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DARBAR INTERNATIONAL TUNNG WITH TINARIWEN
SOUTH ASIAN MUSIC Koko, London
FESTIVAL 2009 When Tinariwen wander onto Koko’s stage,
Southbank Centre, London
they are dressed in traditional Touareg attire
with their faces veiled. Seeing them perform in
If Britain has ever witnessed a more ambi-
any European venue is usually extraordinary
tious assemblage of South Asian music than
enough, but tonight things get even more sur-
the fourth annual Darbar Festival it bypassed
real as Tunng join them – their heads covered
my historian mind and antennae. Held during
too, but this time with hoodies. The two bands
March and April 2009, the sitarist Purbayan
have had only five days of rushed rehearsals
Chatterjee simply called it “the G20 summit
together, and neither can speak the other’s
of Indian music”. Amongst the acts that per-
language. But somehow their union turns out
formed were instrumentalists Kumar Bose,
to be an inspired success, in all its ragged glory.
Ganesh & Kumaresh, Ramesh Mishra, Rahul It’s always tempting to recycle Tinari-
Sharma and Shashank Subramanyam, and wen’s fascinating history. Tunng show us a
vocalists Aniruddha Bhattacharya, Faiyaz new side of the band, however, taking us
Wasifuddin Dagar, Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande beyond those seductive tales of nomadic
and Nina Virdee. A hefty part of the festival’s rebels swapping Kalashnikovs for electric gui-
appeal lay in the gorgeous opportunities the tars. For starters, we learn that Touareg
imaginative programming offered to see
Jyotsna Shrikanth camps don’t just swing to the sounds of North
musicians – long-awaited, long overdue – African blues. Dedicated fans of AC/DC and
debut on British soil.
Hans-Eckardt Wenzel, when he played he
Van Halen, they’re just as much into heavy
With financial underpinning from the summoned an eloquence on mridangam
rock as Tunng’s Mike Lindsay. And to prove it,
Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery (double-headed barrel drum) to match any-
we’re treated to a hair-metal guitar solo face-
Fund, SkyArts (which shot with five cameras one’s – Ganesh & Kumaresh and Purbayan
off between both bands. It’s one genre I can’t
for a series of programmes for televising in Chatterjee and flautist Shashank being exam-
imagine anyone expected to hear tonight.
late summer into early autumn) and Grange ples – he was accompanying. Later in the set, Becky Jacobs introduces
Hotels, the Darbar Festival shifted its primary
Two performances shine out. The Lon-
a Tinariwen song about tea. Out in the
locus and focus to the metropolis while main-
don debut of the Karnatic vocalist Aruna
desert, apparently, the Touareg drink their
taining its performance and teaching pres-
Sairam went beyond splendid or powerful.
tea three cups at a time. The first cup is bitter,
ence outside London. This included three
Accompanied by R.H. Prakash on the tuned
like life, and the second is sweet, like love.
days at the Yehudi Menuhin School at Cob-
clay pot or ghatam, that certain mridangam
The third is light, like the breath of a dying
ham in Surrey and a string of concerts and
player and the British-based violinist Jyotsna
man. Tunng add their own lyrics to tonight’s
workshops in Gateshead, Leicester, Notting-
Shrikanth, Sairam’s performance merited the
take on the song, singing about drinking
ham and elsewhere. It didn’t all run like
observation that on this here night she was
their tea “in a café by the sea”.
clockwork – overrunning was commonplace,
the best singer on the planet. The sponta- Bullets is the last song of the set, before
for example – yet Darbar pulled off an
neous inventions in her singing were the stuff the collective disappear offstage to regroup
extraordinary achievement.
of dreams, imagination and numinosity. At for a restlessly-demanded encore. It’s the
Each day brought morning, afternoon the best of times an animated singer, when pinnacle of a marvellous evening: a catchy
and evening concerts with a leavening of “An she sang her dance of Lord Krishna she posi- pop tune from the British group’s last album
Audience With…” conversations. To declare tively danced in a seated position. And the becomes all-the-more powerful in its new
an fRoots interest, at the festival I was offered other was Wasifuddin Dagar whose depiction setting. It’s tempting to bring up the Kalash-
the final day’s talk with the dhrupad maestro of dhrupad is revolutionary as only the 20th nikovs again – bullets have had an all-too-
Wasifuddin Dagar on the basis of an extraor- generation practitioner of Hindustan’s most real significance in Tinariwen’s past. Yet
dinary interview with the remarkable Aruna august vocal tradition can be. His concluding tonight, despite the thousands of miles that
Sairam for this magazine. The Sairam inter- piece about Lord Shiva was succinctness and separate the two bands, their songs seem
view was filmed for an independent docu- sumptuousness personified. perfectly at home together.
mentary on Indian art music while the Dagar
Ken Hunt John Ridpath
interview was filmed for SkyArts coverage.
Perforce the review must be down to
A Tinariwen and some Tunngs
highlights. Somjit Das Gupta brought, it was
announced, a 300-year-old dhrupadi rabaab,
the wood and skin and string progenitor of
the sarod, to the stage. Like old bones, it
creaked with fretboard clacks and string aches
and in tone and tonality it was nothing like,
say, the classical rebaab of the Afghani mae-
stro Mohammad Omar. But the performance
haunted me the whole festival. Doubling the
performance’s unusualness, Sukhwinder Singh
accompanied on the Punjabi double hand
drum before doing a percussion recital of his
own with the sarangi player Harjinder Singh
accompanying. There were many notable per-
formances. The saxophonist Jesse Bannister’s
recital with Anuradha Pal on tabla (especially
their folk-flavoured Pilu) – brought out
aspects of his playing that his work with
Samay never has. The Hindustani flautist
Photo: Philip Ryalls
Rupak Kulkarni – again Anuradha Pal accom-
panied – and their Tilang hit the heartstrings.
(Pal’s mid-distance gaze when she is flying
always remains something to cherish.) The
most consistent wonderment came from one
supporting player: Patri Satish Kumar. Look-
ing like a brown-skinned David Lindley or
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