“Remember where you come from,” the Hawaiian singer Kaumakaiwa Kanaka’ole said, ending a traditional-style story song. That could be the mission statement for Globalfest, the annual world-music showcase that brought 13 groups to Webster Hall on Sunday.
As soon as world music leaves home, it begins deciding what cultural memories are made for travel. Globalfest is partly a showcase for the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters convention: an audition for promoters seeking something genuine from afar. Nearly everything now billed as world music involves some degree of crossover and packaging, even video backdrops. Yet at this year’s Globalfest roots were showing, and so were dance moves, carnival rhythms and — always a welcome sight — sousaphones.
Spectacle is built into some traditions, like those of Rhythm of Rajasthan, an alliance of two ancient musical clans, Langas and Manganiars, from the deserts of northwestern India. It had songs driven by hand drum and castanets, with hearty refrains and percussive vocal improvisations, akin to qawwali music from neighboring Pakistan and just as ardent and propulsive. The musicians accompanied a dancer, Suva Devi, who balanced a seven-tiered spire on her head as she moved to the beat. She also briefly danced barefoot on sword blades. (The group returns for a full concert on Friday at Symphony Space.)
Carnival beats propelled superb sets by Orquestra Contemporânea de Olinda, from Brazil, and RAM, from Haiti. The Brazilian band casually melds ideas from across the country. Its back line was a horn section, complete with sousaphone, that could sound like a brass band or a funk horn section; the horns backed a plugged-in group that could switch among samba, frevo from northeastern Brazil, mangue beat and ciranda from Pernambuco and some individualized Brazilian funk. The group tucks serious musical lore — like the use of the traditional rabeca fiddle — into wry songs.
RAM, a long-running band from Port-au-Prince, deployed the one-note trumpets of Haiti’s rara carnival processions in a set that cruised between carnival rhythms and other electrified Haitian traditions, including one song that proclaimed (in Creole), “We’re proud.” It was jubilant music to defy grim conditions. Novalima, from Peru, took old songs with Afro-Peruvian roots — there was slavery there too — and pumped them up with dance-club electronics.
Aurelio and Garifuna Soul also had socially conscious messages. Garifuna Soul, based in New York, draws on the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna culture of descendants of escaped slaves in Honduras, Belize and Guatemala. The music has a brisk, light-fingered Caribbean lilt, carried by Aurelio Martinez’s plucked acoustic guitar, and he sings with a sustained fervor akin to the Senegalese songwriter Youssou N’Dour, who has recorded with him.
Yoro Ndiaye, a Senegalese bandleader making his New York City debut, has adapted Mr. N’Dour’s Senegalese rock style, mbalax, into something slightly more Westernized: leaner arrangements (but still using the balafon, the Senegalese xylophone) and vocal lines that land on the downbeat instead of dodging it. Mr. Ndiaye eased into his set via a guitar-scrubbing Caribbean-flavored tune. But he soon moved into the spikier patterns and Senegalese modes that let his voice soar.
The New York City band Zikrayat (Arabic for “memories”) specializes in Egyptian music from the mid-20th century, played on traditional instruments: nay (flute), buzuq (lute), violin. It brought a belly dancer to twirl through part of its set, and it was equally impressive with a singer upfront: Salah Rajab, whose baritone conveyed romance, elegance and gusto.
The three lead singers of La-33, from Bogotá, Colombia, were also its dancers. Colombia has become a latter-day stronghold for the Cuban-rooted salsa that thrived 30 years ago in New York City. The group played its novelty hit, “Mambo Pantera” (based on Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther” theme), but its own music was sleekly kinetic. There was more salsa from Pedrito Martinez, a crowd-pleasing Cuban percussionist and singer now based in New York, who hybridizes his songs with touches of jazz, soul and hip-hop.
Diblo Dibala, the Congolese guitarist whose pealing little guitar lines are a cornerstone of soukous dance music, was flanked by three rump-shaking dancers and then more as audience members crowded the stage, drawn by an irresistible groove. Playing lines that amble or leap, skip or circle, stroll or dart, Mr. Dibala had an infinitude of ways to turn the two-chord vamps of soukous into hooks.
There was gentler music too. Chamber Music — the French cellist Vincent Segal and the Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko — played studious adaptations of traditional songs from places like Mali and Greece. Mr. Kanaka’ole, the Hawaiian singer, was backed only by a guitarist in songs drawing on island traditions, particularly chameleonic vocals. He vaulted through various registers and timbres, from bass to witchy contralto rasp to sweet soprano (his “skinny girl” voice, he said), a traditionalist tour de force.
And there was a raucous finale. The last set belonged to Red Baraat, a Brooklyn brass band (complete with sousaphone) that looks to South Asia, pumping out Bollywood tunes and Sufi songs with a crackling beat (from the two-headed dhol drum) and the muscle of horns blasting in unison, putting some New York bluster atop faraway roots.
Review by New York Times
