49 f T
he popular daytime workshops in the longhouses and theatre featured most of the festival’s bands and musicians, from Sarawak and abroad, explaining their cultures, music, dance and instru- ments, and collaborating on themes such as flutes, percussion, plucked or bowed instru- ments, trumpets and bagpipes, dance or song. The evening stage shows, on two alternating big stages side by side against Santu bong’s green forest wall, began with local traditional performers. These included an actual nose-flute player – yes, it really does exist – 71-year-old Juk Wan Emang of the Kayan people. He’s said to be one of only two Kayan who still play it. Traditional- ly it was played by the women in courtship and to welcome the men back from (head- )hunting. His transverse cane flute looked like it would be playable in the usual oral- puffing way, so I had to ask “Why nose; why not mouth?” I expected something about tradition and ritual, but the transla- tor responded, “If he played it that way it wouldn’t be special, it’d just be ordinary!”
Bidayuh group Madeeh played the
pratuokng, sometimes called a ‘bamboo gong’ but actually a tube-zither made of large-diameter bamboo, its strings strips of bamboo split and wedged off from its sur- face and hit with a stick in one hand and plucked and slapped with the fingers of the other. Its relatives are played in other parts of south-east Asia, including the sasandu in Indonesia’s Sulawesi, the takum- bo, kolitong and other names in the Philip- pines, Vietnam’s goong, and it travelled across the Indian Ocean to become Mada- gascar’s valiha. (Similar principles are found in the many half-tube long zithers of wider Asia such as China’s gu-cheng, Japan’s koto and Korea’s geomungo). Madeeh, led by pratuokng player and maker Arthur Bor- man Kanying, live in the village of Annah Rais, 65 kilometres into the hills south of Kuching, which is a traditional longhouse- centred community, though now hosting visitors and equipped with wi-fi.
These evening-openings of local music were followed by the worldwide acts, end- ing each night with those most likely to get the audience jumping. (There was mutter- ing among some of the local audience, a mix of south east Asian and European in origin, on the lines “never mind this local music, let’s get onto the world music we came to hear.”) Particularly strong sets came from the warm, colourful pan-south- ern-African variety of South Africa’s Dizu Plaatjies (former leader of Amampondo) and his Ibuyambo Ensemble, Ireland’s Kila, the spectacular hat-ribbon twirling, gongs, drums and vocals of Korea’s Palsandae, the showmanship of Iranian bagpiper Mohsen Sharifian and the Lian Band, Croatia’s Kries, Australian Aboriginal youth group Nunukul Yuggera, whose front man Reon Williams is a fine, distinctive singer, Den- mark’s fiddle and brass big band Habadekuk, and the infectious alegría of Colombian vallenato king Beto Jamaica and his band (with notably interesting bass guitar lines augmenting the vallenato core of vocal, accordeon and percussion).
It wasn’t all music, of course, but no space to tell you about the wonders of the rainforest, orang-utans, warm sea, glori- ous sunsets, and the fascinating little sand- bubbler crabs industriously creating art- gardens of sand-spheres on the beach…
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F Above: Talago Buni with kecapi at the front. Below: one of Madeeh playing pratuokng
Mathew Ngau playing sape
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