When on the last evening of WOMEX 24, Clare Sands sang her song Praise the Women – a song written about celebrated Irish women, including Easter Rising participant Constance Markievicz and traditional singer/banjo player Margaret Barry – she could equally well have been praising the prominent voice that women artists had throughout the four-day event. On consecutive evenings before Clare’s performance, you could also witness the serene, commanding presence and unique voice of Ríoghnach Connolly fronting local legends Honeyfeet and compelling, energetic singer Gladys Samba leading the exhilarating women’s collective, Les Mamans du Congo.
WOMEX, which stands for Worldwide Music Expo, is an annual event, last held in the UK in 2013, and was being hosted, in its 30th year, for the first time in Manchester, by Manchester Music City – which includes Manchester City Council, Brighter Sound and English Folk Expo. It is, in the first instance, a very large meeting of people –2,850 to be precise – who work in the music industry, as WOMEX Director Alexander Walter put it at the opening concert, ‘outside the mainstream’, which loosely encompasses folk, traditional and world music, much of it fused with contemporary musical styles. A core part of the programme was 61 artist showcases – seeking to interest venue and festival organisers, agents and promoters – across seven stages, and Manchester Music City pushed for those to be accessible to the public.
Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham livened up the opening evening with some brevity, a little politics—“Manchester loves music, hates racism”—and contrasting historical references to Charles Hallé, founder in 1857 of the Hallé Orchestra (we were in the Bridgewater Hall, which is home to the Orchestra) and to Northern Soul music that emerged in clubs in Manchester and Wigan in the early 1970s (he did only obliquely mention “two brothers from Burnage”).
Four Manchester–based acts showcased their music after the speeches – Dirty Freud, Vulva Voce, Heather Ferrier and Agbeko. Vulva Voce, a four-women string quartet who studied together at the Royal Northern College of Music, stood out with quirky arrangements that mix folk, contemporary classical and techno, driven by their ‘roll up your sleeves’ energy. They only play music created by women and under-represented artists. Their piece Hysteria, which, as they explained, combines techno with a madrigal by Maddalena Casulana, the first woman composer in Western music to have a book entirely of her own music published (in the sixteenth century), went down very well with the opening night audience.
While the performance elements of WOMEX were accessible to the public, the Expo showcase format of 45-minute sets and the distances between venues meant that while Expo delegates were used to ducking in and out of performances, public attendees needed to be more careful with their planning if they wanted to catch full performances. One of the many standout showcase sets was by the Senegalese band Orchestra Baobab. Fifty-four years since their formation in Dakar, four veteran members and a slew of younger recruits played a spellbinding show of their familiar mix of Afro-Cuban sounds with Wolof and Mande songs, including Utrus Horas, the iconic opening track off their World Circuit Pirates Choice 1989 release (titled Ken Dou Werente on first release in 1983). It was a delight witnessing such a legendary band.
Shetland-born and bred Amy Laurenson played absorbing piano with her band in the Albert Hall, one of Manchester’s most attractive venues. There were tunes from her album Strands – Da Trowie Burn and a set of Shetland Wedding Tunes sounding particularly good – some solo, some with judicious guitar, double bass and drum accompaniment, though when I saw her previously, she had a bodhran player rather than a drummer, which I thought suited her sound better (no reflection whatsoever on the drummer). A lovely solo tune Amy played was a tune she’d come across in an archive of tunes played by Shetland fiddle player Tom Anderson, which was composed by Friedemann von Stickel, a German fiddle player who was shipwrecked on Unst in Shetland in the 1770s and settled there.
An enthusiastic audience greeted Ríoghnach Connolly and Honeyfeet in the same venue later the same evening, many seeming to be familiar with the band, presumably from their unflagging festival appearances across Europe. The Mancunian favourites wasted no time, squeezing in ten numbers to make the most of their allotted 45 minutes, though I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who missed Ríoghnach’s usual droll engagement with the audience in between. Concentrating on more upbeat songs and playing mostly material from their last album, It’s Been A While, Buddy, their set really took off with the brassy, highly danceable Colonel Hathi’s Trunk Juice, the funky march of Devil’s Work, another highlight, ending on a real high with a storming version of their anthemic, rowdy Meet Me On The Corner. It was a jubilant, tight, high-energy performance, which the band seemed to enjoy as much as the audience.
Work songs sung collectively by women in northern Portugal were featured in Cristina Clara’s set, some of which she had learned from her mother. Cristina’s music is a fabulously rich mingling of traditional Portuguese fados and chorinhos with Brazilian choro and Cape Verdean morna, her singing at times alluringly jazzy. Her band is made up of musicians from those differing musical backgrounds. A fascinating aspect of Cristina’s versatile performance is her use of various percussion instruments, from castanets to the Adufe square framed hand drum, played almost exclusively by women in Portugal and Spain and has Arabic medieval origins.
Les Mamans du Congo were a revelation. Led by charismatic singer and percussionist Gladys Samba, the women’s collective from Brazzaville merges dance with ancient Kongo lullabies, with rhythms beaten out with forks, plates, pestles and recycled objects. Their collaboration with French hip-hop and electronic music producer RRobin (who was on stage with them) is startlingly effective, blending traditional songs – with call and response between Gladys and the two dancer/singers – with electronic beats and some rapping, their striking singing always to the fore. On stage, what you see is as much highly engaging theatre and dance as it is music, as they perform songs about daily life in Brazzaville, the difficulties of people abandoning their villages and families to find work, the emancipation of women in the face of family constraints and patriarchal society, and the importance of preserving the values of the Congo heritage.
A single spotlight illuminated the ever-mournful sound of the uilleann pipes being played by Conor Mallon (Connla) before Clare Sands arrived on stage, viola in hand (she later explained that she wasn’t playing a fiddle, preferring the depth of sound the viola offers), to open her set with Carry My Song, from her eponymous album released in 2022.
Clare, a sixth-generation fiddler, switched between viola and guitar in between singing in English and Irish, while Connor occasionally played low whistle. Her songs encompass forest and sea landscapes, solidarity, friendship, kinship and the power of women. Abair Liom do Rúin (Tell Me Your Secrets) had an intense, marching melody and sweeping, tense viola playing. Clare introduced Sing A Song Of Old, a song which refers to the importance of songs in our lives – ‘Sing a song of old, love the ones you hold’, by expressing solidarity, audibly shared by much of the audience, with the people of Palestine and Lebanon, “people whose singing has been silenced”. Awe na Mná (Praise the Women) was fittingly the last in a set of powerful, heartfelt songs performed with passion and adroit, bold musicianship.
There were also showcase performances from artists that have previously been covered by KLOF Mag, including:
- Cerys Hafana
- Gnoss
- Ëda Diaz
- Gwenifer Raymond
- Kefaya & Elaha Soroor
- Lenhart Tapes
- Madalitso Band
- Tuulikki Bartosik
Find out more about WOMEX and the artists that played this year here: https://www.womex.com/