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Sudani Voodoo
For a tradition allegedly down to its last practitioners,
Rango give a very good impression of being alive.
Elizabeth Kinder gets down with the Zar stars.
T
here’s a man on stage dressed
in white robes, singing beauti-
ful Sudanese Egyptian songs
about what I don’t know, but it
doesn’t matter, the sound’s so
compelling. The packed LSO St Luke’s
audience are sitting almost entranced.
He’s supported by a man on a tanbura
and two others also in white on djembes,
who join in singing in delicious harmony:
the drums pound out driving cross-
rhythms. A dancer comes on wearing a
belt hung with horns and toenails that
previously belonged to a herd of goats,
and adds a frisson to the already high-
energy percussion. Those in the audience
with unshakeable confidence get up in
the aisles and dance.
Then everyone on stage swaps instru-
ments and one of the drummers takes
over lead vocals playing shakar shakes –
makeshift maracas made by filling vivid
orange insect repellent spray cans with
shells and ball bearings – until a woman in
a hijab appears to wander on stage by
accident. She picks up a set of Egyptian
tablas and proceeds to play and sing solo.
Her uplifting soaring voice carries the Ara-
bic scales and guttural consonants so they
flow out to us in a sonorous crystal
stream. She looks like someone you might
meet in the queue at the halal butchers,
cosy, up for a chat.
It’s so intimate, inclusive: there’s no
wall of celebrity, no posturing persona
separating the audience from the band;
we’re simply all in this room together with
this group of master musicians who form
Rango and they’re just doing what they
do – brilliantly.
The band join in with the call-and-
response Sudanese slave songs, the woman
claps and the audience clap with her (more
or less), adding yet another layer to the
rhythm; the dancer on stage whirls and
then the woman suddenly stops singing. A
young man takes over, leaping from the
stage to lead the dancing audience in a
happy conga around the room, gathering
more people as he goes. The night, the
music – it’s all fluid and easy and exciting.
When a gorgeous backing singer
comes forward and sings the lead, you
know that this band really is a collective. It’s
very democratic, everyone’s a multi-instru-
mentalist and no one hogs the limelight.
We are not asked to worship at the altar of
any puffed-up starry ego. These musicians
work together to generate this intense
exciting sound for us and for each other. It’s
cool club music; dance trance music. It’s
mostly acoustic, entirely traditional and it’s
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