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Tonight’s spectacularly diverse musical delights were captured, ‘live’, in many different places. With WOMADelaide 2009 now five months away, we explore the lavish 3-CD set/book with which WOMAD (‘World of Music Arts and Dance’) celebrated its first quarter-century. Most performances on Music & Rhythm: WOMAD 1982-2007 do not otherwise exist on disc.
Mother-Earth! Father-Sky! is a sublime set of new and old songs from Tuva. This southern Siberian, central-most Asian nation is wildly beautiful. So is its music, most especially the singing. Sainkho is Tuva’s most celebrated female vocal artist. Huun-Huur-Tu is the seminal band in traditionally-based Tuvan music’s creative renaissance. Their collaboration is quintessentially Tuvan, but would have been absolutely unthinkable until a very few years ago. Some sounds may startle a Western newcomer, but most ought prove irresistibly beautiful to any attentive ears.
Jimi Hendrix, Charlie Parker and country music are not often found in the same sentence. To dobro supremo Jerry Douglas, all are apropos. So are Ireland, New Orleans, even Baghdad: all are connected to his new CD, Glide. Douglas has done more than anyone else to raise the dobro’s profile and to make it ‘at home’ in lots of ‘new’ musical territories. The slide-wizard is a steel-worker’s son who fell in love with his instrument as an eight-year-old, forty-four years ago. In explaining why, the man hailed as ‘the holy ghost of the resonator guitar’ says of the dobro, ‘It’s just like a voice.’
His 1971 debut made clear that Steve Tilston was one of England’s finer acoustic guitarists/songsters. Ziggurat shows he is even better now, in all departments. Ziggurat is a set of new, shrewdly-observant originals, plus lovely new versions of two traditional songs. Tilston’s keen melodic sense is always-evident, as are his guitar skills and good taste. He borrows well, too: ‘One of the best melodies I never wrote’, he says of Chopin’s unwitting contribution to a very beautiful, otherwise-original love song.
Saturday 10pm
Sunday 10pm
Presented by
Doug Spencer
Sunday 12 October 2008
Titati is spectacular. Bako Dagnon’s debut CD is also spectacularly overdue. As singer and cultural knowledge-bank, Bako is one of Mali’s living musical treasures, long recognised as such by her peers. The late Ali Farka Toure used to consult her. Mali’s most celebrated diva - Kandia Kouyate - was her protogé. In a career of more than 35 years she had made 5 albums, domestically. But only in 2007 - the year before her 60th birthday - did she record the album which now introduces her to the world. Bako Dagnon is powerful in every sense and well-served by her accompanists; they include two splendid acoustic guitarists and a harmonica ace.
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