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Various Artists: Real World Sampler

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Real World Records
Released: 1996
Time:
 57:55
Category: World Music
Producer(s):
Rating: ********.. (8/10)
Media type: CD
Web address: www.realworld.co.uk
Appears with:
Purchase date: 1997.09.27
Price in €: 6,99



 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Om Mani Padme Hung - YUNGCHEN LHAMO
[2] Sure-As-Not - AFRO CELT SOUND SYSTEM
[3] Sisitizo La Amani Duniani (edit) - HUKWE ZAWOSE
[4] Kipenda Roho - REMMY ONGALA & ORCHESTRE SUPER MATIMILA
[5] Dil Ki Doya - PABAN DAS BAUL & SAM MILLS
[6] Crest (edit) - NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN & MICHAEL BROOK
[7] Daddy's On Prozac - JOSEPH ARTHUR
[8] Mraya - ABDEL ALI SLIMANI
[9] Al-ward al-foll - THE MUSICIANS OF THE NIL
[10] Heei Yaa Alahobalin Hobalowa - WAABERI
[11] Lamentu - TENORES DI BITTI
[12] Excerpt from ABoneCroneDrone 3 - SHEILA CHANDRA

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


YUNGCHEN LHAMO
AFRO CELT SOUND SYSTEM
HUKWE ZAWOSE
REMMY ONGALA & ORCHESTRE SUPER MATIMILA
PABAN DAS BAUL & SAM MILLS
NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN & MICHAEL BROOK
JOSEPH ARTHUR
ABDEL ALI SLIMANI
THE MUSICIANS OF THE NILE
WAABERI
TENORES DI BITTI
SHEILA CHANDRA

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Feature Article: WOMAD North America 1993

Dirty Linen
December 93/January 94
by Joe F. Compton & Danny Carnahan

After receiving two very different accounts of the U.S. version of the WOMAD festival series, and after reading accounts of the events in other publications, we decided to print both versions submmitted to us and let you the reader decide. Comments?

"Know Your Culture From Your Trash
by Joe F. Compton
Starlake Amphitheatre, Pittsburgh, PA,September 8, 1993
Buckeye Lake Music Center, Columbus, OH,September 10, 1993

Peter Gabriel stood stock still at his center stage microphone after his band had completed their encore presentation of "In Your Eyes" at the end of the third (Columbus, Ohio) stop of the two-week World Of Music Art and Dance (WOMAD) tour of the USA. The song's complex undulating chorus had just been sung by a culture-bending choir composed of Uganda's Geoffrey Oryema, Kenya's Ayub Ogada and India's Shankar. Gabriel knew that the venue curfew would not permit them to perform a second encore, so he spoke directly to the 30,000 in attendance, recounting that WOMAD had started 11 years ago in England by people dedicated to the presentation to western audiences of music and dance from all the world's disparate cultures. After putting that dream into reality in some 40 countries, WOMAD "finally had come to the U.S. Thank you all for being here tonight. With your help we hope to be back next year. Back when we began with WOMAD, this was the beat that we heard." With that simple, generous act, MTV's most innovative superstar turned his stage over to one of the oldest and most dramatic musical ensembles of Planet Earth - the Drummers of Burundi, for their second set of the day.

Their playing and chanting began offstage; 14 men, ranging in age from 70 to eight, high stepped onto the stage dressed dramatically in red, white and green. Each drummer brought his four foot tall wooden drum onstage balanced on top of his head and played the instruments with drum sticks approximately two feet long as they marched. They alternated striking the wooden side of the substantial drum, with beats on the animal skin tops of the drums. Circling the front of the stage, the musicians formed a crescent and, one by one, without skipping a beat or slowing the tempo, each drummer brought his drum down and placed it on the stage. A large ceremonial drum (the inkiranya) was placed within the center of the crescent formed by the Drummers. The chief drummer stepped up to the ceremonial inkiranya and asked, "Children, who have sacrificed to the drums, are you ready?" For the next 25 minutes, singles, pairs, and finally trios of the Drummers stepped into the crescent and performed impossible gymnastic leaps into the air and danced out folk tales and seasonal ceremonies. They played the inkiranya with great fervor and twirled their sticks so close to their faces as they danced away from their best "rim shots" off that great drum, that it's a marvel that any of them have any teeth left. As the end of this pulse-pounding set approached, each Drummer re-placed his drum on his head and marched off stage playing continuously. The last Drummer of Burundi to leave the stage was the eight-year-old (carrying a smaller hand drum), who, as the line snaked to the left offstage, turned back to the audience, broadly smiled and waved to the ecstatic crowd, very few of whom were attempting to leave early to get their cars off the parking lot.

