In many ways, this year’s 20th anniversary installment of the Richmond Folk Festival, which starts Friday, will be akin to a greatest hits collection. But don’t be lulled into a nostalgia trip or you might miss the festival’s word-of-mouth favorite.
Each year, one or (sometimes) two relatively obscure and exotic performers surprise everyone–even programmers–and elicit a “you-can’t-miss-that” buzz from attendees. Many of this year’s returnees were surprise standouts during past festivals, including Bombino (Niger blues), Supaman (hip-hop), and Virginia’s own, Cora Harvey Armstrong (gospel).
But even in its ripe-old age, festival overseers continue to introduce and champion little-known traditions. If Las Vegas were taking bets on this year’s “breakout” act, the odds-on favorite may just be Rancho Aparte, masters of high-energy chirimia music from Colombia.
“This is the first time the festival has featured chirimia,” says Blaine Waide, executive director of the National Council For the Traditional Arts, which has programmed the Richmond fest since its earliest days as a National Folk Festival host city. “It’s all about expanding people’s horizons and introducing them to new sounds and new ways of thinking about traditional arts and music.”
Chirimia is indigenous to the Department of Chocó, a region that boasts the largest Afro-Colombian population in the Republic of Colombia. The style has a convoluted history with roots in both military band music brought by the colonizing Spanish in the 17th century–at the same time that enslaved Africans arrived in the Pacific region–and music schools founded by the Catholics and the Claretians in the late–19th and early –20th centuries. But it’s music that is also evolving, thanks to contemporary groups like Aparte.
“Rancho Aparte is an antithesis of what is traditionally known as traditional Chocoan folklore,” say band leaders Dino Manuelle and Dyam Palacios, responding to written questions as a collective. “[We are] breaking the molds in terms of the personal presentation of its members, the uniformity of the band, the musical concept, and the development of compositions.”
Founded in 2005 by vocalist Manuelle, with clarinetist and saxophonist Palacios eventually serving as co-music director, the eight-piece Rancho Aparte, which formed in Chocó’s capital city of Quibdó, incorporates glancing blows from other genres–dancehall, salsa, afrobeat, reggaeton–to concoct a punchy, party-flavored music that has been labeled, ‘El punk del Pacifico” or the punk of the Pacific.
“The music scene in Chocó is diverse in terms of the formation and teaching of chirimía,” say the bandleaders about today’s Chocó. “Chirimía is present in spaces such as events, concerts, celebrations, and even funeral rituals. This format accompanies the daily life of the population in Chocó.”
Rancho Aparte’s high-energy dance music may surprise audiences in the way of past RFF breakout acts such as AltaiKAI (Tuvan throat singing), Son Rompe Pera (Mexican marimba), Ensemble Shanbehzadeh (Iranian Bushehri music). But so could other performers featured this year, including otherworldly Javanese sindhen Peni Candra Rini, who was a visiting Fulbright Artist Scholar at University of Richmond last year.
While she performed in the region during the residency, the festival will expose her to a wider audience. Rini takes her traditional Indonesian gamelan music as a starting point to explore other kinds of sounds, from jazz to classical to experimental music. “I use gamelan as a medium for representation in not only the traditional but in the contemporary,” she told Style Weekly last year, adding that many of her original lyrics are about repositioning the role of women in Indonesian culture.
The Javanese, emanating from the Island of Java, are the largest ethnic group in Southeast Asia, mainly centered in central and southeast Indonesia. Their hypnotic two-tone music is performed by a gamelan ensemble that includes exotic metallic idiophones, sitar and drums, and is central to religious rituals, weddings, funerals, temple festivals, even political ceremonies.
“I’m different in that I get to explore art. But it is very rare. Javanese women usually stay at home as a wife and a mother and cannot do work.” Kronos String Quartet recently performed Rini’s latest chamber work, “Maduswara,” at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
Ustad Noor Bakhsh is another candidate for breakout star, Waide says. He’s a master of the electric benju, a rare, five-stringed, keyed zither indigenous to the Balochistan region of Pakistan. The 80-year-old musician is currently on his first-ever U.S. tour, and has been galvanizing Western ears.
From closer to home is Alabama folk artist and singer Lonnie Holley, who started his music career in 2006 after establishing himself as a visual artist specializing in sandstone carvings [He’s played Richmond before as part of collaboration with Spacebomb Records]. His ethereal, often improvisational music is filled with evocative imagery and references to African-American history. He’ll be leading a seven-piece band at the festival. “It’s about the brain, the same brain that produces the music, produces the visual art. I call it ‘brainsmithing’,” the 74-year-old creator told The New York Times,
“The common thread of Ustad and Lonnie and some aspects of Peni is that they are working from something deeply rooted,” says Waide. “But on top of it, there’s a degree of improvisation, a sense of making something very new out of parts and elements that have been around a long time.”
Good luck, oddsmakers. It looks like the breakout star field is going to be mighty crowded this year.
The 20th Richmond Folk Festival will happen along Richmond’s downtown waterfront, Sept. 27-29. The festival is free though donations are very encouraged. For a complete schedule and details go to https://www.richmondfolkfestival.org
