Tal National come from all over North Africa, and they bring their fusion music to audiences the world over. I spoke to them about the origins of their style and playing in England.
Ian Brennan
Ian Brenann has had many production projects always involving civilisations from oppressed or persecuted communities. He once won a Grammy Award for production global mega-stars Tinariwen, Tuaregs of the North African desert. This year I spoke to him about Abatwa the Pygmy from Rwanda, and their trip together to WOMAD.
Sebye Ntege
Here I spoke to the lovely Sebye Ntege about his music, his instrumentalism, his inspirations for his new album and playing WOMAD.
Addictive TV
Addictive TV are an electronic duo that have traveled to all corners fo the globe, sampling and categorizing various loops and samples from willing participants.
Using their technically advanced musical minds, they then chip n chop many layers of samples of traditional and electronic music and use them to compile all new compositions, with corresponding video footage.
Hashmat Sultana
Sufi soul singing sisters from India brought their award winning talents to WOMAD where I spoke to them about what Sufi music is, their journey to the big stage and their plans for the future.
Orchestre Les Mangelepa
Legendary band that have been playing in Kenya and all around Africa for 40 years, FINALLY make it across the pond, and I get to chat to them about their first festival in Europe / England, audiences around the world and their style of playing and music making.
Afro Celt Sound System
@WOMAD 2017
London in the 80’s / WOMAD / Whirl-y Gig / West African Music / Multiculturalism
When I was ruffly 16 years old, I listened for the first time to a global fusion album. This album was Release by Afro Celt Sound System. The album boasts multi-culturalism, with Scottish bagpipes, traditional Irish flutes, fiddles, Indian rhythms, West African Kora… to name but a few, all fused with infectious unstoppable electronic dance beats.
This album changed my life. I had never before danced to anything non-western in sound. Nor had I heard fusions from the global North to South. I had also never previously heard the bagpipes sound funky.
Afro Celt Sound-System as the name might suggest fuse traditional Western folk instruments with West African instruments and merge the whole thing into the electronic dance scene. Formed in 1995 the Afro Celt band consists of mystro musicians in their own right.
In this interview I talk to Simon Emmerson, a prevalent figure in the changing musical trends in London since the 70’s, Larla O Lionáird of the Irish influences, and N’Fale Kouyate, the West African griot Kora player. Together in a cosy yurt at WOMAD Festival 2017, we spoke through the changing trends in music, the global Norths relation to African music and the London music scene through the ages….
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WOMAD 2017 Saturday, BBC Radio 3 Charlie Gillett Stage, 8:15 - 9:30pm
Speaking with : Simon Emmerson, Larla O Lionairde, N’Fale Kouyate, (Johnny Kalsi)
I was overwhelmed to be given the opportunity to talk to Afro-Celt Sound System, as a long time lover of their fantastic fusion of traditional folk musics of the global north, with traditional folk musics of the global south, the incredibly versatile fusion dance music has had me dancing for years.
I wanted to try and map out the various influences in Afro-Celts vast discography of music spanning from their first album release ‘Volume 1: Sound Magic’ (1996). Having since spanned a further nine albums, the endless array of incredible sounds from one album to the next is truly worthy of the term musical ‘melting pot’.
I started by asking the guys where the Irish Celtic influences came from within the band….
Larla: well it comes from Simon meeting Davy Spillane from County Clare in Ireland and they met over Baba Mal records, and that was where the initial content was, and ever since then there’s been a array of performers and singers who, also some Scottish musicians, so theres a big heavy influence and I joined the band a few years ago and I have been playing the Irish flutes and bohdrán.
SD: Im studying ethnomusicology in SOAS and I just love it, so can I ask, how did it all come together, with the Scottish the Irish, I know the West African and Indian rhythms too?
Simon: Yeah I mean we use Bhangra grooves, Dub grooves, yeah it's a melting pot.
SD: How are the songs constructed? Is it all the work of one genius conductor?
Larla/N’Fale: Ahh Simon, Simon is the clever guy
Simon: Ok so I never wanted to be a virtuoso musician. I started of as a punk, my primary agenda was probably as an activist, but then over the years, you get a little bit older, and then music has become a big part of my life. But as a record producer, I got very interested the music that I grew up with in London.