Gabriel, the high tech modern performer of the '80s and the '90s, has always utilized ancient musical forms from many cultures to create his modern rock music, and here demonstrated that great musical stage craft does not require modern gadgets or even amplification to reach the MTV generation. The Drummers of Burundi are, simply, one of the great live performing ensembles on Earth - not surprising that they are the leading export of their tiny, land-locked, and very poor Central African nation.

WOMAD, centered in England, is an educational organization dedicated to the presentation of musical and dance artists, both traditional and contemporary, from all over the world. They specifically acknowledge that their festivals, that encourage cross-cultural musical collaborations, are, in part, intended to "put the lie to the stupidity of racism." Since their first fest (Shepton Manor, U.K., 1982), the umbrella group has put on some 67 WOMAD Festivals in some 40 countries. The only previous North American events have been four Festivals in Toronto since 1988. WOMAD Festivals are most often multi-day events, mixing artists from around the world with rock, jazz and folk musicians from the West, allowing the audience to enjoy the resulting musical stew. This 1993 North American tour was supposed to include two Canadian dates (Toronto and Montreal), but they were canceled at the last moment (due to poor ticket sales in Montreal) and the U.S.-only nine-date tour opened in Saratoga Springs, New York. Each stop on this tour was one day only, limiting the chance for interaction among the musicians on the two or three stages at each site.

It was apparent that the WOMAD organizers believed that a world music festival would be a difficult sell to a generally uninformed U.S. public; thus the tour lined up, in addition to Peter Gabriel, pop artists Crowded House, Manchester's powerhouse James, rappers Stereo MC and Dawn PM, and Jamaican reggae superstars Inner Circle to attract American couch-potatoes out of their homes to see a world music festival. In Pittsburgh, ticket sales of 8,000 were extremely disappointing. With the addition of the horrid Lenny Kravitz to the tour, the Columbus show topped 30,000 tickets.

As much as I suffered through Kravitz, how many of those extra 22,000 people at Columbus came because he'd been added to the bill? If it was 5,000, and 1,000 of them were enthralled by the Drummers of Burundi, Sheila Chandra, John Trudell, Remmy Ongala, the Terem Quartet, or Geoffrey Oryema, I know that WOMAD made the right call and my pain was for a good cause. Much of the criticism assumes that WOMAD is a purist, world music organization, but its intent is to mix the old and the new and see what happens. Still, the West Coast inclusion of Ziggy Marley seems a better match than Mr. K. Kravitz also appeared at the Indianapolis locale, the other venue where ticket sales were disappointing, so he thankfully should not be perceived as essential to WOMAD's future in the USA.

Crowded House are a terrific live outfit and the popsters James proved a genuine surprise. The Manchester pop group James proved that they possess one of the best new drummers in rock, Dave Baynton-Power. The former PiL bassist Jah Wobble (John Wordell) fronted the archetypal WOMAD rock ensemble, Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart, combining skillful and imaginative rock arrangements with Arabic and African rhythms with some Caribbean dub-based sonics. In their high energy set, the music was reminiscent of a modern day Spencer Davis Group pounding out "Gimme Some Lovin'" in a Middle Eastern dance hall. Jah Wobble is truly capable of rocking the casbah every night and their singer/dancer Christina Amram was a vocal and visual delight amid this musical fusion.

