By David Cloutier

    Much of the excitement surrounding world music today comes from the joy of discovery, the new and the old, the suddenly found in the old, the old in the new.  The story of Mali’s celebrated guitarist Ali Farke Toure’s discovery of American Blues at a folk festival in Bulgaria in the mid-sixties comes to mind.  Toure, who described himself as a “fool for the guitar”, had taken up the instrument, adapting it to African rhythms.  He discovered to his amazement that those very rhythms had been transported and transformed in ways so similar to his own across several centuries and several thousand miles.  Something in the blood?  A shared human, common something? 

    Contemporary music is not an isolated phenomenon.  A singer from a poor Dakar neighborhood can move an audience in American with the sounds of lyrics few understand.  Some have argued that World Music is just a salad bar, garbanzos and cucumbers and too many salty croutons.  A prescription for musical, if unusual, indigestion.  Others worry about the negative effects of “fusion” on traditional musical forms.  The truth is that musicians have never developed their art in blissful isolation.  Jeff Davis, musician and folklorist, described in a KZSC interview the almost total eclipsing of the music of the large number of German settlers in early America by other strains, particularly the Scotch-Irish, English and African.  All before radio and no CD’s.  Who’s to blame?  

    Certainly, the fusions promulgated by world class talents reflect their respective delights in each other’s offerings: witness Jan Garbarek and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on “Sagas and Ragas” (ECM).  These bowings by imaginative artists to each other in no way diminish their particular and immense artistries.  Harm to indigenous musical traditions is far more likely to be the result of cultural “soul loss”; the abandonment of a previously held world view of which music was the expression and played an integral part.  Recently, the Smithsonian Institution has begun a systematic program to repatriate the music recorded on wax cylinders at the turn of the century to various Native American tribes, with varying degrees of receptivity. 

    What happens at the Monterey World Music Festival is the result of our time, its ease in communication, the melding of boundaries.  It is also the result of an evolutionary cultural trend that was initiated early in this century and which had roots earlier in the 19^th century.  While the great empires began to fade, a new sense of commonality and universality of the human spirit emerged.  Voices out of the East found an audience in the West.  In the Victorian era, “Oriental” ceased to mean backward and suddenly became, if you will, “hip”.  Just count the number of turn-of-the-century editions of Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat”. 

    Composers too began to seek out distant sounds, finding inspiration in the pentatonic and new rhythms in the syncopations of jazz.  As early as 1910 classical Hindustani musicians toured Europe and the United States.  Inayat Khan, best known for his Sufi teachings, and his brothers, played as a back-up band for the imagined “Oriental” dances of Ruth St. Denis – a kind of “proto-fusion” in a vaudeville era when the classical and the banal often shared the same stage. 

    There have been more recent surges of interest in “ethnic” music.  The marvelous Nonesuch recordings in the early seventies brought attention to such artists as Hamza El Din, and the ground-breaking Argo recordings by Deben Bhattacharya broadened awareness, recording among farm animals the songs of throaty villagers.  The Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones’ interest in the ecstatic joujouka music of Morocco was another celebrated eclectic foray, a dozen or more years before the World Music birthed by Paul Simon and reared in the Real World of Peter Gabriel. 

    No longer only the subject of rarefied study, the music of the planet now has a name and a draw : World Music.  That is why the Monterey World Music Festival is both timely and, in fact, necessary.  Despite the Bosnias and Rwandas, we have collectively arrived at World Culture.  The Monterey World Music Festival is a celebration of that arrival.  (And what a party we’ve prepared!)

    Find your way to Monterey and drink deep at the Oasis of Sound.