Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Sometimes the least starry Womad festivals are the most rewarding: attendees at Charlton Park in Wiltshire can allow themselves to be guided by serendipity or by noticing which acts are magnetically drawing in passers-by and refusing to allow them to drift onwards.An early example of this was The Zawose Queens on the main stage, who began with a small but loyal following and ended with a whole field. Untangling the genealogical complexities of the Queens, who belong to a prominent Tanzanian musical family, is as intricate as any medieval court. Close relations Pendo and Leah have pushed women’s voices to the fore of music that has traditionally been reserved for men.Their recent debut album gives their thumb piano and percussion grooves a tasteful electronic burnish, and here they were joined by, among others, their British producers, Tom Excell on guitar and Oli Barton-Wood on keyboards. The set started off rougher and rawer than the record, muhembe drums and percussion prominent, but when they locked into the Indian-ocean groove of “Sauti Ya Mama” and then the hectic bustle of “Maisha” the set came alive. There was a look back to one of forebear Hukwe Zawose’s songs and a new number “we pretty much wrote yesterday”, according to Barton-Wood, with a deep dance rhythm. At the end they did the splits and performed somersaults.Another example of magnetism was the Welsh triple harpist Cerys Hafana, the polar opposite of the Queens’ boisterousness. Playing a harp and singing keeps one rooted to the spot, and a swelling crowd pressed in close and silent to hear every note as the wind stilled and the sun started to set. Hafana defamiliarises traditional Welsh and English music, from the psalmody of “Cilgerran” to the balladry of “Willie o’Winsbury”. For the most part the harp was the centre of the sound, although Sam Robinson added bodhrán on some songs and others had tape loops, and Hafana occasionally switched to the very lowest register of a clarinet. “Here’s a song about the baby Jesus . . . going on a murderous rampage in Hereford,” was how she announced “The Bitter Withy”, played against a track of clacks and detuned bells. “This is a song about the end of the world” heralded “Y Môr O Wydr”, all low ostinato and the knock of the bodhrán.Kumbia Boruka, a French band of Mexican origin, were based around a steady drum pulse and accordion riffs, answered by trumpet and trombone, the music the slow-train inevitability of Latin American cumbia. Bob Sikou enthusiastically coached the crowd into calls and responses, regular loud cries of “¡Cumbia!” Sikou cheekily described cumbia as “the original reggae” and, to prove it, the band dropped into a brief dub passage before emerging at double speed. Exhausting, but in a good way.Amadou & Mariam are old Womad favourites, both from regular slots as a duo and from Mariam Doumbia’s appearance with Les Amazones d’Afrique. The blind couple from Mali have surpassed 40 years in the business and at first Amadou Bagayoko’s guitar playing sounded slightly underpowered. But their westernised west African funk is always infectious, and the arpeggiated synthesiser anthem “Sabali”, ending with polyglot declarations of love, would have raised the roof had the open air stage had one. “Beaux Dimanches” on record suffers from a production by Manu Chao that tips just the wrong side of twee, but here it had the toughness and urgency of the couple’s very earliest work; percussion and drum breaks and a series of false climaxes sealed another triumph.The Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita, based for a long time in England, has been an inventive exponent of his instrument. Many of his recent projects, from collaborations with the Welsh harpist Catrin Finch to African Rhapsodies, a full orchestral recording, have been tasteful to a fault, so it was good to hear him with his newly assembled Homeland Band taking the opportunity to unleash his inner rocker once again. Standing, kora strapped to his waist, he marshalled a large group of tropically attired musicians. Some of the material was anodyne balladry but at its best it had a full mbalax snap, with cracking sabar drums and Keita playing furious high-speed circling riffs.Womad brings music from less familiar parts of the world. Saigon Soul Revival played Vietnam war-era bar music, a mixture of surf guitar, up-tempo soul and rock-’n-roll, all with Nguyễn Anh Minh’s high sweet vocals. The most interesting songs were a ska number (less common in 1960s Vietnam) about forced marriage, and a closing traditional song highlighting Jeremy Vinh Laville playing the đàn nguyệt, a two-stringed banjo. Womad has also had a good run of east Asian music playing with folkloric themes; this year’s instalment was the indigenous Taiwanese singer Sauljaljui, who played the yueqin, a round Chinese lute, with a prog-rock dexterity, emerging out of a soundscape of dry rattling percussion.A cruel scheduling clash pitted indie rockers Deerhoof against a multigenerational supergroup, Ghana Special, against a new collaboration between Justin Adams and Moroccan gnawa master Mohamed Errebbaa. Deerhoof’s math-rock was at its squalliest and Ghana Special jazzy and bright; in the Arboretum, Errebbaa’s bass guembri was the perfect bedrock for Adams’s shimmering guitar, nine parts Tinariwen to one part Mick Jones. The two, backed by Chloë Rose Laing and by Omar El Barkaoui on drums, delivered songs of migration (“Poor Wayfaring Stranger”, Adams’s “Still Moving”) and of gnawa transcendence. Later amid the same trees Laura Misch’s saxophone and vocal lullabies, accompanied by harp and guitar, were gently exquisite.Some of the biggest crowd-pleasers were Alison Goldfrapp and Palestinian hip-hop group DAM. Goldfrapp’s music with her band ranged from the John Barry swoop of “Felt Mountain” to the robotic glam of “Black Cherry” to the Wicker Man-esque album Seventh Tree. Here it was European synth-pop all the way. A drummer frantically hammering out a high bpm like a sped-up version of himself and a pair of keytar players left the stage largely free for Goldfrapp and an interpretative dancer; the audience chorused to “Ooh La La” as if in the Stade de France and cheered “Strict Machine”.DAM played furious, intense songs with barely a pause. “You want a break?” shouted Tamer Nafar. “This is a Palestinian gig we don’t have any fucking breaks.” The vocals moved effortlessly between him, his brother Suhell and Maysa Daw, over a soundscape of beats and samples of found sounds and political speeches. The noisy audience was a sea of whirling green, red, black and white flags. Overall, these were two strong days, with the Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal still to come.To July 28, womad.co.uk