Sheila Chandra opened the two Festivals and this seemed unfortunate for her audience. In Pittsburgh she played from 3:30 to 4:00 pm when the program stated the music would begin at 4 pm. At least one couple who had travelled six hours to see Chandra and arrived at 4pm were not pleased. Some new material from Chandra's next CD, the Sandy Denny-inspired "A Sailor's Life" and a potential smash feminist hymn/anthem with black gospel overtones, "Women, Awake," were almost too beautiful to describe. Already Chandra has established herself as RealWorld's top selling artist, and seems to possess the greatest potential to convert American audiences to the aesthetics of world music and WOMAD. A huge surprise was the Terem Quartet of St. Petersburg, Russia, four classically trained musicians on two domra lutes and balalaikas, a huge bass balalaika, and an accordion. Utilizing traditional folk melodies, gypsy music, and classical compositions, the quartet demonstrated great skill and considerable wit throughout the Columbus set. Shankar 'n' Caroline proved to be a misbegotten Indian fusion ensemble unable to match Chandra's brilliant fusion of similar sources. The hippie-like vigorous flinging of flowers and fruit into the audience seemed both quaint and possibly dangerous.

Walking through the Festival grounds, the happy music lover could fall upon many fascinating workshops, such as the African percussion class for the rhythmically remedial locals conducted by Nigeria's master drummer Kanyinda Mukala, or Christina Amram's on African and Egyptian dance. Vendors sold great food (the immense bean burrito and the African entrees were delicious), Tower Records had a great book selection to complement their world music library, and you could retreat into the '60s once more by wearing your LSD Trip Simulator goggles.

Uganda's Geoffrey Oryema performing on both acoustic guitar and thumb piano, along with the Drummers of Burundi, were the world music artists most often appearing on the big stage. His duo with a French electric guitarist featured more uptempo music (from his forthcoming CD Beat the Retreat) than listeners to his last CD (Exile) might have expected, especially the song "Nomad."

Remmy Ongala and his Orchestre Super Matimila fused his soukous-based dance beat with a social conscience in music he calls "ubongo," "music for the head." Born in East Zaire in 1947, Ongala was orphaned at age 9 and eventually moved to the neighboring country of Tanzania, settling in Dar Es Salaam, where he is the most famous artist of his adopted land. He has several controversial songs about AIDS and AIDS prevention. One of those songs "Mambo kwa socks" ("Mambo with socks") is a euphemism for the use of condoms, and was roundly denounced by the male-dominated church and government forces in Tanzania. "I am successful in Tanzania because I write songs about serious topics... the lyrics are the most important part, all of my songs have meaning. Even if my life is not now bad, I go on to defend the weak ones." For this commitment, Ongala is known as "The Voice of Tanzania." In concert, his Orchestre Super Matimila, regrettably shorn of its two horn men by economic necessity, was a four guitar army of hypnotic intensity. Ongala proved an awe-inspiring stage presence, blessed with great dance moves, good guitar licks, and a great voice.

Among the best musical moments of the WOMAD tour were those provided by Native American poet/activist John Trudell with his hard rocking band. Trudell fuses music and political passion with an intensity that can frighten the unprepared. Some of the strongest songs on these provocative, but short sets of all new material, were "Rant and Roll" with its insightful observation that "soul is what is left when they take your spirit," "Tikaan (Wolf)," the in-your-face observations of "Johnny Domas and Me" and "All There is to It" with its references to the S&L debacle.

Gabriel's pared down stage presentation brought many of the elements of WOMAD philosophy into a most accessible and creative musical whole. Few at these WOMADs could fail to make a connection to Gabriel's intricate dance routine with his entire band during "Shaking the Tree" with its African roots. Gabriel's video dance moves are clearly derived from his understanding of other cultures, their music and their dance; it makes for a most refreshing alternative to the stock macho posturing of most rock stars. His tour band this time out included Manu Katchie (drums), Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar), Shankar (violin), Jean Claude Naimro (keyboards), and Sinead O'Connor (backing vocals). O'Connor performed one of her own tunes during each set, dueted with Gabriel on the lovely "Blood of Eden," and was booed by a small, but vocal element of the Columbus audience. The presentation of "Steam" and "Sledgehammer" remain great stage pieces that reinvent Stax-Volt-Memphis bass lines into a modern format with respect and energy. In Pittsburgh Milton Nascimento was just hanging about to join the mellifluous Ayub Ogada (sadly limited to two songs before the James set and an MC's role) bringing new and surprising interpretations to the complex choral structure of "In Your Eyes." Then it was the drone of "Biko" and each musician leaving the stage one-by-one as the audience took up the human rights chant. As the audience sang the chant, The Drummers of Burundi reappeared to wail a close to the show. Gabriel, as he says in "Steam," does "know his culture from his trash"-- Kravitz aside.

