If your musical tastes run only as far as Britney or Madonna and you have chosen to look no further, you need to go to the Rainforest World Music Festival in Kuching. This is not some elitist rant, insisting that “music that is difficult and demanding is good for you, whether you like it or not!” If you actually don’t like a piece of music, don’t listen to it. There was plenty to choose from with one of RWMF’s 17 official performers and fringe bands. Some of the music on offer is not easily accessible. It often doesn’t accord with the standard sounds derived from rock/blues/jazz and it often employs rhythms that many of us don’t immediately relate to. Some of the sounds are not necessarily sweetly melodic. Some (not much) of the music is sufficiently obscure to make it pointless to listen to for the western biased listener who has not taken a deeper interest. But to watch and listen at the same time…now that is a completely different experience, and will often result in finding that the listening alone gains considerable appeal and some meaning. The ululating (look it up) of the Tanzanian Zawose Family sisters is piercing, alarming even, until you see the huge grins and the wild but very disciplined rhythmic dancing that accompanies it. As the MC said, they raised goosebumps in the pre-show workshops. They even got volunteers to have a go, and with the gentle help of Moana of the Maoris, we all found the music.The various performers, for the most part, are folk musicians from their own cultures. But they are almost without exception fully aware of and in tune with the dominant popular music genre styles. There is no sense of obscurantist rejection of “mainstream” music. There is however a willingness to experiment, combine and conflate their own traditional styles with others. After all “world music” is folk music, which is all about what folk like to hear, not just what is “good” for them, so it develops and responds to audience. Quite right too! Listen for instance to Malaysia’s Akasha. The Sitar makes it clear that there is an Indian base here, the guitars - Spain? Nashville? The drums, well they could be from Sabah, Africa, South America….anywhere where rhythm is practiced, well musically anyway. Keyboard.Beethoven and Liszt used that, but so did Jerry Lee Lewis. The result from Akasha was outstanding, beautiful to listen to and near impossible not to dance to. Their seamless incorporation of MJ’s “Beat It” into one otherwise oriental number was evidence, if more were needed, that there are very few boundaries here, and this nod to recent events was fully appreciated by the audience too. And did you know that the concertina was invented in Sabah? Well, sort of. The Sompoton is apparently the Daddy here, leading to harmonicas, concertinas, reed organs and stuff like that. And it can be used in some seriously funky music, just go listen to Kinabalu Merdu Sound. Older Sabahans will enjoy the familiarity, but so will their grandkids who have enjoyed the sounds of KL or further afield. They will hear the same thing, but different, if you see what I mean.                     The festival has great atmosphere and there is so much variety that there is no call to like everything. The workshops varied from a serious lecture ( Sompoton) to “ah stuff it, lets just have a good time and play some music and dance a lot” (Zawose Family), via virtuoso displays on various instruments separately or together (Hungarian Violin, Sarawakian Sape - superb). We are not musical aficionados, we don’t know anything about the background or theory of music, but we had a great time, learned a lot, and we will be back. The festival was affected by the swine flu scare and by the economic woes of the world. The few resulting rough edges were hardly noticeable because the core event and its organizers got it right in all of the important ways. For more information: www.rainforestmusic-borneo.com *images property of Suchens.com* |
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