Migration puts the ‘world’ in world music

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The eighth Migration Music Festival (流浪之歌音樂節) gears up this weekend with a series of lectures and workshops to lay the groundwork for its big opening concert at Bitan (碧潭) in Taipei County next Friday, which will be followed by two days of concerts at Taipei City’s Zhongshan Hall (台北市中山堂).

This year, the theme of the festival is “South.” According to project coordinator Alice Lin (林怡瑄), this theme evolved from the development of Growing Up Wild (野生), the most recent album by Golden Melody winner Lin Sheng-xiang (林生祥) published by Trees Music & Art (大大樹音樂圖像).

Lin is an artist based in Meinung (美濃), Kaohsiung County, and got his start with the creation of the protest band Labor Exchange (交工樂隊). The cover art for his new album features wood-block prints by Cantonese artist Wang Liang (王亮), whose work will also feature in an exhibition associated with the festival (tomorrow until Thursday at Taipei Artist Village).

“Both these artists are from the geographic south of their countries ... In many countries the south tends to be more culturally diverse and have more complex ethnic interactions. In Taiwan, we in the north often talk about ‘southerners’ and see them as somewhat different ... so we wanted to explore this idea of a southern perspective,” Lin said.

One of the international groups that will be visiting is Filipino band Nityalila, which blends together classical Indian music with Filipino folk music and the environmental concerns of sing-songwriter Nityalila Saulo. Lo Cor de la Plana comes from Marseilles and seeks to revive Occitan culture and language, which was once widely spoken in parts of southern France. Also from Marseilles is Sam Karpienia, who brings together rebetiko (a kind of Greek urban folk), flamenco and Provencal musical traditions. Kol Oud Tof draws on the musical traditions of Israel, Morocco and memories of the Arab expansion into the Iberian peninsula to create its own unique sound, while Habib Koite from Mali is noted for a “pan-Malian” musical sound. Along with Lin Sheng-xiang, these artists will perform at the Grand Opening on Oct. 2, and give individual concerts at Zhongshan Hall on Oct. 3 and Oct. 4.

Another part of the festival that will take place in Chiayi has been titled Project South (南計畫). It includes a collaborative project between Taiwanese artists in the beiguan (北管) group Qing He Xuan (慶和軒) and pipa (琵琶) specialist Chung Yu-feng (鍾玉鳳), with Japanese guitarist Ken Othake and Finnish folk musician Pekko Kappi, who have all been living in the town of Budai (布袋), Chiayi County, for the last month working on a musical fusion that will be presented at the concert in Chiayi on Sunday and at the final concert in Taipei on Oct. 4.

Migration Music Festival is largely the result of the efforts of Trees Music & Art founder Chung She-fong (鍾適芳) to promote world music in Taiwan. It achieved significant success with free concerts in Da-an Park.

After the 2007 festival was catastrophically disrupted by bad weather, the festival has been struggling to recreate its earlier success in a more reliable indoor environment. This has necessitated replacing the hugely popular free outdoor concerts with indoor performances. “It has been difficult to overcome the expectation that the shows should be free,” Lin said, but through the use of preliminary lectures and demonstrations, as well as the sale of cheap one- and two-day concert passes, she hopes that this hurdle can be overcome.