It is 10.30am on a Sunday morning, and I, along with around a dozen other reporters, am seated in a conference room on the ninth floor of a hotel in George Town, on Malaysia's Penang Island.
Behind a long table at the front of the room are several musicians who either performed last night or will tonight, in what is the final of the Penang World Music Festival's two days.
Raggy Singh, a rotund Indian (and Penang local) with a bushy salt-and-pepper beard has the floor. He is wearing a woollen cap and suspenders.
"Consider the fact that we are rarely able to listen to real music," he says, scornfully accusing the pomposity of those attention-seeking electric guitars, those soulless DJs and "the guy who does the horse dance" — this a reference to Psy, of Gangnam Style fame, whose now-iconic video has garnered more than 2 billion hits on YouTube.
"Let's not throw [real music] away and substitute it for something else," he continues. "You have to ask your kids, when was the last time they heard a bamboo flute?"
I am not sure that I have ever heard a bamboo flute, except maybe in a Bath & Body Works store.
Raggy is the frontman of the Raggy Project, what is essentially, I discover, a Western blues band accompanied by an Indian tabla. On stage later that night, he plays a silver Fender Stratocaster. Ain't nothing bamboo about that. Nevertheless.
"You guys are letting real music die," he says.
"There is no digital formula for pleasant. We are accepting this plastic age as the new normal."
But I have to ask, considering this is a world music festival, and that the world is constantly in flux: "Shouldn't world musicians be attempting to change with culture, to evolve with it, instead of anchoring themselves in a past that no longer exists?"
Raggy looks at me as though I am a man who loathes bamboo flutes.
Opah Aspa, a vocalist in Nading Rhapsody, an ethnic Bornean band from the state of Sarawak, speaks up.
"You can't avoid culture coming in," she says. "We need to incorporate what Sarawak has to offer [into our music]. We need to be more approachable to youngsters."
That way, she says, young people will become curious, ask questions, get involved. Breathe life into a what is a dying art form. But I am surprised to hear this coming from her. The seven musicians who are Nading Rhapsody last night performed wearing feathered headdresses and (what I assume to be) traditional costumes. They sang songs that included hints of ritual chants.
Nading Rhapsody overall seems very theme-park-ish; there isn't much contemporary about it.
That's not to say the music is bad, although it certainly doesn't seem approachable to any youngster who wasn't born into a rainforest tribe.
Still, Opah is right. It is not up to a collective "us" to save a particular genre of music, to make the same sort of preservatory effort as we do for, say, the African white rhino. Cultures, people and times change, and that means music — and especially world music — must, too.
Perhaps the band that best represents Opah's vision of world music is Ajinai, a Mongolian folk-funk outfit that integrates "khoomei" throat-singing with the horsehead fiddle, electric guitar, electric bass and drums. Its music is at once triumphant and defeated; exotic and familiar; angelic and demonic — and it entrances a crowd of adults and children.
The conflict that moulds Ajinai is in sync with the liminal genre that is world music, which exists simultaneously in the past and the present. Its performers are somewhere between band geek and rock star, its fans between the hippie and suburbanite. To keep world music alive is to cater to the amorphous. Otherwise, you're putting it in a box. And unless that box is some type of traditional drum, I imagine Raggy would not approve.
That said, you can't choose a better place than Penang as a venue for world music. Just take a walk down George Town's colonial-architecture-lined Street of Harmony, which is home to four places of worship (a church, two mosques and a temple) used by no less than three nationalities. You're in ethnic heaven — the (sub)urban equivalent of Jesus Christ practising feng shui; of Buddha in a taqiyah; of Allah using chopsticks.
The festival, too, showcases a wide swath of culture — bands from Germany, Estonia, Spain, Brazil, India. And the people, all of them members of Raggy's "plastic age", are happy, smiling, eating, dancing, at peace — with themselves and one another — for two days, standing unflinching beneath a sky from which falls an indolent rain.
Surely that counts for something.
Raggy Singh of the Raggy Project. (Photo by Sherwynd Kessler/ Malaysian Ministry of Tourism)
Mongolian band Ajinai. (Photo by Yew Kok Hong/ Malaysian Ministry of Tourism)
