Dragged S out of bed with a hangover this morning and down to Regent's Park for the Diaspora Music Festival. Short form: it's like a very hygenic Glastonbury.
Ran into D (he of Kabbalistic insight and salsa ability), replete with oud, as he'd been jamming with the RoB guys. Also ran into E, who'd been at A&D's drum gathering last Sunday, swaying in time to the music in the latest Indian/ethnic garb.
Sadly, we got there just too late to hear Rivers of Babylon - Iraqui songs from Bombay and Calcutta. But we did hear Cilay, from Indonesia, and Burning Bush.
As ever, the audience watching was really something. There was a bloke in his fifties wearning a string vest, shaved head, and not much else, dancing non-stop as if he'd had some kind of drug-induced assistance. A woman in an almost-belly-dancing outfit - the first time I've seen someone belly-dance to Indonesian music; I wonder what you call that kind of cultural crossover? Fusion dancing? Like a restaurant.
And there were two guys in strange cowboy-cum-south-American outfits, one of whom I'm fairly sure was wearing a wig. Very John Travolta meets John Wayne, but with no rythm. They looked like they were having a good time.
Experienced ethnic-music-circuit musicians told me that the same nutters dance at the front at every event. Wonder if there's a name for them?
Afterwards S and I, bitten by the middle-eastern bug, tried to get appropriate food in a Morrocan looking pub in St John's Wood, The Duke of York, but it turned out to have a generic bland-English menu, despite its ethnic good looks, so we settled for Welsh Rarebit at Richoux.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment