WOMAD

I am full of praise for WOMAD, the world music festival founded by Peter Gabriel and essentially franchised out to a handful of locations throughout the world. We’re in the middle of Abu Dhabi’s second free annual festival. After missing the first one last year to be a bridesmaid in Alli’s wedding in the Bahamas, I have been following every announcement leading up to this year’s event – generally shrieking to Mahmoud from the balcony as I read new line-up announcements in the morning paper. The biggest shriek this year came for Tinariwen.

I’ve been madly in love with this band since I first heard them about 5 years ago. They’re a group of Touaregs playing North African blues rock. It’s droney and tribal, a dense sound of voice, acoustic guitars, electric guitars and the tindé drum. It sounds like a view of the Saharan landscape, with Jimi Hendrix galloping past on a ferocious horse whipped by the sandy wind. At least, that’s what I thought when I first heard them on my iPod as I was walking through Hyde Park. I also figured it was extremely unlikely that I’d ever see them live, since I don’t spend a lot of time in the desert in Mali.

Lucky for me, the good folks at ADACH have brought them to me. They were wonderful live. The sight of them all on-stage was remarkably close to my desert/Hendrix fantasy! The lead singer is a battered-looking version of what Hendrix (or Shaft) might have looked like had he lived until 50 and the rest of the band performs dressed in the voluminous layers of traditional Touareg dress. Wikipedia has just explained to me that the Touaregs are a matriarchal culture where the women do not veil their face, but the men do, as you can see in this picture.

Anyhoo, long night – we didn’t get back home until 3am – but it was well-worth it. The concert was in Al Jahili Fort in Al Ain, which is a beautiful place for outdoor concerts. It feels a bit like being inside a giant, well-lit sand castle. Here’s a picture from the last event we attended there, the New York Philharmonic.

The other surprise highlight of the evening was concert of Pakistani singer, Faiz Ali Faiz and his Sufi backing musicians (2 harmoniums [harmonia?], 2 tabla players, and 2 clappers, all of whom occasionally sing as well). His music was hypnotic and moving in the way that I find all Qawwali music to be. But the real joy of it was the crowd. Being in the UAE, the population of which is heavily sub-continental, it should have come as no surprise that about a third of the audience would be Pakistani men. They went, quite simply, crazy. It was a bit like what I’d imagine a Pentacostal service would be. People were sitting in the audience, clapping and swaying, and suddenly – like popcorn – the spirit would enter someone and he would leap to his feet, arms raised in victory and start jumping everywhere, waving his arms above his shoulders in a vaguely dyslexic YMCA-style dance, grinning from ear to ear. Small groups of them would be jumping closer and dance together and it felt like a real privilege to be so close to what looked like an intensely private rapture for a segment of society we rarely get close to except in the taxis they drive. As the concert went on and the number of dancers increased to resemble a more modern mosh pit, we started to see eruptions of confetti thrown 20 feet in the air. The men were shredding the event program and heaving it towards the heavens, or towards the stage. We think it was to symbolize the traditional throwing of money on inspired performers.

On a more mundane note, we discovered that Pakistani men have absolutely lustrous hair and many of them have a penchant for architecturally-bold mullets.