WOMAD: Musical melting pot

Amadou and Mariam of Mali. Photo / Michael Flynn

It's the flags you see first. The WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festival, held annually at Taranaki's beautiful Brooklands Park, is littered with them.

This year's 100-strong set, designed by visual artist Angus Watt, are apparently aimed at side-stepping the "constipated notions of nationhood and sovereignty" and exploring the connections between music and people; their simple rectangular design avoiding "lurid juxtapositions of colours and primaries".

Standing on bamboo poles atop hillsides and by stages, they really are in some strange way a unifier for the diverse crowds making their way through the green festival grounds.

It's that diversity that makes WOMAD unique in New Zealand. A conglomeration of the 20,000 or so enthusiastically-applauding middle-aged, dancing kids, over-65s, tween girls and young men mix together with the usual set of modern-day hippies and world music aficionados across its six stages, internationally flavoured markets, bars and "village of wellness".

The festival's cross section of New Zealand and international artists ensure they are shown dozens of cultures and musical traditions. This feels like an event for the whole New Plymouth community.

For us, arriving late from Auckland on Friday night, the first act up was blind Malian duo Amadou and Mariam at the festival's Bowl of Brooklands mainstage. The pair met at Mali's Institute for the Young Blind in the 1970s, where they began to develop the sound which now sees them playing on stages at Lollapalooza or Glastonbury with bands like Blur and Coldplay. Here on the smaller stage at Brooklands, they combined with their six-piece backing band for an intense hour-long set. As with many WOMAD acts, they make the difficult sound easy. Call and response vocals were exchanged between the duo and their two backing singers/dancers, bird-like in red dresses. Electric guitar and keys strung together counter-melodies (one song working despite prominently featuring what sounded like the keyboard sound from Men at Work's We Come From A Land Downunder). The songs tethered by percussion and drums that slid through time signatures, each new one heralded with Mariam's repeated yelps that sounded a lot like 'jump, jump, jump'. This was dance music.

But this festival has never just been about the acts. Sudanese "sonic voodoo" from Rango was only background music as we picked up chicken quesadilla and wood-fired pizza in its Global Food Village. Friends endured the impossibly long queues to get the ever-popular Hungarian bread puffs. The food on offer here beats the subsistence diet of hot dogs and hot chips normally plied to punters at large events. My only regret was that the huge tree which stood over the eating area in other years is now a large pile of sawdust. I can only suspect one of the many cyclones that went through the area this year had something to do with its absence.

Our night was closed out with a performance from Australian/Macedonian two-piece Shopska Salata. Dressed in pointy white shoes and suits that mixed the blues brothers with the business lunch crowd, they looped ancient Macedonian traditional instruments through synthesisers, then repeated words over the top of refrains to make an unusual, but oddly infectious, breed of Balkan dance/rap. This act is a kind of escapist side project for the duo, who normally take the stage as Dva. But the talent both possess leave you with the image of two clowns, each tripping over into backflips. They are on again in their other incarnation this afternoon, as this festival kicks off its first day of truly serious business.