Last year Chicago’s annual World Music Festival was clobbered by 9/11, as nearly two dozen acts–most of them major international artists–canceled their appearances. The fest has rebounded vigorously, with a lineup that’s at least as diverse as last year’s was supposed to be. But we’re not out of the woods yet.
The 50-some acts on this year’s schedule cover a lot of geographical and cultural territory, but the most striking trend is the abundance of acts that bring together disparate genres or borrow from one or more foreign cultures. Cross-pollination can often make for exciting music, creating interesting juxtapositions or drawing attention to universalities, and it’s an inevitable product of globalization. But it also seems to indicate that the musician who dedicates a lifetime to mastering a single traditional discipline–like Julien Jalal Edinne–is an increasingly endangered species.
yMAMAR KASSEY
yDAVID KRAKAUER
Garmarna focused on the von Bingen songs at their last local show, two years ago; this time they’ll play stuff spanning their career and probably new music as well.
yTRUCO & ZAPEROKO
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Led by Venezuelan songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andres Levin, who’s produced records for a who’s who of Latin- American rock and pop acts (Aterciopelados, Ely Guerra, El Gran Silencio, Carlinhos Brown, Moreno Veloso), this dynamic dance band careens around the cultural triangle that connects Nigeria, Cuba, and New York. (The New York Times’s Ben Ratliff has called the band “a history of the transmission of Yoruban culture in a nutshell.”) No records yet, but on a hot four-song demo they emphasize the common threads running through Afrobeat, son, boogaloo, and dozens of other styles. Breakbeats shuffle beneath the sly guajira “I Wanna Fly With You,” which interpolates a snippet of Roy Ayers’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” while “Solito me quede” combines elements of cumbia and hip-hop with Levin’s acidic electric guitar and Brian Lynch’s fiery trumpet.