So as a kid I grew up in South London, I was surrounded by reggae and ska, I as a punk I was very much on the fringes of all the sound systems that you had in London. In the early 80’s I worked in a jazz specialist shop called ‘Mole Jazz’ and I got very into jazz, but I discovered African music. I discovered the music of West Africa; Fela Kuti, I started trying to play African guitar in the way that Africans do it, but in my own kind of punk way.
So I met a guitarist called Spike, who was in a punk band, and we became part of a band called Weekend and we were playing kind of African licks in a kind of Indie feel. That soon developed to me being in a band called Working Week, through all that I ended up in Africa in the early 90’s and it was Davy Spillaine who set me off on the road to the Afrocelt because he told me that the aboriginal Irish were dark skinned and that there are loads of legends of dark skinned Irish.
He told me lots of stories about how the North Africans having frame drums like the ‘bodhrán’ and having pipes, and I got interested in the Bardic tradition which is the kind of western magical tradition that goes back to the idea that music is a transformative power, that through song and poetry you keep the ancestral legends alive. I met through Baba Mal, I met the griots, and N’Fale is a West African griot, and living breathing proof that the Bardic tradition is a reality, because this is exactly what N’Fale does, it is his culture, and he is a founder of Afro-celt Sound System.
SD: Fantastic, so tell us what is your instrument?
N’Fale: My instrument in the Kora (twenty-one stringed Harp, West Arica), and the Balafon (wooden xylophone, Gambia) and I sing.
SD: Wonderful, as a student at SOAS University (London) we have the opportunity to spend six weeks studying the Kora. It’s such a beautiful instrument.
N’Fale: 21 strings there are to tune… *laughs*
SD: So in the group we have many different origins, I was wondering if there is a place you perform as a group that feels like a home for the band? A base?
Simon: The band was conceived at WOMAD 1995. That was the fist time I helped introduce a kind of post acid house rave Sound System called Whirl-y Gig*.
In 1995 Whirl-Y Gig set up a tent at WOMAD and we played there. Here there was a lot of my friends with bands like Joy, and Transglobal Underground and all the kind of fusion techno bands. Many of which were based in East London. A lot of us were.
The East London Asian community had created the kind of Asian Underground so you had Johnny Kalsi and we were all clustered around the Whirl-y Gig, of which came to WOMAD, and then from that we started working with Real World (Records). So in a way Real World records and the Whirl-y Gig were very much the source, perhaps the origins of the band.
That was because East London was this kind of melting pot at the time of multiculturalism, and we’d all been brought up with music from different cultures. Where as Ireland was much more kind of isolated culturally.
Lara: At that time for sure, actually. My sort of introduction to sounds from around the world; so I lived in New York 2000/2001 for about a year and a half, and I’d have the most amazing experience when I walked home.
Each block I passed would have a completely different musical sound. You had the meringue from Puerto Rico you had the Arabic grooves from Morocco, there was a trance session on in the next block and polish music over the road. This was the sort of scenery I had when I’d finish work and I’d walk home, and so that was something we didn’t have in Ireland. For me going to New York was a similar experience to Simon with WOMAD and such.
Simon: Yes, like I said, when I went to Senegal in ’91 and I walked around Dakar I heard on African radio; there was salsa, there was funk, there was hip-hop, there was a huge amount of latino music there was, bhangra and bollywood, which of corse was huge there. So West Africa was just as much a melting pot. In Baba Mals band there were five languages, so the idea that multiculturalism was invented in the West is not true, there is just a much multiculturalism in Africa I mean reggae…
N’Fale: Latino, the jazz and the pop, the blues all the blues, the pentatonic. In my country there are many natural players, my Uncle is the director of the National Ensemble Traditionál, all these differences come to this National band to build an Orchestral Ensemble, and me I educate in this family, and I discover many different cultures. Polyphonic singing, such as the singing. I am a teacher in Belgium of singing polyphonic, and I do some singing workshops in WOMAD, I use that and I catch some singers too. I am now also in Guinea musical director to coach some people, but this experience Africa gave me many possibilities to hear more different.
