On frontierless music

New Internationalist, July, 2000 by Louise Gray

recently, I was lucky enough to hear Omara Portuondo play to a packed concert hall in London. Along with about 3,000 other people I had a great time -- the Cuban singer does torch songs, expressing longing and usually unrequited love, like no other. But like, probably, most of the audience I understood barely a word she sang. So how do I know they were torch songs? Partly the music's mood -- a sultry big band sound that owed as much to Africa as it did to Europe. Then there was an inflection, a yearning that transcended the need for translation.

In a world where music's unofficial motto often seems to be `keep it real' the wider issue of translation is a vexed one. Containing as it does the seed of curiosity towards new musical territories and new formats, translation should be an exciting concept. One thinks of music without boundaries, of an historical sweep that sounds out Brazilian exhortations to African gods, Cape Verdean-Portugeuse fado in New England, Parisian rai and even Elvis' white-boy blues.

Some say that translation implies the antithesis of `realness' or authenticity. But the point is simple: music does not stay still. Its life-blood lies in a fertile cross-pollination of ideas. This is shown most elegantly in the Spanish/Moroccan sounds of Radio Tarifa or the rai/DJ crossover of U-Cefs album Halalium. It's demonstrated in the way Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan brought his dignified, devotional qawwali song to new, collaborative fields or most spectacularly in the wide range of Gypsy music. A recent festival, The 1,000 Year Journey, showcased Roma music from Eastern Europe, North Africa, Spain and Asia to exhilarating effect. Singers like Vera Bila and Esma Redzepova and bands with all the ancestral energy of the Taraf de Haidouks demonstrated the elasticity of music both traditional in form and forward-looking in attitude. Taking place at a time when Gypsies are once more being persecuted across Europe, the festival was an appropriate reminder that music is one of the most humane links available.

Recent years have certainly shown this to be true, helped by advances in recording technology. Groups in poorer countries have been able to distribute their albums and reach new audiences via the relatively cheap format of cassettes. (Whether MP3 technology, which enables tracks to be downloaded direct from the Internet, will have a similar effect remains to be seen. Computer-access is still far from being universal.) And it's obvious that the growing international status of artists such as Senegal's Youssou N'Dour, Algeria's Khaled or Hungary's Marta Sebastyen has benefited from the slow flow of this multinationalism.

Some may object that multicultural, transnational music will create new situations, where local markets -- especially those belonging to small languages or precariously poised populations -- will be swamped by the advance of anodyne pop, dreamed up by manufactured bands with a canny eye on the money. Yet this shows no sign of happening; the truth is that a whole range of music is capable of existing in parallel and of building various meeting points as they do so. A more serious objection lies in meaning: someone who knows nothing of Sufism can listen to Fateh Ali Khan, although it's true that she or he won't hear it in the same way that a devotee would. `So what?' is the attitude of another Sufi singer, this time the Iranian exile Sussan Deyhim. Her latest album, Madman of God (Crammed Discs), is a breathtaking excursion through Persian devotional song and one which features such great jazz musicians as Reggie Workman and Richard Horowitz in its mix. `A soul,' she says, `transcends cultural barriers and parameters of wherever you're from. Things are more subtle than we give them credit for. You know why? ... Subtlety requires interaction.'