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 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 breakdown 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 ins piration’
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!
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News
7th September 2008
Woodworks Festival Bedfordshire
9th September
'Ballads &
Beats' CD launch, Church Crookham Junior School, Fleet,
September 21st.
Free
afternoon concert,
Gheluvelt
Park, Worcester,
Boka Halat's
programme of Village Hall shows in FIVE different counties is
now almost complete! For confirmed dates between September 20th
2008 and March 2009,
see What's happening
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