Womadelaide 2004

Womad is a well established international festival, held in about a dozen cities around the world. This is my first Womadelaide, my fifth Womad, and the second city in which I’ve been to Womad. I’d been to all 4 in Seattle before it was cancelled there. I’ve wanted to go to the Adelaide version of Womad – the first non-UK version of the festival – for many years. It’s only been in the past two years that I’ve been close enough to make it a possibility. I couldn’t make it last year because I was really really really broke, so I was super happy to make it over this year. Adelaide

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Adelaide’s really pretty. That’s a bit of an understatement. The CBD is surrounded by parks on all four sides (one of those parks hosted the festival). There are small mountains to the East, and a small river flowing to the North of the city. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see much of the surrounding area, but this visit has definitely whetted my appetite for going back, and seeing some more of South Australia. So, SA Government, if you’re reading this, please keep sponsoring this festival – it’s a great way to showcase Adelaide and the rest of the state to passing tourists. I’m coming back and spending money on wine. Oh yes!

I didn’t realise how dry the Melbn air was until I got to Adelaide. I’m used to moist air like Vancouver has, and Melbn must be somewhat drier – Adelaide felt just right. The air was fresher and easier to breathe, the place just smelled good – unlike Melbn, which smells a bit stale.

It was good to get out of here for a while, I fear I was succumbing to the Melbn Reality Distortion Field a bit. Being somewhere else, even for a weekend, reminded me of many of the things that bother me about Melbn.

To be fair though, Adelaide really has to get a few better restaurants and cafés going on. Everywhere we went felt like a cafeteria. I’m used to the cool laid back cafés of Brunswick Street in Melbn or Commercial Drive in Vancouver. This whole cafeteria-style thing is a bit jarring. Food was good though, and the people nice.

Festival grounds

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Map of Womadelaide ontop of a kiosk [click for bigger map] I’m really bad with sizes of things, so I can’t say something like “the grounds were blah blah square kilometres big”. Things did seem a bit cramped though – the space wasn’t used very effectively. There was empty space and crowded space over the grounds. It would take about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other at a leisurely pace. Six stages, four bars and dozens of little booths selling all kinds of hippie shit. Dozens more booths highlighted various charities and community programs – everything from Amnesty International (a major sponsor this year) to the City of Adelaide.

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There were three main stages, and three “informal” stages, one tucked away in a corner, one under some trees, and the other in a kind of natural ampitheatre that was unfortunately close to one of the main stages. Luckily the performances were staggered, so it was a rare event to have two adjacent stages in use simultaneously. Osadía

Once we got into the festival grounds, the first thing that grabbed our attention was a small stage at the back of the grounds. There were what looked like mad hairdressers making art of people’s hair. That was, in fact, what that was. From their website:

The performance of the group is based on a creative and innovative concept of hair-art. The active participation of the public is sought, as each volunteer is invited to take a seat and free themselves into the artists capable hands, allowing them to creat daring and original hairsculptures inspired by the theatrical apearance of the performers or the theme of the festival or event.

So yeah, mad hairdressers. These people make the hairstyles in Pricilla, Queen of the Desert seem dull and pedestrian.

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I don’t know who this guy is, but his work is a good example of what was going on. [click for big (scary!)] As an aside, it’s very strange to approach a complete stranger and ask to take his picture. When I’m faced with a sculpture I really like, I normally don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to take its picture, and I don’t feel weird taking a picture of it. But when the sculpture is part and parcel of a person, it’s strange then treating that person as an object.

Jon Boden From the Osaída, we heard some strange noises from across the grass – it turned out to be a group of people learning how to sing. Jon Boden was showing everyone how to sing like a Scottish or Irish folk singer, complete with all the halftones and warbling. I sang a bit and felt suitably silly about it all.

Les Hurlements de Léo Next up were these guys, dubbed simply “Léo” by the people who wrote the program (probably because the world “Hurlements” is kinda scary). I can’t really describe their music better than their web page does (in French):

groupe de chanson punk caravaning

It doesn’t matter what that means in English, just read the words, you’ll get the idea. Caravan punk. Gypsy punk. Something like that. They’re nuts. Lots of energy on stage, and a good ear for mixing different “kinds” of music to create something very danceable and good to listen to. Take equal parts of the Jazz Butcher, Sex Pistols, a Jewish wedding band and those guys at the pub down the street always laughing and talking and telling stories, and you’d get something not quite unlike Les Hurlements de Léo, and you’d have a lot of fun doing it.