Reports of the other tour dates and the finale in Golden Gate Park were quite encouraging as to ticket sales and audience enthusiasm. Los Angeles had 20,000 in attendance and Golden Gate Park overflowed with some 100,000 enthusiasts ("enough to create a whole new zip code," a WOMAD official chortled), making it the most well attended WOMAD event ever. The human crush inside Golden Gate Park was so intense as to make the movement back and forth between the three stages utilized that day close to impossible. This success has encouraged WOMAD to plan for another tour next year, probably with fewer pop acts and probably only utilizing a single stage. While it would be preferred that WOMAD could mount a multi-day one location festival closer to the model they have perfected in other countries, it is a major event that many American music lovers who have not experienced the passion, the pageantry, and the awesome skills of an assembledge of so many world musicians are at last getting a taste of WOMAD.



WOMAD in the Park(or, Can 100,000 Lemmings Be Wrong?)
by Danny Carnahan

Golden Gate Park
San Francisco
CASeptember 19, 1993

The WOMAD Festival, that might have been the engaging and enlightening panoply of international music, dance, and culture it promised to be, played out as just another exercise in celebrity worship and Big Music Biz greed. "The WOMAD Festival," said founder and headliner Peter Gabriel, "is where the ancient and modern collide." Well, in Golden Gate Park they did more than collide. The modern stomped the bejabbers out of the ancient, took the money and went home laughing.

Think of the "ancients" as those in the crowd who actually remember 1967, who perhaps attended a free concert in the Park, and who thought that Winterland was a really big concert hall. The "moderns," then, are all the youngsters who missed the '60s and who jump at any over-hyped opportunity to "relive" a "'60s-style" event.

Bill Graham Presents, who staged the S.F. event, laid the '60s on with a trowel in its effort to convert the Polo Grounds into the world's largest can of sardines. They picked Golden Gate Park to encourage fond memories of free concerts and dreamy days of dope-smoking and dancing on Hippy Hill while the Grateful Dead played on the back of a flat-bed truck. BGP producer Peter Barsotti even tried to make the production seem like nothing more than the old days adjusted for inflation, quoted in the S.F. Chronicle as saying "Ten dollars in 1993 is like free in 1967."

But this was different. BGP shoehorned 100,000 people into the Polo Grounds. Local music lovers with long memories will recall that nothing this big ever happened in the San Francisco of the '60s by several orders of magnitude.

One reason nothing like this ever happened here before is that Bill Graham didn't let it happen. Graham, the consummate master of crowd control, didn't hesitate to herd 30,000 or so head bangers into a sports stadium for a Rocking Day on the Green, but under his directorship, BGP never doubled that kind of crush to turn around and advertise it as a "family day in the park."

Another reason is that Bill Graham did not participate with WOMAD when past festivals were proposed beginning about 10 years ago.

Chances are, schedule conflicts had a lot to do with this. But it is intriguing that in all the American media hype and adoring coverage surrounding the WOMAD tour, we hear almost nothing about opposition to WOMAD events around Europe, artists who refused to work with the organization, reports of staggering pay inequities, bankruptcy filings, none being very savory takes on this self-promoting juggernaut.

But Bill Graham is gone and his BGP successors are free to make their own business decisions. Thus, we get 100,000 people in an arena that could perhaps hold one-third that number. We get so many people crammed into so little space that any hope for a relaxed day of multicultural exploration is lost in the crush of a seething crowd.

All that being said, the festival had a promising start. By the time we were herded through the gate at 11:30, every square inch of space in front of the main stage (filling the western half of the Polo Grounds) had been checkerboarded with blankets by smiling homesteaders. The measurement of arena space in square inches wouldn't really hit home until later, when not everybody would be smiling.

Upon entering, it all looked and felt a bit like the New Orleans Jazz Fest at its most crowded. The day was clear and hot. Huge inflated ice cream cones wobbled in the breeze. Food, ice cream, and craft booths could be seen dotting the grounds in the distance, and thousands of people milled around on the grass while gusts of sea air pushed Sheila Chandra's voice through the Welcome Arch from Stage Two.

