way to a narrative of sorts around human rights: “Not One of Us” and a trip-hopped “Games Without Frontiers”, during which brilliant white spotlight beams goose-stepped into the crowd. “Steam” offered a coup de théâtre with 50-foot streams of dry ice to mark the chorus. “Solsbury Hill” and a sombre closing “Biko” were perfect, and “Downside Up” was a delight. But even hardcore fans were bemused. At the back of the crowd, no one clapped the first four numbers, the closest Womad comes to sacrilege.
Over in the arboretum, Jim Moray was playing on a moon- and neon-lit stage. Moray is like a younger Gabriel, taking unfashionable music (folk rather than prog) and refashioning it with technology. A week before, his fiddle player had chided another audience for insufficient appreciation; no need here, as he demonstrated “how we do it in Bristol” on the revved-up Morris of “I’ll Go List for a Sailor” and led a mass sing- along on the tongue-twister chorus of “All You Pretty Girls”. Moray can be too clever for his own good; this was just right.
The Black Arm Band, made up largely of Aboriginal singers, combined mild country music with moving social commentary: against a backdrop of vintage footage they recounted Australia’s forgotten civil rights struggle. “Could we please have our country back?” sang one, and the audience cheered with the comfort of people with no plans to give back anything.
Backstage on Sunday, Youssou N’Dour was wearing a Zouave uniform and a pair of Hunter wellington boots so new that the discarded box was still on the floor of his tent. He was keen to talk about malaria eradication, the cause to which he has now dedicated himself.
“The difference between this and AIDS/HIV,” he said, “is that AIDS, people are worried about. Malaria, people aren’t worried about. It’s important to talk to Africans and say, malaria kills a million people a year, most of them Africans.” In partnership with Malaria No More, N’Dour wants everyone in the affected areas to have a mosquito net by the end of 2010. The charity will raise the money; N’Dour will spearhead awareness raising. “We know how to prevent this disease,” he insisted. He traced a circular relationship between malaria and poverty, and his new song, “Xeex Sibbiru”, drives home the message about using nets – often repurposed into fishing nets – properly.
When he and Super Étoile took the stage, the rain was steady. Not even the prospect of a crowd dressed as outdoor-supply mannequins daunted N’Dour, who played his first Womad 25 years ago. The whipcrack of the sabar drums and the relentless mbalax riffs warmed things up; there was a tumbler, bravely if foolhardily dressed all in white; one employee’s sole job was to whip up the crowd into Wolof chants; a giant Senegalese flag waved vigorously from the front row. “Set” even blew away the clouds for an instant, and concluded with the band trooping off, leaving four drummers to do their work. There was a fragment of “7 Seconds”, and a synth-laden “New Africa” name-checked African heroes from Nkrumah to Biko. If malaria could be eradicated by force of personality alone, N’Dour would do it.