The Cat Empire They’re current Melbn sweethearts, a spot previously occupied by Jet. I was lent their CD about a week ago and was quite impressed. Fresh new music, sounding new and different. Very high energy, clever songwriting, good instrument playing.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way in real life. Their second performance would be better, but their first show in the evening fell kind of flat with me. It felt as if they were just going through the motions of having a good time, and working the crowd according to a manual someone else had written. Pity, that. They might have been really good once. Zakir Hussain

Let me take you back a moment, gentle reader, to the very first Womad USA in Seattle. Josh and I had just arrived, and we didn’t quite know who to see first. The selection was a bit daunting, and neither of us had heard of anyone playing at that time. We decided to pick the one with the strangest name and go see them. Thus began my great respect for Zakir.

Since then, I’ve seen him in person (both solo and with his group Shakti) about half a dozen times, so I had some kind of idea what to expect from one of his gigs. Even so, I was completely blown away. His midnight show at was one of the best live performances I’ve ever heard, ever.

It wasn’t just Zakir on stage. His party, including clay pot master (yes you read that correctly) T.H. Vinayakram put on a riveting show. It was very loose, jazzy and playful, and when it started raining around 1am, I stayed rooted to the spot, mesmerised by the 60-something T.H. Vinayakram going absolutely nuts on his clay pot. Also in attendance was a man on a large double-drum (I apologise for my poor grasp of what these things are called – sorry sorry), another man on a bowed instrument, and another man who played a bunch of different percussive instruments.

At one point, they were each taking turns showing off, trying to outdo each other with clever tricks. Around and around it went until Vinayakram couldn’t think of anything else to do but mumble into his clay pot, starting the audience to howl and clap in appreciation of his bizarre side move. Later on in the show, they all collaborated to emphasise a three-beat motif that was repeated for several minutes. Yadda yadda BOOM BOOM BOOM yadda yadda BOOM BOOM BOOM – you get the idea. To show you how much the audience was into the music, instead of hitting the drum three times, the audience got pointed at three times, and we all found ourselves clapping in time – clap clap clap. I looked down at my hands and realised that I clapped. Looking around, many of the other audience members were doing the same thing. We’d clapped without really knowing. We just knew there had to be something there.

This was unrehearsed music played by geniuses at the top of their form, to an audience who knew the kind of treat they were being given. I use “played” in the very simple sense: they were playing, having fun, enjoying themselves. Having that come across in a performance, and having the audience along for the ride, also enjoying themselves, made for an absolutely stunning and thoroughly enjoyable performance. The rest of the festival, fantastic that it was, pales by comparison to this late night performance. Monsieur Camembert

The second day opened with Sydney-based Camembert. They were like a less energetic, somewhat catty, more sly version of Les Hurlements de Léo. Their brass-things player did the very neat trick of playing a couple of his instruments at once. A clever trick if you can pull it off, and even better if you can play them both well, which he was clearly able to do.

Embarrassing side-note: During the introduction to one song, the lead singer asked if there were any Prince fans in the audience. Mica and I were the only ones to yell an affirmative. I also think I was one of the few people who caught the guitar tech on the main stage doing sound check by playing a bit of a very recognisable but somewhat obscure Pixies / Frank Black song.

Sotho Sounds

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Nutty funsters [click. big.] These guys were so very cool. Along with Camembert, they’re my favourite new find [Google link] from this festival. They’re from Lesotho, one of the poorest countries in Africa. They performed very danceable music on their completely home-made instruments, made from petrol cans, wire, and chunks of wood. Their costumes were similarly bizarre, sporting mismatched meat-worker-style knee-high gumboots on their feet and mysterious Styrofoam triangle things (which doubled as packing material for their instruments). Their show was on the smallest stage, stage 6, and by the end of their set, it was filled to overflowing. There was no room for anyone to move, never mind come closer to the stage. The band looked astonished that this many people wanted to see them perform – especially when two dozen of us rushed the stage and started dancing with them!

