The big news about this year’s World Music Festival is that there really isn’t any news. Michael Orlove of the Department of Cultural Affairs, who’s organized all seven festivals, says that this year’s process was the smoothest yet–visas came through, and for the most part artists kept their commitments. (There was just one last-minute cancellation, by Venezuela’s Simon Diaz.) The only serious trouble came early in the year, when Orlove was trying to settle on a lineup: the low value of the dollar against many foreign currencies meant that a number of overseas artists couldn’t offset the financial liabilities of making the trip without booking several more stateside gigs. Serbia’s Boris Kovac, India’s Jaipur Kawa Brass Band, and Spain’s Son de la Frontera were among those who declined invitations from the city.
R = recommended
R If you’ve only heard one piece of music from the Cape Verde Islands, a former Portuguese colony off the west coast of Africa, chances are it was morna sung by Cesaria Evora, the undisputed master of that beautiful, sorrowful song form. Similar to Portuguese fado, it’s the dominant style on Sao Vicente, Evora’s island, but hardly the only one from Cape Verde: much of the music on Lura’s third release, Di korpu ku alma (Escondida), is a more upbeat, African-derived style called batuku, developed on the island of Santiago, where her father was raised. (Lura herself was born in the Cape Verdean immigrant community in Lisbon.) The album is slick and bright rather than rustic, with thoroughly contemporary arrangements, but the unique rhythms–from the batuku, a galloping clop that was once beaten out by women on folded stacks of clothing, to the funana, traditionally driven by the seductive rhythmic scraping of knives–still provide a broad window on the traditional music of Cape Verde. And Lura’s voice would be enough to hold my attention all by itself: on the brisk “Vazulina,” about a young girl digging through rubble for coins so she can afford to get her hair straightened, she juggles tricky phrases with the precision and grace of a veteran jazz singer, and on the album’s token morna, “Tem um hora pa tude,” creates a deep melancholy that almost rivals Evora’s.
R For two decades singer and guitarist Celso Fonseca has been a ubiquitous behind-the-scenes presence in Brazil: he’s produced albums by Virginia Rodrigues, Gilberto Gil, and Daude, among others, and the likes of Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Carlinhos Brown have covered his tunes. Though he’s also been making his own records for most of that time, his performing career only began to take off a few years ago. Fonseca is a devotee of bossa nova in its purest form, but he’s hardly a revivalist: inspired by guitarist Baden Powell, who opened up the genre’s already liberal sense of harmony even further, he pushes the music gently into novel territory. On “Perdi,” from the recent Rive Gauche Rio (Ziriguiboom/Six Degrees), he sneaks in sly accents plucked from a whimsical mix of sampled sounds–some indistinguishable from conventional percussion, some more like whispering birds–and on a cover of the Damien Rice mopefest “Delicate” he livens things up with lighter-than-air vocals and Ramiro Musotto’s pulsing hand percussion. Still, the essence of Fonseca’s music is the elegant interplay between feather-stroke singing and deeply rhythmic guitar playing–the same combination that made Joao Gilberto sound so revolutionary in the late 50s. This is Fonseca’s solo debut in Chicago, and he’ll play unaccompanied.
The daughter of a Mixtec Indian mother from Mexico and an Anglo father from Minnesota, singer Lila Downs named her latest album Una sangre (Narada) in part to remind us that all Americans are of mixed blood. She explores traditional music from both sides of the Rio Grande, paying special attention to the folklore of her native Oaxaca, but unfortunately Una sangre is burdened with overstuffed arrangements and awkward stylistic collisions–unwelcome distractions from her voice, with its stunning range and throaty soulfulness.
Amadou & Mariam
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R Riffat Sultana is the daughter of legendary Pakistani singer Salamat Ali Khan, and she and her brothers Sukhawat, Ahafqat, and Sharafat all grew up singing Pakistani and Indian classical music. But her father, mindful of traditional Islamic proscriptions against female performers, didn’t let her take the stage for years. It wasn’t till the early 90s, when she and Sukhawat convinced their father to let them stay in the Bay Area after a stateside tour, that she began to perform–and even then she did so clandestinely at first. But by 1995 she and her brother had formed the Ali Khan Band with guitarist Richard Michos, one of their father’s students, and in 1996 they made a name for themselves collaborating with DJ and producer Cheb I Sabbah for the disc Shri Durga. Since renamed Shabaz, the group has continued to release albums, but their dated, electronics-heavy dance-floor production style does a disservice both to the traditional elements in the music and to the powerful vocals–a fact underlined by the trio Sultana founded last year with Ferhan Najeeb Qureshi on tabla and Michos, now her husband, on 12-string acoustic guitar. This group’s gentle, pop-accented settings leave her singing plenty of space, both on original material and the occasional qawwali tune or light classical standard.