Because I learn in the traditional musical family, I have no choice in my musical education, but when I go I go to a different cultures to study, and to mix again the music. The big musicians always like the musician from African.
SD: So it’s safe to say you are all constantly learning…
*ooh yess**
N’fale: Yes I think we are always sharing, I have worked with for example Lady Smith Black Mambazo, and many others. All these experiences gave me endless possibilities. With Africa being a very nice experience for the world music; to be honest the term world music… I don’t think if I perceive very much that… because they choose the jazz out, and the French music out, the pop and rock … and the rest… what do we have to do with this? Ok same bag; world music.
SD: I completely agree, it can be said that it would only seem to be world music from people in the western hemisphere, as it’s only our genres excluded.
Nfale: In Africa they sing in R&B and they come and sing very nice, but if they hear them they say ok, world music, because he’s from Africa. But then there is jazz music in Africa, the base of jazz, and the blues is from Africa as is the pentatonic, but they call them ‘world music’.
SD: You all like to mix it up…
N’Fale: The new thing for me on the music; the ‘afrotronix’ my traditional instrument with electronic, it becomes completely afrotronic
SD: Such as the music of Afriqoui, they have the Kora with electronic music, and African calabash drumming dubbed…?
N’Fale: I use the calabash, completely traditional, and I used completely modern Panasonic electronic, such as my Wah Wah with my Kora, *impression of a wah wah pedal*.
S:D That’s soo cool.
N’Fale: I have one pedal that I like with the sound of the Kora, very very unique to other griots.
SD: I was hoping to know what music you guys are listening too at the moment in your spare time?
N’Fale: Electronic music
Lara: Yeah you know I listen to everything from Rock, to folk music to electronica to classical there so much music I listen to it all.
Theres a great radio station in Ireland I love. I love that it goes from jazz to classical to pop, to rock. There all just sounds from different genres, I hate, I dislike being put into a genre.
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With this, the band and myself were summoned away from the yurt in order to get ready for their performance.
I made my way over to the Charlie Gillet BBC Radio 3 stage where they we to play and awaited. As expected, the crowd grew immensely, an obvious choice on the bill it seemed.
Sure enough out came the band, with Indian drums, Koras, balafons, Irish flutes, Scottish Bagpipes various percussion instruments and of course vocals.
Afro Celt Sound System did not let down. They proceeded to play an electrified performance with grooves that demand dancing, melodies that shake the hips and beats that stomp the feet.
I felt incredibly pleased to see the awesome fusion dance music performed live with such liveliness, passion and energy, all worthy of the 20 year strong band.
Vigüela
Vigüela are a Spain who take their traditional music to a global audience. Having been playing for over 30 years together, Vigüela, part family members, aim to keep alive and vivid the traditional repertoire of specific styles from their home in Castilla La Mancha. The melismatic vocals and pulsating guitar rhythms create a beautiful harmonic sway.
I managed to catch up with Vigüela at WOMAD Festival 2017 before their slot on the BBC 3 Charlie Gillet Stage, and I spoke with them about their influences, their traditions and how they were finding British WOMAD.
Members: Juan Antonio Torres, Mary Nieto, Carmen Torres, Luis Garcia Valera.
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Sophie Darling: firstly did you enjoy your set
Viguela: Yes of corse, a lot
SD: So let us know the relationships within the band, how do we know each other?
Viguela: Antonio is founder of the band, he was 15 years old, so that was 35 years ago. Carmen is his sister, so she joined very very soon after he created the band, Marie is from the same village as they, she joined the band ten years go, so they know each other from all their lives, and she has been involved with many groups of women singing and playing music, and so when they decide they want one more woman, they asked her to come with them. Louis is from the different region is from the north and he is like on hour away. We know from the world of folk and traditional music, he is a director of a school for music, so we know him and we needed one more man so he joined the band 5 years ago, he is only 21 years old. He is from the south eats and we know him only over the internet before we met in person, because he is active mainly int eh traditional practise of music, so he.
