Hear it & dance to it!      Make it!      Get it!     What's Happening?     Home     Links

FOLK? WORLD? ROOTS?

FORGET THE LABELS, LISTEN TO THE MUSIC!

The one question about their band Boka Halat which makes Roger Watson and Musa Mboob take deep breaths and roll their eyes is: What kind of music is it then?

How do you classify the unclassifiable? Particularly when the whole point of the band is to break down stereotype images of the people who play in it. Their wry answer to the genre question is: the music you’d expect this group of people to make. The one thing that’s certain though is that it is ‘Made in England’, because that’s where all the members of the band are permanently domiciled!

 Boka Halat’s co-directors are Roger Watson & Musa Mboob. Their cultural origins are, respectively, English and Gambian. Roger Watson has over 40 years of English folk music behind him, during which he has been responsible for some cutting edge bands in a very conservative movement. From 1989 to 2008 he was the Artistic Director of TAPS, which under 19 years of his guidance carved out a reputation for getting people involved in English music, who never thought they would be. Musa Mboob, from a family of Gambian Wolof griots, and himself a master drummer, known also in the Gambian media as a high profile singer and song-writer, now lives in Sussex and was co-founder of Boka Halat back in 1999.

A performance or workshop team can extend to anything between 3 and 7 members. Popular line-ups include Gambian guitarist Ousman Beyai, English fiddler Tom Fairbairn (both Ousman and Tom also play bass) and Iqbal Khan Pathan on Indian percussion. An additional bass player (Cliff Eastabrook) can be added, to allow Ousman and Tom to concentrate on guitar and fiddle, and Thomas Christen can add alto sax into the mix.

The Boka Halat technique is not ‘multiculturalism’. The name means ‘mutual inspiration’ in Musa’s native Wolof language, and the technique is INTERcultural: to see what a group of diverse musicians, living in the same area, can create which none of them could arrive at on their own. Wherever the melodic or rhythmic stimulus originates, the band builds its arrangement on all members contributing a response from their own experience. Don’t expect the African songs to sound like Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Yussou N’Dour, nor the English ones like Show of Hands or Maddy Prior. Instead, be amazed at how naturally an English ballad sits with rhythms from the Gambia and the Punjab, or at how a song based on the Mandinka rice harvest can move smoothly into a jig from Wessex. Try finding a genre pigeon-hole for that!

                                                                                                                                                    web design by Anne Garrison