Adam Levin chats to some of the greats coming to Benoni this weekend about the politics and possibilities of world music
The first time I heard Yungchen Lhamo’s heavenly, snow-pure, bone-rattling voice was in 1995 at Womadelaide, the Australian version of the unmissable event coming to Benoni this weekend … Only Miss Lhamo was rather late. When she finally graced the stage however, in an antique burgundy, chuba gown, raven, waist- length hair piled majestically on her head, you could have heard a Eucalpytus leaf drop.
“Sorry I late,” she announced, “But I walk all the way across the Himalayas to sing for you.” This was not that far-fetched an excuse.
In 1989, Lhamo fled her native Tibet on foot, arriving, after a perilous journey, in the Tibetan exile headquarters of Dharamsala, India, with nothing but the clothes she was wearing, and an explanation from her grandmother on the reason for singing. “Sing!” said grandmother. Use your vocal talents to inspire spirituality in other living beings.
As a close friend of the Dalai Lama, Lhamo’s grandmother had repeatedly been tortured and imprisoned by the Chinese government. Lhamo herself had been sent to work aged five. Although her name (which means Goddess of Song in Tibetan) had been bestowed on her by a holy man when she was just a few days old, Chairman Mao’s cultural revolution hadn’t left much room for prayer, let alone devotional song.
Lhamo made her way to Australia, and has lived like a gypsy ever since, performing in some 17 countries, at Carnegie Hall, and alongside everyone from Sheryl Crow and Natalie Merchant to Michael Stipe and Laurie Anderson, and making her name as a diva of the Womad circuit and an ambassador for the Tibetan cause.
Most often, she sings unaccompanied, to reflect the plight of refugees and show that she is without all that has shaped her, except for what is within. “When you leave home as a refugee, you do not escape,” she explains on the phone from New York, her voice clear as a temple bell. “You have a mission to work for your country. All this time in the West, I have learned so much about freedom. I am waiting for the day I can go back to Tibet and take that freedom home with me.”
Musically, Lhamo’s is a most unlikely success story and one that would not have been possible were it not or a gradual global warming to the music genre described problematically as “world music”.
“What is `world music’, anyway?” one asks, as the most astonishing range of musicians to mount a stage in South African history makes its way to Benoni this weekend.
Strange instruments? Weird, moody lyrics you don’t understand? Well, not that weird to Lhamo. And when Justin Vali digs his fingernails into the bamboo valiha in Madagascar, it’s no more exotic to the locals than the synth player at the Red Barrel is to us. But while world music has traded on its foreigness to break into a market ruled by American-accented pop, this exotic veil has also been its imprisonment.
Baaba Maal, the Senegalese vocal flamethrower, whose Womad appearance is his second in South Africa, is outspoken on such stereotyping: “Sometimes, I’m afraid to hear about world music,” he says. “I’m afraid to see our music taken like a fish out of water. I think it’s important for people to have a name, but I don’t want people to put African music or any music in a corner and say: `After all these other kinds of music, you have this kind of music, and its called World Music.’ No.”
Maal’s own career exemplifies the potential dynamism of musical crossovers. Since the haunting, acoustic purity of his early albums, Baayo and Djam Leeli, he has dabbled in everything from soft rock to poker-hot house tracks. His new release, Nomad Soul, covers a particularly wide and progressive gamut, and includes a track featuring Brian Eno and Howie B. Tossing an album like this into a category of static, traditional songs, is to ignore the individual talent and creative evolution of the artist.
Llamo feels equally strong about this. “You know, I am not a museum piece,” she quips. “And as a creative individual, I have a need to experiment with different things.”
As a result of concerts like Womad and the workshops that accompany it, the past decade has seen the production of some of the most obscure musical experiments imaginable. The rise of trance and sampling fever has had many electronic artists looking to the world stage for inspiration, but the resulting projects have varied from smooth, irresistable innovations to things that sound like Bird Calls of the Transvaal played through a sewing machine.
French House deejay Francois K’s remix of morna diva, Cesaria Evora’s Sangue di Beirona may be delicious, but British bhangra crews made a fine mess of the late Womad stalwart, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s masterful Qawaali songs on Star Rise.
The key, it appears, when bridging such immense musical divides, has less to do with sampling groovy bits of Urdu or Wolof, and more to do with respect and understanding between the artists. Nowhere is this better exemplified than on Lhamo’s second album, Coming Home.
While her first album, Tibet, Tibet, clung to the stark strains of traditional songs, by the time it was released, Lhamo had received and rejected scores of demos from hopeful Western musicians who had mixed her voice with their work. Then came Hector Zazou, a French producer who had worked with Bjork, and it was on Womad main man, Peter Gabriel’s, recommendation that Llamo went ahead with the project.
Coming Home sums up the progress of world music over the past decade. It includes the most courageous juxtapositions of sounds, yet never jars. And the fusion of talents is indeed so subtle, sophisticated and individual, the ethnic origins of the artists seems quite irrelevant.
It is neither Tibetan nor French, nor ambient, nor acoustic. It is simply a reminder of the awe-inspiring cultural crossovers of our time, and the infinitely melodious possibilities of getting a bunch of master musicians from the planet earth jamming on a single stage. Now, if you happen to be heading out to the East Rand this weekend, it’s worth bearing that in mind.