They go to play in the street, so he spend a couple nights in this world, so we wanted to bring someone here, because he sings and he know this music directly from his family, especially his grandfather is his inspiration but also his mother is dancer, and she dances wonderfully so when we had this cache to come to womad to play here on the bbc3 stage, we thought about bringing a guest artists to show what he can do, the music he knows can join perfectly with Viguela, because it continues in a style of music that is like a language.
SD: Can you explain a little bit about your genre of music, and for example is there a strong timing
Viguela: This is a very interesting questions, because the question of rhythm is quite intriguing, beaus elf you put up a clap you always say this is awful, because you can't play this music with a clap, because the procession of ‘compas’ you have these music sheets with the lines, so they say this is a 3/4 compas rythm, this is a 2/4 4/4 that concession in this music doesn’t have place, this a totally different way of making music, I mean you can't record this with a clap because you make the drums then you have to make the bass… no, you have to play together of corse to make a records with this, you can add voices after that perhaps, but everyone has to be together because the rhythms is moving al the time, you can’t really touch the rhythm in the modern conception of music.
SD: How did you all start learning your instruments, was it passed down from your family? I assume from what you just explained that it wasn’t a western ‘sitting down’ and reading scripture technique?
Viguela: Mainly we learned from our families, but also from the social environment, Antonio and Carmen; their father was a professional drummer, he was in band that play for you in the villages, but their grandmothers used to sing, not professionally, but they are singing with people all the time, so they picked p this excuse they have grown, in the rural village with 2000 people, so it’s notary big, and maybe like a little not well communicated with each other, there is no train, and only one bus to the city, so they have guessed some music in their village.
Marie she is from the same when they were younger this music was totally alive, this was a music that for
Louis came into the music mainly because he kew his father used to play guitar, but when we was a teenager, he realised that his father didn’t play anymore because he didn’t have someone to play with, so he started to play the lute in order to accompany his father, so after this he also got some of the older people interested again to play some of this music and also to play some specific music they used to play. So it got alive again. So now he studies and teaches education for music, he knows how to communicate in both ways, int eh modern way, but also int he traditional way, and for
Habe, he is only young, 20/21 years old. So he has all the possibilities to be interested int his music because all his grandfathers died, but his family in general they are very musical and dancing and playing.
SD: Do you have a good fan bass at home? Where have your most enjoyable performances been?
Viguela: In Spain of corse they have played a lot, they have some people that are really really encouraging them all the time, “ahh Viguela you ere going round the world”, because you know sometimes when you are doing things like this, coming here, the people are very proud of this. But we are so happy in Spain that there are a lot of prejudices against this music, because they really don't listen to it, but they feel it is rural its old fashioned lack of modernity. The contemporary people can only sometimes be interested. This is traditional music from the people in our village. There is also perhaps new folk lets say inspired, but from a modern point of view I mean, the ones who can’t record an full album of music with a clap, so we also have that in Spain. For me it is another world, it is a different world, because this is a different approach to music, totally different. But we have these two things, The traditional music we also have other kinds of gigs with bigger line ups, with choreographic with um, dress, everything is quite standardises lets say, they go they make their show always the same, or maybe they can include one more song, but its more different now. It’s another world too. But sometimes it’s very confusing everything gets old, people don't understand really how to interpret it, how to excuse they think this is like the other thing meh but this is shay we face a lot of prejudices, but this of corse is why it is very important to be here, because we are so traditional to excite the Spain, and of the other people that have prejudices, but for others too to be very proud
SD: What was the small guitar you were playing?
Viguela: Mini guitar, e’darram mancheio’
SD: any follow up gigs?
Viguela: yes in Spain, we have gigs on Fridays and Saturday and we hope no later than the end of the year we will have recorded a new album
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In a beautiful atmosphere Vigüela came out roaring a stunning Spanish tune from their homelands. The guitars and the vocals caught the attention of the audience, who gathered to listen to the traditional music.
For me the vocals are truly the aspect that stands out in this beautiful music, almost Arabic with it’s tonality, I love how they interact singing together.