A world of rhythm

Julian Owen

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 3:10PM UAE / November 14. 2009 11:10AM GMT

The great Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure and his band pulled out all the stops on the main stage at the Gran Canaria Womad festival. Courtesy Womad

As wide-eyed commentators covering the recent Grand Prix couldn’t help but repeatedly tell the world, nowhere in the world has grown quite as fast – or spectacularly – as Abu Dhabi. Quietly, though, Las Palmas on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, has been undergoing something of a tourist-led revolution itself.

Enjoying one last moment of relative calm before the opening of the Womad festival the following day, on Wednesday evening organisers decamped to their favourite beachside fish restaurant. When they first came here 15 years ago, they explained, it was a tin shack, with food arriving courtesy of one man and his rod. Whatever bit first, you ate. And if nothing was landed at all, well, it was a lovely place to sit. Today there’s a vast array of freshly caught sea life to choose from, consumed on a large expanse of canopy-roofed wooden decking.

The beach, Las Canteras, is testament to the town’s longer-term evolution. Before the building of a promenade (its age evidenced by older buildings with wooden balconies), there was no beach proper. Instead, sand was free to drift in a long dune stretching all the way to Alcaravaneras. Beyond, rows of white-washed houses rise to an – almost entirely – uniform line beyond which the all-encompassing hillsides are left to breathe and bask in the sun. The buildings are tightly clustered, as if sheltering in expectation of a storm brewing on the other side. The chances of it coming to pass, however, are remote; the year-round climate of the islands led the US climatologist Dr Thomas Whitemore to declare it “the best in the world”.

Still, it would be a mistake to push the image of a sleepy island idyll too far. Away from the beach, massed ranks of spindly, towering cranes testify that Las Palmas remains a busily thriving port. A short distance from the container ships and industrial quayside bob row upon row of private sailing craft. Bordered by wide, snaking ribbons of palm-tree-lined roads, the centre plays host to densely packed blocks of sky-scraping hotels and office blocks. It’s as if there had been a mid-air clash between Barcelona and a southern Californian town, the seamlessly merged result dropping neatly on to a rocky volcanic outcrop 150km off of Africa’s Moroccan coastline.

Knowledge of Gran Canaria’s delights is nothing new. Christopher Columbus stopped off here en route to “discovering” America in 1492, and for good measure dropped in on his way home. Indeed, there’s evidence that the island’s original inhabitants, the Canarii, arrived as early as 500 BC. Since then, it has played host to migrants from across the globe: Spain, Cuba, Germany, Sub-Saharan Africa and beyond. The ideal setting, then, for a world music festival that began in England in 1982 and has since set up stage in countries including Australia, Singapore, the US, New Zealand, Japan and, of course, the UAE.

On the Thursday morning of the festival, some of the performers – Manao, Manel, Eliades Ochoa, Spiro and Black Swan Effect – gathered in a suite on the top floor of the Hotel Meliã Las Palmas for a standing-room-only press conference. Ranks of photographers depressed shutters with ceaseless regularity, creating a monotonous background noise later echoed at day’s end by chirping crickets in the festival’s Gran Canaria home, Parque de Santa Catalina. In this part of the world, it’s immediately apparent that Womad is a very big deal indeed. The foreground noise, meanwhile, saw an Englishman – the Spiro guitarist Jon Hunt – apologise for a lack of Spanish verbosity, before nonetheless launching into a comprehensive explanation of how his band utilises traditional instruments and influences to produce decidedly non-traditional music. At least that’s what some key words suggested he said; though your correspondent would like to tell you what was explained by the Spanish-speaking contingent, his apologies for being profoundly mono-lingual are, alas, altogether well founded.

Come Thursday evening, Hunt and cohorts opened the main stage, Santa Catalina, and instantly made good on that old maxim about music being a universal language: the rapturous ovation greeting the end of the first track mirrored that given their set closer in native English fields in mid-summer. Accordion, fiddle, guitar and mandolin cascaded in infinitely entwining notes, classical and rock influences transcending their folk roots.

The Spanish quartet Manel eschewed native song as well; their guitar/bass/drums line-up is pure western rock. So, too, the four:four time and anthemic choruses – songs in which to drape your arms around the shoulder of a neighbour and shout along with.

