The strengthening of music tourism will bring people to Adelaide for a quick tour of the world, as Kerryn Goldsworthy writes.

MUSIC tourism around the world takes a number of forms; as with any other kind of tourism, the tacky end manifests as the kind of mass commodification you see in Vienna’s Mozart chocolate wrappers or Elvis teddybears at Graceland. The other end – whatever is the opposite of tacky – is the complex set of attractions that draws visitors to particular places in order to listen to the music itself.

In Australia there is a growing culture of regional music festivals where the name of the place is becoming increasingly synonymous with the style of music regularly celebrated there by fans on pilgrimage. Tamworth for country and Port Fairy for folk are probably the two best-known, but among the others there’s Byron Bay blues, Woodford folk and Wangaratta jazz, as well as the Hawkesbury National Fiddle Festival.

The deep connection between music and place is the basic premise on which the original Womad festival and all subsequent Womads and Womadelaides have been founded, bringing together examples of particular musical forms and practices from all over the world.

It’s the opposite of the Eurovision Song Contest or so-called Idol shows, where – with a few honourable and moving exceptions – cultural differences are flattened out to nothing, and the music is homogenised to fit some synthetic and hypothetical popular-music norm of Western culture. On the Womadelaide program for 2004, even those artists whose music is characterised by a mix of influences and styles are working in an original way to produce music of an imaginative, sometimes inspirational hybridity.

Two of the Australian-based groups, for instance, draw their sounds from across the world. Monsieur Camembert is a five-piece band whose Eastern European gypsy sound mixes Hungarian, Russian, Romanian and French influences with tango and swing. Los Cabrones, one of the biggest bands on the program, with 15 musicians (including a five-piece rhythm section), is described as “Australia’s premier Afro-Cuban Latin-jazz group”, influenced not only by the music of Cuba but by also by the kind of New York City jazz that was itself originally the product of mixed influences from elsewhere – a kind of third-generation regional influence.

The program also includes the Brazilian singer-songwriter and Minister for Culture, Gilberto Gil, who developed a whole international style dubbed “tropicalismo”, incorporating international pop music with South American regional styles and infusing the mix with overt political and social commentary. There’s Algerian Hamoud Baroudi, who sang with a German band before going solo and incorporating Algerian, Brazilian and African rhythms and techniques into his work.
The work of other featured artists is more closely tied to a single place, as with the traditional English folk material of 26-year-old Eliza Carthy (daughter of the legendary Martin). Irish band Kila, formed 13 years ago on the streets of Dublin, shows its Gaelic origins not just in the music but often in the language of the songs. Sultan Khan’s music is an unusually pure product of his region and history: he plays traditional classical ragas on the Sarangi, a 38-string Indian violin, of which he’s described as an eighth-generation master.

Africa, in particular, with its complex and turbulent history, produces artists whose music is intricately tied to the political events of the region. Mali’s Oumou Sangare is, through her music, a social commentator and champion for women’s rights in Africa, while the Touareg group Tinariwen was formed 20 years ago by young Touareg men in exile.

Some of the most intriguing performers are those who have recovered and reclaimed indigenous aspects through music, where original cultures have been scrambled or destroyed. Oki Kano is a Japanese musician with Ainu (indigenous Japanese) ancestry; he uses the tonkori, a traditional Ainu instrument, to compose new songs with reggae and blues influences as well as to preserve and perform some of the old Ainu songs from Hokkaido. R. Carlos Nakai is a Native American musician and composer, a classically trained trumpet and cornet player whose music for the Native American cedar flute has been award-winning and prolific.

In many cultures, the music’s tone and timbre come directly from instruments fashioned from whatever the region has to offer – the most familiar example to Australians being the didgeridoo. The 21st century’s globalised version is the music of an extraordinary group of teenage musicians and dancers from Lesotho called Sotho Sounds, whose instruments are fashioned from the urban wastelands of contemporary South Africa: scrap metal, inner tubes, junkyard wood and wire.

Womadelaide takes the place/music connection to a further dimension: a particular city is becoming associated with global diversity. Adelaide is now a place where cultural differences are celebrated annually through the music of the world.