Zakir Hussain workshop This was written up as a similar event to how I was introduced to Zakir in the first place – a workshop setting in which he’s talk about Indian classical music, and how it’s all put together. I was with a couple of people who’d never heard it before, so I dragged them along to this. Zakir’s a very good speaker, he doesn’t take himself that seriously, and has a calm, peaceful air about him.

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The talk was interesting, and the people I was with really enjoyed it, and learned a bit as well. Unfortunately, the performance was marred by really bad sound quality and a perfectly useless sound technician. Part of the blame lay with a faulty speaker that was taken apart and squinted at after the performance. Meanwhile, I wandered backstage (really, just behind a kind of poster thing) and shook Zakir’s hand, thanking him for the performance the previous night, and wishing him well. African drumming workshop

This was supposed to be a drum circle. Instead, it was a boring and poorly organised mess. I’m not going to talk about it. The Cat Empire (again)

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The third day started with a somewhat better afternoon performance by The Cat Empire. I got much closer to the stage and paid more attention this time. Their keyboard player is excellent. He was playing effortlessly, and the handful of solos he got were performed flawlessly and with great style. The trumpet player / skat singer was okay, but seemed tired. For that matter, the entire band just seemed tired. They had a lot of energy, but not creative. They were just jumping around a lot. Enough of that. Souad Massi

The comparison to Nana Mouskouri has probably been made before. Souad’s from Algeria via France, and takes musical ideas from a mostly Mediterranean base, incorporating Flamenco guitar, castanets, as well as lute and an electric guitar player who thinks he’s Steve Vai (it works, really). She’s got a beautiful voice though, so I laid on the grass in the shade of a big tree and listened a while. A glass of white wine would have been nice, but that would have meant getting up, and I didn’t want to do that. Howie Sumner

One of the nice things about a music festival is being able to wander around and accidentally listen to music. We were on our way to the bathrooms, and caught a bit of a song by Howie. Not bad, so after taking care of business, we sat down to listen to his politically and socially aware blues rock. Some of the subject matter was a bit heavy (rape and murder at a house party, for example), but good solid unpretentious musicianship. Turns out he’s a Ngarrindjeri (Aboriginal Australian) man, who’s worked with a bunch of Australian “folk” artists, including Paul Kelly. All-star Jam

Womad has a fine tradition of having an “all-star” jam session towards the end of the festival. Since all this money was spent to get all these talented musicians together in one place, it seems silly not to have them all play together. So they did. I lost count of who all was on stage, but it was all orchestrated by Zakir again, and it made for a really good show. We were all on our feet and dancing, and at just less than one hour, it ended far too soon. Dhol Intentions Crew

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There was a whole other side to Womadelaide that we didn’t get to see because we were travelling with a 12 year old – and that is the nighttime dance parties called WoZone. We managed to get a small taste for it with this crew. We just had to pretend it was louder. One DJ playing bhangra music, and one guy on a big drum called a dhol. Big badda boom! We bounced, we danced and we harassed the poor crew people who kept asking us to please stay back. They finally let us get closer to the stage, so we all ran up, and danced our little asses off. Fire

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We were very lucky this year in Australia not to have a huge bush fire problem. Last year was terrible, with much of Canberra burning, plus thousands of acres of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania going up in smoke. Apprently, South Australia has a short memory because each night, they lit thousands of little clay flowerpots to create a very pretty display of fire. They were arranged in large globes, on ropes leading up trees, and laid along the ground in snakey patterns. It smelled great, and looked fantastic, but “bushfire” was in the back of everyone’s heads. Angels with fuzzy bums

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What’s a festival without roving performers? These guys were my favourites. They’re angels, and I caught them lurking suspiciously about the grounds, making a spectacle of themselves. One of them sat in a baby carriage, and the kid gave him a look , and he slunk away. As they ran away, they lifted their skirts to reveal fuzzy strips up their bums. Very bizarre.

Alight, gentle reader, that’s all from me. Well worth the time and effort getting over there, and I’m looking forward to going back to Adelaide (with or without Womad) again sometime.