The delights of Womad Abu Dhabi

Rango at the Womad Abu Dhabi music festival

A couple of weeks ago, even the sophisticates of Womad probably thought Eyjafjallajökull was an away-with-the-elves folk band. Then, abruptly, it looked as if the second Womad Abu Dhabi might not happen, or at best, be drastically curtailed. Airline disruption made visible the tracery of the logistics on which festivals depend. For example, Tinariwen, the Tuareg nomads, were in Algeria, able to fly, but their guitars were all in Paris.

But Womad’s organisers have seen enough mud not to be frightened of ash. Once an aircraft chartered from Air Dubrovnik had lifted off from Nice with 70 musicians aboard, Chris Smith, Womad’s director, knew he had a festival.

Womad Abu Dhabi is a free festival split across two sites: the Corniche in Abu Dhabi itself, and the 19th-century Al-Jahili Fort in the second city of Al-Ain, 90 minutes away down a dark desert highway lined with lay-by mosques and road signs pointing to labour camps. Al-Ain is a conservative place, and a patchy first-night audience seemed unsure what to make of Debashish Battacharya as he sat cross-legged, weaving instrumental Indian legends out the 24-string slide guitar on his lap, accompanied by drummers from different traditions.

The Zawose family from Tanzania

The Corniche was another matter. The beach here is only a few years older than the festival, tons of white sand piled up against the waters of the Gulf. On the land side, the backdrop was chrome-and-glass towers, their lights blinking. On the opposite side, the water was studded with flagpoles flying the festival’s trademark silk flags. Small children and women in full niqabs splashed in the sea, which at night was still the temperature of a warm bath.

“There have been fines and arrests in the past,” the organisers warned their talent, “for performers who went shirtless on stage. We strongly ask you to err on side of caution and suggest no navels, no thigh and no chests exposed for either women or men!” Womad, accordingly, scurried around trying to find nipple tape for the (male) Drummers of Burundi.

The first test case for the dress code was Femi Kuti, the Nigerian Afrobeat star. His father, Fela Kuti, gave interviews and even performed in his underwear, and would probably have relished a confrontation with the authorities. His son, prudently, kitted out his dancers in red body-stockings that left little to the imagination but observed the letter of the law. But when there was mass rump-shaking, the cameras for the big screens tended to stay discreetly on the band. Kuti’s set was uncompromising, from denunciations of oil-based corruption in Nigeria – off-stage, he contrasted Abu Dhabi’s use of its oil wealth favourably with his home country’s – to the full-on lasciviousness of ‘Beng Beng Beng’. “Don’t come too soon,” he crooned, and in the temporary autonomous zone of the beach, he got away with it.

At the other end of the Corniche, Egyptian star Hakim found an adoring crowd of fellow countrymen, some of whom had driven from neighbouring Dubai to see their idol. In rhinestoned jeans and a shirt with an airbrushed tiger appliquéd on its back, unbuttoned to the verge of illegality, he teased and flirted, waving an Egyptian flag, repeatedly starting on an anthem before pausing and cupping his hand to his ear for applause. His musicians, from a brass section to a wall of darbukas, from accordion to keyboards that could have powered a Scandinavian metal band, were lock-tight. His hair was perfect.

Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni of Tinariwen

Friday at the Corniche started with fireworks over the Gulf and the ecstatic Sudanese voodoo of Rango; the Chemirami family from Iran played precise Persian classical music, and Sierra Maestra added a Cuban tinge. Transglobal Underground, as ever, squeezed an entire festival into their set: cascading sitar from Sheema Mukherjee, pounding dhol from Gurjit Sihra meshing with Hamid Mantu’s energetic kit work; deep reggae basslines; space noises from Tim Whelan at the keyboards. “All those in Southall, remember when we used to listen to Coxsone ... ” intoned the storyteller Tuup – perhaps mischaracterising this audience – and there were perhaps too many portentous shamanic-revival voice-overs before female singer Krupa and Mukherjee joined forces for a skanking cover of “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough”.

Rachid Taha’s music is not that dissimilar to Hakim’s chaabi. But the expatriate Algerian was in combative form, grungy metallic guitar riffs exploding like fireworks. Once Taha discarded his skinny tie and trilby, the music breathed a little more freely. A pogoing contingent at the front waved a huge Algerian flag; when it was thrown on stage, Taha wrapped himself in it ambivalently for a moment, before discarding it on the drum riser and launching into “Rock El Casbah”, his Clash reclamation. He remains too cussed to be enlisted into easy patriotism.

In the small hours of Saturday morning, Smith took a call from Damian Marley, for whom a private jet had been dispatched to Miami: Marley was phoning in sick. There was a speedy reshuffle of the remaining cards. Tinariwen were promoted to the top of the bill, and Rango, the undisputed champions of the previous days, brought back to fill their place. Tinariwen had made plans to collaborate with two members of trendy Brooklyn band TV On The Radio. Volcanic ash had reduced the planned number of rehearsal days to none, so Tinariwen and Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe set up an encampment of amplifiers in the Hilton ballroom just hours before stage time and tried to work out a set through the language of nodding and smiling.

The Drummers of Burundi

Another headache was the improbably strong wind gusting in off the Gulf, turning the sea choppy. The skies started to look bruised and the fireworks were cancelled. As Amparo Sánchez led her band on stage and into a woozy melodica waltz, the stage canopy above them flexed and strained with the flapping of a Roc preparing to take wing. But the Spanish singer calmed her musicians with a glance, and twanging guitar and sobbing trumpet, with bowed cello and double bass, traced the hidden connections between the American south-west and humid Cuba. (When she namechecked “Moros y Cristianos”, she only meant the island’s national dish of black beans and rice.) “Turista Accidental” rose through a wonderful three-voice climax of trumpet, guitar and piano, and “Corazón de la Realidad” closed with the muted trumpet counterpointing her voice: a perfect note for the desert wind.

Marya Andrade, the most promising of the new crop of Cape Verdean divas, tends on record to the lightweight. Here, powering up to carry over the wind and outsing her forceful band, she grew in stature. As she popped open the effervescent chorus of “ ... Storia, Storia”, the dry ice swirled up around her, sparkling in the stage lights like purple-and-green sherbet.

Rango went down a storm for the second night running, this time sharing the stage with the young dancers of the Zawose Family from Tanzania, culminating in a snaking conga, chorusing back and forth with the audience, that no one wanted to end.

Tinariwen, robed against the flying sand, were their normal implacable selves, guitars crackling before springy basslines locked in on “Amassakoul”. Frontman Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s famous thousand-yard stare focused all the way to Qatar.

The guests were respectfully unobtrusive. Adebimpe sang in the wordless high tenor scat of an Ifreet, filling the implied spaces in “Tenhert”, looping it back on itself with a foot pedal. The Algerian Jimmy Page of the electric oud, Mehdi Haddab was more adventurous: negotiating a faster tempo with Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni, he fired off riffs and runs that combined flash and filigree, until “Lulla” fell apart into a scrappy jam. But the set overall had united everyone left on the beach: no one really missed Marley. And when the Drummers of Burundi – torsos clothed – closed out in leaping, dancing thunder, no one needed actual fireworks either.

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