Womad Festival review — a surprise round every corner

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When The Beatles finished recording their Sgt Pepper album in 1967, they broadcast it at dawn over the rooftops of Chelsea. Last weekend Peter Gabriel, finishing up his first album proper in 20 years, arranged for i/o (about ageing and grief — for parents and for the planet) to be pumped out through multiple speakers at an “immersive listening session” in a forest clearing underneath a seven-metre-wide replica of the Moon at the Womad Festival. In which setting it sounded reassuringly timeless and occasionally sublime.

But a whole festival was taking place all around, with surprises everywhere, from joyous northern Ghanaian Frafra synth gospel to samba rap to Welsh and Colombian harp battles. Last year ADG7 made a splash with their eclectically instrumented modern take on northern Korean folktales. Following in their footsteps came Leenalchi from South Korea, who play an updated form of pansori, the austere narrative music performed by a singer and a single drummer. But the band, with two bass guitars, three singers (in their Womad configuration, at least), keyboard bleeps and interjections and relentless kit drums, were anything but austere. The singers swapped lines around conversationally and then dramatically; cartoon woodblock animations unspooled behind “Tiger Is Coming” and then full-on dayglo Hallyu for “Please Don’t Go”.

Mokoomba, Victoria Falls’s finest musical export, staked their claim as future headliners. The Zimbabwean group opened with a brooding “Masangango”, matching the gathering clouds. Trustworth Samende snapped a guitar string and Abundance Mutori filled in with a dub-heavy bass vamp until Samende was ready to unleash the band’s trademark mix of jit and zamrock. By the end, as “Welelye” segued into “Africa”, the crowd were dancing and shouting amid the raindrops.

Orchestral Qawwali Project brought a full string orchestra, plus French horn and a gong hovering, like Chekhov’s gun waiting to be deployed. But the frontline is a traditional Qawwali party: harmoniums, tabla, backing singers pushing with steady, accelerating claps, and a powerful singer, Abi Sampa. She and musical director Rushil Ranjan have taken on the tricky task of marrying western classical and Sufi devotional music and bringing it to a festival that Ranjan described as “Qawwali’s spiritual home in the west”. Some Birmingham suburbs might dispute that; but in any case, the reprises of qawwals performed at earlier Womads by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan were rapturously energetic. The crowd thrilled as a harmonium intro resolved into “Allah-Hoo”; and a closing run through endless false climaxes on “Dam Mast Qalandar”, the basis for Nusrat’s “Mustt Mustt”, exemplified traditional Qawwali bad behaviour as the orchestra grandiosely over-ran their stage time and had the power pulled mid-flight, to disappointed boos and a standing ovation.

The singer Liraz, born in Israel to an Iranian Jewish family, was greeted by a sea of waving red, white and green flags. Vexillological analysis identified the lion-and-sun emblem of pre-revolutionary Iran, which her parents left to move to Tel Aviv. She sings entirely in Farsi, in solidarity with Iranian women; her last two albums were made with musicians from Iran, the former with soundfiles traded over the internet, the latter in person in a clandestine session in an Istanbul basement. Here her Israeli band captured their heady amalgam of Anatolian rock, Shah-epoch Tehran disco and “Babooshka”-era Kate Bush. Liraz swapped her glittery gold veil to brandish her own Iranian flag, embroidered with the words “Women Life Freedom”.

Palestinian singer Reem Kelani, making a welcome return to the festival in a shady Arboretum, took her jazz trio on a musical tour of the Arab world. There was polyrhythmic clapping on wedding songs (“If you let us in,” promised the groom’s family, “we will make you leader of all the Arab tribes”), then a Galilean lullaby shifting in and out of darkness with gentle piano triplets from Bruno Heinen. A galloping reading of Sayyid Darwish’s “The Porter’s Anthem” brought Weimar to Cairo. Nets were cast and crews gathered together with a brisk “yallah” on a celebration of fishing, from the trawlers of Gaza to the pearl divers of Kuwait, where Kelani grew up. Best of all was a sojourn in Al-Andalus: Carlos Cano’s song about the last Arab ruler of Seville, al-Mu’tamid ibn Abbad, was followed by a setting of the poet-king’s own farewell to the Alcazar and to the city.

The Iranian classical musician Kayhan Kalhor made one of the albums of the year with the kora player Toumani Diabaté, The Sky Is the Same Colour Everywhere. Here Kalhor was joined by the equally talented Erdal Erzincan from Turkey. Iranian spike fiddle (kamancheh) and Turkish lute (baglama) are a perfect fit: the two men played a single uninterrupted hour-long flow. Kalhor set up sad descending melodies, occasionally dropping his bow to use the kamancheh for percussion, tapping beats on its neck, playing pizzicato, strumming chords; Erzincan watched and waited, keeping time on the baglama before diving into fast solos of his own. It all culminated in a brisk jig, before the two locked eyes and finished perfectly in sync, as if a long and complex equation had finally been solved.

“If you want to lie down,” offered Estonian singer Mari Kalkun, “that’s fine by me.” Even in the early hours of Sunday morning, no one accepted her invitation. On record her music sounds utterly organic, as if hewn from the earth, but in performance she was constantly sampling and looping herself with foot pedals so the layered construction was apparent. Accompanying herself on piano and a kannel zither the size of a bodyboard, she sang of creation, of the dying languages of her corner of south-eastern Estonia, of the world tree that blocks out the light. The delicate melody of “Tõistmuudu” rang clear; on “Mu Vallakoolomise Paal Kiil” the zither sparkled as if the night was raining stars.

Heavy rains on Sunday left the crowds skating gingerly on mud. Horace Andy delivered a groundshaking reggae set, reminding the audience and the food stalls that money is the root of all evil while mining the best of his own career and his collaborations with Massive Attack. Japanese psych trio Kuunatic played an extended version of their science fiction concept album, Gate of Klüna, with a deep thump of drums, sternum-cracking basslines and shrine instrumentation of flute and shakers. Soul II Soul brought matters back to reality. And Femi Kuti & the Positive Force closed out with high-energy Afrobeat for those who had resisted the siren call of the M4, making a series of in-flight announcements, railing against corruption, bad education and healthcare and failing electricity supplies, messages more than usually universal. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he sang, as he turned this corner of a Wiltshire field into downtown Lagos. “A lot on my mind.”

womad.co.uk