Echoes of the Land

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Interview with Mariza

Mariza, the striking, single-monikered singer who has become the international face of the traditional Portuguese song form called fado has broken a barrier or three in her career.

Born 33 years ago in Mozambique, of African and European background (her mother was from Mozambique, her father from Portugal and her full name is Mariza Reis Nunes), Mariza grew up in Lisbon's Mouraria-Alfama district whose clubs and taverns frequented by sailors, prostitutes, the children of slaves and working men and women were said to have been the 19th-century birthplace of fado.

It was there, as a precocious five-year-old, that she began to sing the slow, rhythmic, often melancholic songs, what some have called the Portuguese blues. Though steeped in the traditions and enamoured of the greatest fado singer of the 20th century, Amalia Rodriguez, when Mariza returned to singing fado in her early 20s, after a teenage flirtation with jazz and pop, she began to make small but significant changes to a style largely unchanged in 150 years.

With her closely cropped platinum blonde hair and a penchant for colourful necklaces, rather than the traditional black bun and severe black clothes, Mariza would have stood out anyway.

But when she added hints of Brazilian rhythms, jazz and, more recently, a full orchestra rather than only the Portuguese guitar as backing, the slender singer ran the risk of offending the purists even as she opened up fado to a generation more interested in rock and pop than the "old" music.

However, any opprobrium at home was quelled as soon as she opened her mouth to sing. A similar effect was obvious among fado novices as we discovered last year when Mariza was a success at the Sydney Festival.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The 2007 edition of WOMAD in the UK announced the line-up for the festival. Baaba Maal (Senegal); Balkan Beat Box (Israel/USA); Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba (Mali); Ben Taylor (USA); Bill Cobham (USA); Candi Staton (USA); Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); CJ Chenier (USA); Daara J (Senegal); El Tanbura (Egypt); Kronos Quartet (USA); Kung Nai & Ouch Savy (Cambodia); Lila Downs (Mexico); Mariza (Portugal); Marzoug (Algeria); Sam Tshabalala (South Africa); Samba Mapangala & Orchestre Virunga (Kenya/Democratic Republic of Congo); Serta-Gesar Troupe (Tibet); Sheila Chandra (UK); Steel Pulse (UK); The Dhol Foundation (UK) The Imagined Village (UK); Toots & The Maytals (Jamaica); Toumast (Niger Republic); Warsaw Village Band (Poland)

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Womad New Zealand 2007 CD Released

The CD was released by Shock Records NZ through Border Music on Monday 12 February and features 16 tracks from some of the fantastic worldwide performers set to take to the stages at WOMAD New Zealand 2007 at New Plymouth's Brooklands Park and TSB Bowl from March 16-18.

The CD truly is a world music journey, beginning in Mali with a track from "the Golden Voice of Africa" Salif Keita, followed by sensational French/Swiss/Argentine tango act Gotan Project.

Next up is Kronos Quartet and Afrobeat superstar Femi Kuti from Nigeria, with tracks from New Caledonia's traditional Kanak performers Celenod, and the legendary Mahotella Queens from South Africa.

New Zealand's own Don McGlashan contributes a track, before the stunning sounds of Portugese fado singer Mariza, and Mexico's Lila Downs. Next up is Australia's Augie March, Chinese bamboo flautist Guo Yue and another Australian act, Lior.

The festival's incredible world tour continues - off to Israel for Yasmin Levy, and to Tuva for Huun Huur Tu, before coming back to New Zealand with a track from dDub and finishing with Indonesia's SambaSunda.

One Love - Johnny Clegg

South African musician Johnny Clegg, who's popularly known as the 'White Zulu,' has released a new solo album, featuring a song about Zimbabwe. The CD, called "One Love", features a track critical of President Robert Mugabe's administration. It's entitled "The Revolution will eat its children"

In the song, Clegg specifically denounces the political and economic crisis in Zimbabwe. In an interview with South Africa's Mail and Guardian Newspaper, Clegg states that the song is open criticism of Mugabe's government. In the interview, Clegg adds that while culture should never be used as a weapon because that would reduce cultural value, musicians and other performers have a duty to draw attention to injustice.

In addition, Clegg says "The Revolution Will Eat its Children" is about the "inability of certain African leaders to relinquish power, despite its being time to do so."

Monday, February 26, 2007

Interview with Johnny Clegg

Gazette: Your father took you into the townships when you were 9. What was it about that culture that you seemed to connect with at such a young age?

Clegg: It was more the way he connected with it. He was a crime reporter and he had connected with the most crazy, colourful groups of people in the underworld, but also connected to music, connected to key figures of the community, so he operated as a journalist, writing and interacting with these people. And he was also somebody who wanted to communicate that people were living these amazing lives in the townships. These lives were absolutely incredible - the intensity, the colour, the texture, the paradoxes, the inability to resolve conflicting loyalties. All of this stuff was communicated to me at the age of 7, 8, 9, 10. I became, I suppose, infected with the same passion and interest. It was about real people struggling to overcome real problems, real contradictions. And South Africa was such a contradictory society in the 60s. It was forcefully separated on the one hand, but on the other hand, people would meet at drinking houses, at clubs ...

The African population itself was going through a huge transformation from the rural, tribal world to the modern, urban Western world. And all of these fascinating paradoxes .... part of apartheid's huge negative image abroad was the government's attempt to stop urbanization. They didn't want black people in the cities. They wanted to have what they called feeder locations outside of the white areas. So a southwest township, which later became Soweto, was one of these big feeder populations, which were not supposed to be permanent. They were supposed to be returned...every 11 months, you had to go back to the rural area where you came, get a new labour contract and come back again to Johannesburg. The only problem is, you had people born in Soweto, who never, ever ... you had second and third generation Sowetans, and the government had to accept that this was now permanent dwellings, a permanent city.

These are all the contradictions and all the ironies that the country threw up, and (my father) was interested in that. And he was also a bit of a lunatic, because he would take me to places that were just ...I remember once going with him to...he was covering a feud between two groups in an African church. A young preacher had broken away from the main preacher. I have a very clear recollection of these two groups standing dressed in their Sunday best with rocks in their hands, ready to throw stones. And my dad put me into a police van while he went out to take photographs. And the police guy said to him, "Are you mad? How can you bring a 9-year-old kid?" And my dad was just a total newshound. He said "Don't worry, don't worry. You can sit him in the van. He's done this before. He knows what's going on. You do your job. I'll do my job. You're sitting in the police van. It's no big deal. I'm not going to take this kid back and lose the story." And he just talked his way through it. And I sat in a van and watched these events unfold and how the police went in and separated the groups and he got his story, he got his photographs - and, in a way, I felt like this curtain was always being moved away for me to see the other side of South Africa - by him. It was always this magic ... these moments. And then the curtain was closed because you'd go back into a white area, back into a white school, back into ... you know ... during the week. And so I think I always knew that there was another reality on the other side of town, which, I think, most white kids didn't know. And they didn't care.