Music festival in the Berlin HKW
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Once down the Mississippi
Your eyes rest on the Spree, but your ears travel down the Mississippi: over four weekends, the House of World Cultures celebrates the heart of the United States with music. From Jazz, Funk, Blues and Cajun to R&B, Folk and Bounce. From Laf Overland
Whoever talks about the Mississippi in a musical context usually means the delta of the great American river, a geologically huge bay that houses the last third of the river: from Memphis (Tennessee), where rock ‘n’ roll and the sweaty ones were born Stax soul was at home, through the rural areas that gave birth to the blues, to New Orleans, the mother of jazz and funk. If you then turn even further to the southwest, you end up in a completely different world: in the swamps.
From July 16, the Wassermusik summer festival in Berlin’s House of World Cultures explores the music between Memphis and the swamps in its entire spectrum, including new mixed forms.
People were left only with their kitchen and their music
It is a mystery of most music genres from the far south that life there is mostly poor, but the music is happy and full of life. Somewhere down there, where you didn’t quite know what the future would bring, but life went on, trusting that better times were about to come. Laissez les bons temps rouler – Let the good times roll: especially in the endless swamps, southwest of New Orleans, where French-speaking Acadians from Canada had ended up in the 18th century when fleeing the British, who had all the people in their colonies wanted to deport on the east coast because it refused to take the oath of allegiance to the English king.
They then swamped in the truest sense of the word in the bayous of Louisiana, despised by the Americans, their French language forbidden (until 1974!). The Cajuns, as they called themselves, were left with only the kitchen and the music as the connecting lines of their identity. But they cultivate both with fervor – like the group BeauSoleil with fiddle and accordion and band boss Michael Doucet as an infectious storyteller.
From street musicians to classically trained jazz singers
The “Water Music” brings together jazz, funk, blues, rock’n’roll and soul in its Mississippi festival – and in addition to the white Cajun music, of course, its indigenous and Afro-American colored, extremely happy Creole sister Zydeco.
And just names like Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. & The Zydeco Twisters already exude life: Dopsie with the washboard in front of his stomach, on which he scratches the rhythm while he also likes to parody James Brown & Michael Jackson. And the audience loves that, because it’s time to celebrate when the Cajun and Zydeco bands play for the dance – in squares and in bars and sometimes, quite down to earth, in neon-cold multi-purpose halls for older people.
Back on the long river, the street musicians from Tuba Skinny, who have been celebrating old-time jazz, ragtime and jug-band music in record studios and in shopping streets for years, are already waiting on the roof terrace. The classically trained soul-jazz vocal prodigy Quiana Lynell amazes with her sparkling versatility, and the former rhythm’n’blues prodigy Swamp Dogg has been trudging through styles at will for six decades, singing about love, race and politics in two or three breaths , Sex and God.
A name that is almost symbolic of New Orleans music is represented by the youngest offspring of the Marsalis family of musicians, trombonist Delfeayo; he jumps and hops through the decades with his Uptown Jazz Orchestra, from James Brown to Louis Armstrong to the jazz of his brothers Winton and Branford to the Second Line, the dancing and partying section of the brass band parade.
New sounds from New Orleans
However, the pianist and singer Jon Cleary from the English county of Kent is an exception: he fell in love with the funky rhythm and blues of the songwriter Allen Toussaint so much that he flew (uninvited!) to Louisiana in 1981, took a taxi to the legendary Maple Leaf Bar and made himself comfortable on the piano stool. Since then he has been part of the Nawlins Band Circuit.
And of course the “Water Music” also explores what is now hatching on the Mississippi – like the rather crazy Hammond organ drum machine puppet duo Quintron & Miss Pussycat and surprisingly also real Afrobeat with the 14-piece band “Kumasi – Fela Kuti goes Nawlins”. Saxophonist Donald Harrison has played with jazz mentor Art Blakey as well as hip-hop masters The Notorious BIG and now mixes hip-hop and jazz with classical. The songs of the young Cajuns from Sweet Crude, on the other hand, are sung in English and Cajun, but in a modern outfit almost as art pop with influences from the experimental indie rock of Radiohead or Arcade Fire.
Afrobeat with the band Kumasi Films complement the festival
If you want to sink even deeper into the Mississippi mood after the musical excitement in the evening, you can extend the evening by watching films – including the crime thriller “The Big Easy” or the political thriller “Mississippi Burning”, the drama “Mudbound” or the blaxploitation grotesque “BlacKkKlansman” as well as some documentaries.
And at the end of the festival, when everything has been heard, the guitarist and singer Alvin Youngblood Hart is supposed to squeeze the styles and temperaments of Mississippi music out of the guitar with his extremely strong handshake. The root music pope Taj Mahal said quite aptly about the man: “The boy has got thunder in his hands.”
Broadcast: rbb24 Inforadio, July 16, 2022, 7:55 a.m