Halfway through Saturday’s programme I was convinced there was too much Patagonian bum-flute music at this year’s World of Music, Arts and Dance (Womad). By the end of Sunday, I was convinced there was too little, or, to be precise, too little world music.
It almost seemed that the organisers had handed Sunday to sponsors SAfm to plug local musicians of its choice.
In part, the impression was created by shutting down the third stage, once a platform for world artists, and alternating between the main and jazz stages. This may have been a cost-cutting exercise — most of the jazz acts were local — or an attempt to draw more black punters to an event historically dominated by pinko-greys. But the result was the overweening intrusion of jazz sounds.
The jazz of early Satchmo could pass as world music, because it was a form of cultural self-expression. Marabi was world music because it gave American jazz a distinctly South African voice. Musicians at the interface of jazz and traditional forms, such as the late Moses Molelekwa, made world music. But the vastly overrated jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, who played twice at the weekend, does not.
Jordan is a technical prodigy, that much is undeniable. He has refined an extraordinary technique that enables him to sound the guitar with both hands at once, and he plays with breathtaking speed and smoothness. His classically influenced harmony can be surprising.
But the type of jazz he plays is far too remote from its cultural roots for Womad. There were times — for example, in his recasting of the Beatles tune Yesterday — when he verged on the easy listening mock-classicism of the Deer Hunter theme.
As classical guitarist John Williams illustrates, instrumental virtuosi are not necessarily great artists. But there is deeper problem with Jordan, which underscores why Womad should not be allowed to degenerate into a semi-jazz festival. It is his chosen idiom. Jazz, now abstracted from its folk origins, has nowhere near the same emotional range.
Much of it is about itself rather than the accumulated experiences of a culture and their expression in sound. Jazz harmony and melody render the form incapable of clear emotional statement. Its major and minor sevenths, and other semi-dissonances, express moodiness and regret, but not despair; febrile excitement, but not joy. It is cool or hot — and not much else.
By contrast, the scales, rhythms and vocal styles of folk music have evolved over long ages as vehicles for the deepest human feelings. The Blind Boys of Alabama, a gospel combo that took Womad by storm, may be twice Jordan’s age, but steeped in the fervent popular church music of the American South, they had 10 times his intensity.
The point is not restricted to jazz. Asian Dub Foundation is an excellent British dance band, but there was too little Asian and too much dub in its Saturday night set. The only ethnic reference was a tribute to the towering Pakistani qawaal, Nusrat Ali Khan.
To say that world music must be rooted in some cultural idiom does not have to imply lethal doses of the Malaysian three-note plunkaphone.
The pentatonic monotonies of Tibetan singer Yengchen Lhamo, one suspects, were only appreciated by the most hardened ethnic purists. A glut of folk singers working in obscure traditions would be the kiss of death for the festival in South Africa.
Festivals are places where people want to prance around addle-pated on their molecules of choice — not re-education camps.
But the fact is that Womad is about exposing people to the musical expression of other cultures, in the hope that this will promote global understanding. It is possible to remain true to this ideal without either disappearing into the esoteric or broadening out to include every musician, in whatever field, who has a pigmented skin.
What is needed is more ”world fusion”, more artists like Geoffrey Oryema, Afro-Celt Sound System and Joi, who are creating new syntheses from folk music and contemporary forms familiar to the West — rock, ambient rock, dance, rap, and, yes, jazz.
A stronger focus on roots music would certainly not exclude South Africans. One of the glaring lacunae at Womad over the years has been the absence of top local artists with indigenous roots. Where is the Zulu traditional guitar maestro Madala Kunene? Where are Pops Mohamed and Sipho Gumede? Why have bands such as Amampondo and Bayethe not featured?
Nor would such a direction necessarily mean smaller crowds. The large turnout for Cape Verdean diva Cesaria Evora on Sunday night, including many black enthusiasts, might indicate that world music is gaining greater acceptance in a country that only recently emerged from cultural isolation.
For the while at least, Womad SA will not draw the mass audiences it has drawn elsewhere. But the organisers should accept this and soldier on.
The music it showcases is so much better than the limp offerings of Splashy Fen, Oppikippi et al it isn’t funny. It will grow as South African tastes become more cosmopolitan. Its unique character should not be twisted out of shape by the quest for quick numbers.