WHEN THE MODE OF THE MUSIC CHANGES...
What strange & sneaky things have been happening within folk music this past 20 years. Once a bearded man with a guitar sat on a stool in a pub back room & sang of sweet primroses to a hushed & reverential audience. Now a 9-piece band will pull them up by the roots, wrap them in jazz brass, Cuban percussion & Hendrix pyrotechnics & have young & old dancing until dawn.
Although some of us have had scratchy discs of Bulgarian choirs & Balinese gamelan ensembles in our collections for years, our smug & exclusive club has been busted wide open by the record-buying lumpen proletariat. World music has arrived. Suddenly there are experts in every saloon bar holding forth on bangra as the authentic voice of the British Asian, or the influence of the Carter Family on early Dylan composition. Itís a classic example of a socio-cultural phenomenon rising almost entirely without trace.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the world famous Cambridge Folk Festival, now in its 39th year. As a major musical event it has evolved from a men-in-beards singaround in a field into a four-day multi-stage celebration of international music. Tents of all shapes & styles appear on the Thursday, making it look as if pretty Cherry Hinton on the edge of the city has been occupied by Mongol hordes. Rainbow families abound, all homespun tie-dye parents & Romany-chic children. Their numbers are seeded with representatives from the mainline youth subcultures - punks, goths, metalheads, skaters, white rastas, even eyelinered, gum-chewing Robbie Williams fans. Moving unscathed & unafraid amongst them all are short-sleeved bank clerks, teachers in carefully ironed jeans, red-eyed & bare-chested lager-swilling soccer fans - in fact, authentic samples from every conceivable stratum & sub-stratum of society. But the bedrock of this utopian condition of humanity is the unreconstructed hippy ñ thousands of them, wispy tonsures teased into thin ponytails held in place by cowboy hats, once-golden locks twisted into greying schoolgirl plaits poking out from beneath crocheted tea cosies. Time & again, as I wandered around the jewellery, clothing, food & deep massage stalls, I found myself staring incredulously at the second coming of Jerry Garcia or a Robert Crumb earth-sister cartoon made flesh.
And as each Irish jigsíníreels outfit, authentic Chicago blues band, Malagasy choir & legendary singer-songwriter hits the stage, the polyglot crowd rises as one & boogies on down. To watch & listen from the back of the crowd is about as exhilarating as it can get at a live music event. Lump-in-throat, tear-in-eye exhilarating because the only matter of any interest to anyone is music. Kids run amongst the dopers & the drinkers; uniformed police wander benignly through the packed crowds; people stand, sit, lie everywhere drinking coffee, reading War & Peace, dancing like your Mum & Dad & never a punch gets thrown.
Iíve been to five Cambridge Festivals & each long weekend has pulled in the sun, almost as if it would be churlish of meteorological providence to share out the clouds that abound elsewhere. Yesterday & today were at worst a little grey at the edges, at best Mediterranean. And the musicÖ Unforgettable as ever (& for anybody whoís been to all 39 Festivals so far, thatís going to be quite a feat of memory). Two bands confirmed their immortality fro me yesterday, both having laboured for many years in obscurity, both having suddenly burst into the light of day at around about the same time.
First is Dervish, Irish song & dance band without peer, even in so competitive a field. Driven along rhythmically by two bouzoukis & a twelve-string guitar, tune carried by fiddle, flute & accordion & the whole fronted for songs by the icy clear, warm as summer voice of Cathy Jordan, the band works to a pulse that confirms its name absolutely. The slipping & sliding that goes on between topline & rhythm is so compelling itís impossible not to dance when they power into a set.
Second is the outfit named by one besotted correspondent of a folk magazine as ìthe best band in the worldî. From Quebec comes (not often enough) La Bottine Souriante, a phenomenal 9-piece band ñ more an orchestra ñ which has branched out from its unlikely base ñ Quebecois traditional song & dance - with bewildering speed & energy, embracing just about every genre that underpins Western musical modality. Built on the tap-shoe rhythms of the seated guitarist, mandolin-player & singer Eric Beaudry, a whirlwind of fiddle, piano accordion, piano, trumpet, trombones (tenor & bass), saxes & acoustic & electric basses takes us on a world trip of astonishing breadth & depth, all achieved without ever leaving the entirely regional behind. I believe that when they first toured (& the bandís been going now for some 25+ years), the tour was underwritten by the Canadian government. Whatever the measure of their success around the world now, the band should be permanently funded by a grateful administration.
As The Fugs informed us in 1966, when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake. Tomorrow is the last day of the Cambridge Folk Festival. I shall report back to my breathless public on my return. Anticipate in particular (& how will you contain your impatience?) commentary on Flook, Shooglenifty & Linda Thompson. And I shall make particular reference to the general structural stability of Cambridge in the wake of this explosion of music from around the world.
2:14:20 AM 
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