Off to the right was the Future Zone: A Virtual Village, advertised as "a monumental display of new technology" designed for audience interaction. There were at least 500 people already waiting to get into the Future Zone at 11:30. We decided to bag it, monumental display or not.

What little we were able to see and hear of the music was first class. After a captivating set by Chandra, we wandered over to the Workshop Stage, on which Zi Lan Liao was playing sweeping melodies on the Chinese zheng. I'm not sure what people unfamiliar with the zheng made of the "workshop" though. The program called it a "harp" with no further explanation, and though the program also asserted that the purpose of the whole exercise was the "breaking down of barriers and the exploration of new musical frontiers," no attempt was made to enlighten the listeners about this music's meaning or importance. It was also a little disappointing to note how few people were stopping at the Workshop Stage. While fifty or so people were giving their undivided attention to Zi Lan Liao, an endless stream of newcomers rushed by, chattering eagerly about being able to see Peter Gabriel for only 10 bucks.

It was shortly after noon when we joined a tidal flow of humanity surging toward the main stage, where the thunderous bass from Jah Wobble's Invaders of the Heart was already loud enough to invade the Workshop Stage. We passed the food booths offering a spectacular variety of international dishes for quite tidy sums, but decided to wait until after the lunch rush when the lines might be less than 12 deep at each window.

We got close enough to just make out the Drummers of Burundi through binoculars. We couldn't really see the dancing we'd heard so much about, since already everyone was standing shoulder to shoulder as far as the eye could see and the newcomers surging in from behind were ignoring the blankets and squeezing in wherever they could.

Parents who brought their 12-and-unders for free expecting a family outing found themselves in a sea of hips and shoulders, aggressively pressing forward to get close enough to the stage before Peter Gabriel's set to make out his facial features. No one could sit without getting trampled and no one under six feet tall could hope to see anything clearly.

At 1:30, with five big acts and four hours left to go, we'd had enough. We turned and began a nightmarish swim back upstream, consciously suppressing a rising sense of panic. I was determined to get out before somebody's fight-or-flight reflex kicked in and flight was not a viable option.

By this time the crowd was unbelievable. We'd been to all manner of festivals but had never experienced anything like this. People seemed to be behaving like some peculiar new strain of lemming which had elected to commit mass suicide not by jumping off a cliff but by smothering everyone to death in a small, enclosed space. There was obviously not an inch of room within 100 yards of the stage. Yet uncountable thousands of fans kept inexorably pushing forward. It took us the better part of 30 minutes to escape to where we could actually see the grass.

By this time the queues at the food booths were 30-40 deep. Whether the international fare was as good as the program claimed we'll never know. We didn't get close enough even to smell it.

We noticed that multitudes of people had packed up and were leaving by 1:30, apparently as full of WOMAD as we were. As we maneuvered our way out past a still never-ending sea of faces flowing the other way, we could hear John Trudell's highly political acid rock band blaring from Stage Two. The last lyric we could make out was, "Trillion dollar debt! Trillion dollar debt!" An hour after clawing our way back to the car we found a Persian-American cafe on Irving Street. It was multi-cultural. It was empty. It was heaven.

The next day the papers showed wide-angle photos of the kids in front of the main stage, all smiles and fingers in the air. The event was universally declared a roaring success simply by virtue of selling 100,000 tickets. No reporter asked anyone about what, if anything, they had learned from the cultural displays or the exotic music or the political booths. No one talked about whether or not the Ben & Jerry's "Write Your Congressperson" campaign to support Head Start had been a success. No one explored the irony of the Businesses for Social Responsibility booth being lost in the shuffle of an oversold event. No, the news was all big stars and big numbers.

It all might have worked if Peter Gabriel had simply stayed home and let all the international WOMAD artists delight the festival-goers on their own. But Gabriel did show up and hogged the lion's share of the glory. To judge from the media coverage, that was really what he had in mind all along, despite all the festival's earnest, politically-correct trappings. Gabriel was even quoted as invoking Bill Graham from the stage, declaring, "Bill, wherever you are, I'm sure you're smiling today." I wouldn't bet on it, Peter.

Copyright © Dirty Linen: Folk, Electric Folk, Traditional and World Music

 

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