…took some time to warm up but once in the zone she held strong with searing banshee vocals leading an off kilter repetitious war-like Celtic / Nordic folk drum rhythm laced with ambient jazz trumpet. Indeed I had an elegant vision of running through Christian knights with a Viking broadsword in slow motion, gloriously rich crimson blood spraying ceremoniously up my wolf-skin tunic. A quadrangle of free visceral reeling, a soul-opening-up-to-the-sun platform, a sky piercing call-to-arms, letting all come that will and landing wherever it comes ashore. Part of the way through the show, Marie Boine, come straight from the northlands -30 degrees centigrade wintering in Norway exits at the back of the stage. Meanwhile her cohorts strike up an aggravated improvised free jazz explosion, gnarled beligerant haphazard bass chords dive like a gliding lead juggernaut out over the crowd, sea borne on the air, the drums peeling and pummelling the wake to break open the afternoon like a can of god-snakes over the scorched 38 centigrade degree earth. And upon the crowd it came down, splashing into vapour just before impact, posed hippy dancing weaved in and out of a suspended scene, the music of a spinning death blow, a helmet bent inwards by the seeking power of a throwing axe, and the last moments of life, in a dimethyl reel, as it dreams itself away, out through eyes of surprise, out through the veins…
Tripping over to stage number three in the cloudy stenching humidity,
the steam-hung crowd awaits Dhafer Youssef.
The instant he appears we feel a sudden weight from above as we are landed on.
He kneels prostrate between us, eyes
tensioned straight ahead, soon it becomes evident he is in the grips of a silent
seizure, with others we lay him down on his side. Frozen in time his hands and
feet pick up the sharp rapid rhythm, tapping / air treading, absorbed in the
groove from the depths of his seizure. St John’s and a doctor from the crowd
assist then hand over to the ambulance crew. We step in and relate the story
which had yet be told despite recollections of training on these matters from
the saints. Wild sharp jazz beats and fluid voice breach the canopy as the
stretcher crew receives applause. Atmospheric falsetto, sparse open calm
flipped over and built into deft crested waves of math-crafted petri-rhythm.
Rolling in late and soaking up the flavour of the air from South
America, a positive short feast, hydrant red flowers passed around, stomach
braced for more drink and more paced for raw stink of humming summer like fruit,
close in the troop.
And later ravenous devouring of burger theories to the bright dew
envelope of Antibalas afrobeat funk
from New York. A rest in a rose garden then the half sleep of the dead to the
planar elevated vibes of Sudha
Ragunathan. In the central piece, fruity kaleidoscopic vocal gymnastics,
crow-like illuminated waverys with fragments of voodoo zombi-dream sequence,
sustained rapture.
The final stage of Saturday, Hugh
Masekela, priestly in purple, ridiculous moves, slow train chugging out
from the mouth, slowing slowing stop… and a hearty ointment for the scolds of
the day, cooling in the night, some stars seen out, a calling out of the spirit
to douse inhibition in family petrol.
Soweto in the sunshine, a pure moment of shade and raised rising
voices, descending passion wiping out in the sea seed of baritone waves, the
sun stellar held perfectly behind a spear tower tree trunk in the finest hour. Soweto Gospel Choir singing a perpetual
dawn in the late afternoon, the wizard of heaven sleeping soundly dreaming on
clouds, a zen nothing beat of cane on the head of a deity, gone or never… some
stale sections but when the souls spoke they did with candour, skygone absent
in the skipping waves of an afternoon drunk.
Deep red wine cascading down in the new dark, no stars seen, lit up
grounds heaving and people slipping in and out, do you mean to talk or talk to
mean? Hammer drunk, washing up in semblance of post-rudeboy days, squashed-in
happy, Jimmy Cliff, a long Jamaican celebration
truncated by living grass of beer bar, late dining on Odin and Freyja, shown
tapestries of Danish winter blizzards and tales of the years of Skaldic unity
now divided, reminiscent in Norse autumn thoughts, back across the oceans and
mountains to the edge of the desert.
Last day, another burning afternoon, spent close to mist haze,
clothed in waterfall spray diamonds to soothe off the sun, a Swamp Thing emerging from the muddy
ground, tackling the heat with endless Sunday blues sliding up creek and down
across to the colder sub Australis lands. Taking off in the early eve to the
coast and diving into a mellow bubbly scene at the beach, floating effortless
in clean ocean brine, a salted wound complains for an instant but vanishes in
the bliss. The horizon of a long weekend hanging orange and bright, a smile of
earth and steel, electric grass, a turning wheel, slow, now passed.
Dominic J Clark