If they’d played either of the first two years here, these acts would have performed on the beach. Unfortunately, complaints about noise from adjacent hotels – not to mention one unexpectedly high tide – put paid to that. The Parque, happily, proved a gracious substitute, the forest of palm trees surrounding the main stage giving way to harbour walls bordering tonight’s other stage, Guagua. Around the perimeter stood curving waves of small, brilliant white tents, with the usual festival fare: food, drink, stands for human rights and environmental NGOs, a girl having her hair braided here, a man bartering over a wooden sculpture there.

Where this admission-free Womad really scored is in the crowd it attracted. To many western ears, world music – with its attendant unfamiliar rhythms, strange instruments and non-English lyrics – is not always an easy concept to sell. Crowds at its English home don’t lack in enthusiasm but, for the most part, the recipients of their cheers are playing to the converted. Not here. Of course, there were plenty of passionate and knowledgeable festivalgoers, but equal numbers were simply curious. Early evening, the collective age felt at once older and younger. Groups of insouciant teenagers gathered in groups on the steps of a fountain, intently talking, but always with an ear out for something to make them gravitate towards the stage. Prim but immaculately dressed older women, hair unmoving, studied in their footsteps and invariably accompanied by a similarly well-groomed dog, paused in their stride. Some walked on, others stayed, stern-faced but entranced. Perhaps this music doesn’t feel quite so alien after all, once you get the hang of it.

By the time Vieux Farka Toure took the main stage, the crowd had swelled and the average age had dropped. Earlier, the great Malian guitarist and a stripped-down band had given a workshop on the Guagua stage in a considered, musically reflective mood. Later, faced with this throng and full, crashingly loud band in tow, he was in superstar guitar-hero mode and pulled out all the stops. He has many stops. The Hendrix-recalling fret-only, spare-hand-raised solo; the impossibly fast runs; the trance-inducing, slowly repeated motif; the head back, eyes closed, lengthy improvisations where all stops come at once. Yet what really hit home was his voice, often breaking into earthy exultant/anguished cries that must surely have carried all the way to Morocco.

Young people with a mind to sit had by this time moved far back to the lawns, grouped in cross-legged circles, some with African drums and trying to repeating the rhythm patterns carried on the air from Toure. Next rang out clear, brassy punches from the band of Eliades Ochoa, the man dubbed Cuba’s Johnny Cash. Added to the horns were the great man’s fluid tres playing, intoxicating piano and insistent maracas. On the fringes, forceful girls taught reluctant boys to tango. Not for the first time in history, gangly awkwardness was trumped by an eagerness to please.

If Womad has helped raise the island’s profile as a tourist destination, Dania Dévora Barrera, the director of Womad Spain Festivals, is convinced that the event’s effects run deeper. Young bands on the island, she attests, are increasingly incorporating sounds and rhythms of long-distance visitors into their music. In part that’s helped by the links she’s established with Casa Africa, whereby African musicians are brought into Spanish schools to work with students. Come this afternoon, the scheme will provide what’s mooted as the highlight of the weekend: a procession of giant puppets made by children with help from the aptly named, Burkino Faso-hailing troupe Les Grands Personnes.

It will have to be a spectacular parade if it’s to top Diak Haso. On Friday night, the 13-piece African group – all drummers or percussionists save for a solitary, melody-supplying kora player – were a magnificent mass of flailing limbs on the main stage, a monster music machine producing the most colossal, irresistible noise. Chiwoniso, meanwhile, supplied power of a different kind on the freshly opened Boulevard Stage. The Zimbabwean star sat alone centre stage, quietly plucking at a mbira and singing rebel songs with the quiet, indomitable strength of Tracy Chapman.

Near to the night’s conclusion, Forro in the Dark provided a literal translation of their name (“forro” meaning “party” in their native Brazil). Flute-led reggae rhythms rubbed up against free-flowing guitar redolent of Carlos Santana, while the emphatic vocals and chorusing would have felt at home in Cuba. It’s a heady mix. By 1.45am, when Tinariwen took the stage, the crowd found enough energy to declare that they weren’t through with partying just yet, making the stately disposition of the Touareg blues masters appear more striking than ever.