Folk is a strange term. The range of music that can be called folk is so vast that, perhaps, it is best understood by what it is not: not classical, not commercial, and often not contemporary.
‘Folk’ would seem to imply ‘of the people’, but it rarely means what is popular today. Instead, folk is often understood to be ‘nostalgic’ rather than current, ‘cultural’ rather than popular, ‘rustic’ rather than sophisticated, something otherworldly, from a simpler time or place, something people used to do, elsewhere, before radio or the internet. At its worst, folk is a static signifier of culture.
At a showcase of ‘folk’ music in the Capital this week — the sort that is in abundance this time of year — a member of the audience, obviously a veteran of Delhi cultural programming, was audibly bewildered by Ravid Kahalani, the flamboyant front-man of Israeli funk band Yemen Blues. She did not think he looked Jewish, she did not think they sounded Jewish, and why on earth were they called Yemen Blues? The first half of the evening had been a sensible and suitably folksy performance of traditional Hungarian music and dance. And now there was a tall brown man with a pile of braids on his head gyrating back and forth across the stage, making the venue seem absurdly staid. One of these things was not like the other.
Three days earlier, on the second night of the eighth edition the Jodhpur RIFF, an annual four-day international music festival at the beautiful Mehrangarh fort, Yemen Blues brought the house down. Though RIFF is also known to be a ‘folk’ festival, nobody seemed surprised at the band’s raucous genre-bending energy; they hadn’t been expecting some quaint group of white-robed Yemenis, and if they had, they adapted quickly.
The next night, the same venue was in the grip of a profound hush as Senegalese duo Bao Sissoko and Malick Pathe Sow played a much gentler music, a delicate West African blues particularly stirring to those familiar with the music of Ali Farka Toure. Following that, every corner of the fort’s old zenana courtyard filled up with the jubilant energy of 25 Rajasthani Manganiyar musicians performing together.
All this, too, could be called folk, and there was nothing staid or static about it. If it was folk, it was folk at its best: vivid, mutable, alive, diverse. Despite its slipperiness, ‘folk’ does seem to be the only serviceable way to describe the kind of music curated by RIFF, though artistic director Divya Bhatia eschews the term. He was not involved in naming the event Rajasthan International Folk Festival and has since done his best to rechristen it Jodhpur RIFF. Still, the festival itself suggests some positive alternatives for how folk might be understood today.
A dawn performance by Ustad Daoud Khan Sadozai playing the roabab, an Afghan relative of the sarod, suggests that folk is about place. More than 30 years in exile, Khan sahab plays everywhere but his own country. He calls his music his behtareen dost; it carries its own roots, conjures its own context — it makes sense even when not in its own surroundings. On the other hand, an acoustic midnight performance by Darra Khan, Shakur Khan and Kachra Khan Manganiyar in the Rao Jodha Park at the base of the fort, makes sense of its surroundings, breathing life into the landscape.
Malick Pathe Sow and Bao Sissoko reveal a different kind of rootedness: the folk musicians from whom they are descended were oral historians, custodians of the identity of their people. After their cracking performance, Yemen Blues bassist and oud player Shanir Blumenkranz explains that the band’s music is arranged around the identity of lead singer Kahalani, who grew up in a Yemenite family. “The main thing,” he says, “is to play the music that you are.”
Perhaps the best moment of the festival came on the final day, after an interactive session on classical and folk forms, during which Dr Vijay Verma attempted a typically scholarly deconstruction of folk. As soon as the session ended, Ghafoor Khan Manganiyar and his group relocated to a rug on the grass just outside the talk’s venue and, with a group of enthusiasts clustered around them, began playing without guidance or explanation. He didn’t have a chance to speak, but his generosity with his music suggested folk was about resisting formality, about intimacy and play.
(Devika Bakshi is a Delhi-based writer)