Summer's gone: Ethno Port 2011

Another eventful summer's gone and I'm stuck with a long list of flashbacks I'd like to write about. I want them to stay for longer, especially that it's going to be a good six or seven months before the sun's back.

As usual, it was Ethno Port in Poznań that cracked the summer open in mid-June, a time when I start getting in the holiday groove with most of my classes coming to an end. I don't know if it's this festival of world music that works so well or just its place in time, prompting a Pavlovian reaction connected with less work and more freedom coming soon.

Anyway, ever since its modest beginnings four years ago, I've been around Ethno Port, never missing a single edition. Something has changed this year, though. Not necessarily in the festival itself, but in my approach. I was much less engaged and excited than before and didn't feel bad about walking out of the concert area well before the day's end or something. One thing is I'm getting older, the other is I'm not taking going to festivals alone very well. I met an old student of mine and nodded hello one day, had a couple of beers with a friend, but couldn't really chill out. It's probably because it's in Poznań, which has a strange way of keeping me a little worried, watching carefully.

But onwards to music. There's one band that blew my head off the moment they entered the stage. In fact, it was its frontman who kept the show rolling, but the rest of Yemen Blues, a collection of musicians from around the world based in Isreal, did a phenomenal job too. They didn't care to wait for the audience to come back from the concert of India's very intersting Desert Slide and when I got to the main stage their opening song was on. And what an entrance it was. I knew right away the band's lead singer Ravid Kahalani was a rare marvel. Incredible movement, powerful vibe, a voice that engages you into a fascinating story you instantly want to follow. Hard to say if it's the guy's visibly mixed background, oddball appearance, intense style of singing or something else, but there is a magnetic force about him that I aboslutely adore in music. Here is this opening song, called Eli, in Soundcloud and as a clip from Poznań on YouTube.

I remember two other acts only, not because the rest were easy to forget but because I simply didn't see them. I was either late or too tired to stay. Jeez, what does that say about me? Back to the other two bands. One was India's Desert Slide, which was a unique collaboration between Rajastan's desert musicians and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, a world-renowned composer and virtuoso. It was quite a sight to see the artists get involved so passionately with their instruments, many of which were a relevation in themselves. Another act I remember was Ukraine's Dakhabrakha, a rich mixture of Eastern European, Balkan, Hungarian and other influences sprinkled with a very contemporary arrangement.