f36 Sounds Of Spice
Zanzibar’s Sauti Za Busara festival is an ideal winter destination. Ian Anderson reports and snaps.
I
t’s gone midnight on Thursday, the second night of Zanzibar’s epic five- day Sauti Za Busara festival, and Tanzania’s veteran Mlimani Park Orchestra are in full flow. Crouched down in the photographer’s pit in front of the stage, I must have cracked a big joyful grin as the lead guitarist launched an outrageously glittering intro run to their second song: simultaneously our eyes met and he beamed back. By then the fast East African rumba was cooking, two telepathic guitars intertwining and being bounced along by rubber band bass, a sizzling drummer, a sweetly out- of-tune brass section and five glorious harmony vocalists giving it the old foot- work. The audience are jumping and I’ve just discovered my new official best live band on the planet (this week’s model).
“African music under African skies” is
the festival’s subtitle, to which you could add “presented African style”. Don’t come here with expectations from slick Euro- pean world music festivals with multiple stages allowing for speedy changeovers. The venue is Stone Town’s lovely Old Fort, which has a single open air stage inside its spacious, thick-walled compound – the only other site I know that’s remotely like it is the ancient walled arena used by Croatia’s EthnoAmbient. A stone seated amphitheatre next door shows open-air African music films. A band finishes, the next one gets announced, then people amble around setting up the stage, the sponsors get thanked, sometimes a little
A proper-job coral island…
video address from the president is shown, and eventually the next band starts up.
But time is elastic here. You’re clutch- ing a cold Kilimanjaro beer and people- watching – an incredibly diverse audience from right here in Zanzibar, wider Tanza- nia, still wider South and East Africa and these days more are travelling in from the rest of the world. Groups of young Muslim women in colourful headscarves and sub- tle bling mix with dissolute rastas, lots of local music fans (who quite rightly qualify for much cheaper tickets than the likes of us), wide-eyed backpackers and seasoned world music travellers. All is well with the world, albeit a hot, muggy one.
Years ago my daughter announced her newly discovered theory that the best way to hear music is in the open air in the place it comes from (this after seeing Eleftheria in Athens, Danyel Waro in La Réunion and Bampton in Bampton). She was dead right, of course, and Sauti Za Busara is living proof. Indeed, the localest of the performers provide many of the highlights. Two of Zanzibar’s famed taarab orchestras, Nyota Zameremeta featuring Mohamed Ilyas, and the superb 23-or- more-piece Culture Musical Club, both conclude their sets with guest appearances from the legendary Bi Kidude, who looks every bit of her rumoured 104 years while still being capable of a feral howl. The stage almost vanishes behind a wall of lofted cameras and mobile phones, and the uproar is the kind usually reserved for rock stars in the West. Class!
Sinachuki Kidumbak play their infec- tious, stripped down, rootsier version of taarab with their skiffle-style tea-chest bass, and Maulidi Ya Homu almost defy description: a row of singer/percussionists stand, a row of singer/dancers initially sit in front of them. The softly chanted music grows in intensity and the front row, all dressed in identical white robes and hats, erupt into choreographed swaying, swooping, backward bending movements, like a shoal of chefs doing a cross between Olympic-standard synchronised swimming and Mexican waves. Who knew that reli- gious fervour could be so eyecatching?
Among other standouts were two
maloya bands from La Réunion: soulful singer/percussionist Christine Salem and her group particularly impressed, but Groove Lèlè (including four of the leg- endary Granmoun Lèlè’s children) were excellent too. NEWS Quartet was a mes- merising collaboration between Culture Musical Club’s Rajab Suleiman (qanun) and Matona (oud), Hardanger fiddle player Anne Hytta and Mauritanian singer/
guitarist Becaye Awe, augmented by a Norwegian string quartet. And everybody was raving about Tanzania’s Jagwa Music, Afroroots-punk by all accounts, whose very late night set I unfortunately missed.
B
This being an ‘African music festival’, there were also good doses of most other styles popular in the wider region, from local hip hop and R&B to reggae and jazz. Cameroonian Blick Bassy’s hyperactive singer-songwriter thing was a big hit with the SZB crowd, though I was relieved to note that Kenyan ‘neo soul’ exponent Atemi’s cheese-smooth Americanism was- n’t. The funky Afrobeat of Benin’s Orchestre Polyrhythmo certainly made much more sense under African night skies than they’ve previously done in the Barbi- can, but unfortunately for them Mlimani Park Orchestra hit the stage two sets later and pretty much erased them from short term memory. London’s very own twist on Afrobeat from Yaaba Funk showed much more spark and very much deserved the great closing night reception that they got. They were also sweet relief after some ear-scrapingly metallic kora noodling from the can-be-heroic Djeli Moussa Diawara who inexplicably came with a jazz trio. Damn, I’d been looking forward to hear- ing him again after all these years too.
ut even with a few musical reservations over five nights, this is a tremendous event in one of the world’s most fasci- nating, historically and cultural- ly rich places. With the stage only kicking off as things begin to cool a little in the late afternoon, you have all day to explore the shady mazes and bazaars of Stone Town (taking in a relax at the very nice Zanzibar Coffee House, where you might even like to stay), visit the muse- ums, cultural centres or the Dhow Coun- tries Music Academy, go to open rehearsals of taarab orchestras, buy some tingatinga paintings or just take off out of town for some snorkelling from a prop- er-job coral island or a tour of the places where they grow the spiciest of spices. And it’s in February: what better time of the year for a week’s concentration of tropical culture as a break from cold, grey northern winter?
Thanks to Sauti Za Busara festival
director Yusuf Mahmoud and his great team for their help and hospitality.
www.busaramusic.org
Sauti Za Busara is part of the ACP (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific) Music Festivals Network.
zanzibar.com/zch_index.html
Zanzibar Coffee House: www.riftvalley- F
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