Out of Tune: Nov 2019
This October saw my 8th or 9th visit to WOMEX – this time held in its apparently northernmost location in Tampere Finland.
It’s such a whirlwind of an experience – 2700 ‘delegates’ from across the globe: label managers, booking agents, venues, festivals, managers and more than 250 artists. WOMEX, the world music expo, is structured to offer a thoroughly intensive networking opportunity – a trade fair during the days, and then at night at least 20 different bands perform in five different venues in staggered 45 minute sets between 9pm – 2am each evening. People spend their days rushing between hastily scheduled half hour meeting slots, catching the odd conference or daytime gig, greedily imbibing wine and assorted Russian / Belgian / Finnish / Canadian snacks at the various country-sponsored drinks towards the end of the day, and before moving between gig venues – only staying for a few songs at each music ensemble before layering up for Tampere’s fast arriving winter to trudge across to another venue to catch another set.
I tend to go at a different pace to most at WOMEX. I’m not selling a band or booking a festival with a mountain of appointments to make and people’s lanyards to locate. I tend to schedule a few key conversation with friends and colleagues to push forward ongoing conversations and enjoy the music later in the evening. This year, I loved some of the older musicians, rediscovered later in life by curious younger artists. There was Los Wembler’s de Iquitos from Peru, the Sanchez family who have been playing Amazonian cumbia together for 50 years. Olivier Battesti came across an old track by this amazing almost disbanded band in a New York vinyl shop, covered it with his own band and then late set out to track the band down and help to raise their profile across Latin America. And Dona Onete, an 80 year old teacher from Brazil who has only recently started to perform. She was a riot of passion and personality who sang her way through the set in an armchair. At the close of her set, she was helped out of her seat to her feet by the rest of her band, a dashing young band of male musicians who then knelt around her for their curtain call.
My absolute favourite find was the phenomenal Ak Dan Gwan Chil – a nine-piece ensemble playing on traditional instruments who rocked their way through a powerful theatrical set filled with folk songs, punk and music verging on heavy metal. They also won my best costume award for the weekend.
I was really thrilled to see Marouf Majidi’s set with his new project MA Rouf – bringing together Persian maqams and Scandinavian jazz united through his own sufi-infused soulfulness. I met Marouf at the end of 2017 when I visited Helsinki for the Baltic Circle Festival. I’d asked some WOMEX friends whom they would recommend as interesting musicians to meet during my visit. I briefly met and saw the wonderful Hilde Lansmen and XXX (check) whose Sami / electronica project we subsequently brought to a Dash Café last year. I met Marouf on that visit on the way to the airport. Over a quick cup of coffee, we chatted about his musical life in Helsinki. Marouf is Kurdish Iranian and came to Finland fifteen years ago as a refugee. Our conversation, in which he talked of feeling Out of Tune for years with Finnish musicians before one day something changed so that he found the right resonance in Helsinki but now feels it when he returns to play with musicians in Turkey or Iran, sparked my current Out of Tune project.
Marouf and I have Skyped and Whatsapped, emailed and Facebooked as we developed the thinking around a new production. But I had never seen him play. This week I had the privilege to watch him playing his new jazz set at WOMEX and then later in Helsinki, play a solo straighter set at a gig at the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki, teach Persian singing in Sibelius Academy and his more informal noodling on the tar, setar or tambour as we began to talk through Out of Tune.
I brought the Aeneid, the text we’re using as inspiration for Out of Tune, and we spent a few days together in Helsinki plotting and talking. Virgil’s Aeneid (an epic Roman poem from 20BC) tells of Aeneas who flees from Troy, an Eastern war-torn city, and makes his way across the Mediterranean to sanctuary, challenging assimilation and settlement in Italy. Together Marouf and I dipped into the text in English, Kurdish and some stumbling Latin (mine but long forgotten) attempting to get to the essence of the story, placing it alongside Marouf’s own story of migration to Europe.
Out of Tune will eventually be an artistic journey into the heart of Europe, a contemporary retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid through the prism of today’s migrants. The few days in Helsinki was only the beginning but it entirely strengthened my sense that the parallels and contrasts of this ancient beautiful poem to today are apposite and powerful. We’re reimagining the Aeneid as a musical poem, telling the stories of artists in Europe today – i’m excited for the next steps in the journey.
To find out more about the production, see here.
