The inaugural, family-oriented three-day festival featuring Wisaal, An Dro and Badenya Drum & Dance wraps up on Sunday at Osgood Brewing, boasting “folk music from around the globe.”
Reveling in World Music: An Dro plays the three-day festival in three cities.
What if Millennials could bring their Greatest Generation grandparents, Baby Boomer parents and Generation Z toddlers to a cool, inexpensive concert in their own town where everybody could dance with abandon to folk beats from around the world?
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Welcome to the Michigan Global Roots Music Festival.
The first-year, three-day, three-city festival promises a spirited introduction to what percussionist Carolyn Koebel and her collaborators have dubbed “global roots music.” The musicians will perform Friday in Lansing, Saturday in Kalamazoo and Sunday in Grandville.
“It is essentially folk music from around the globe,” Koebel said. “It (global roots music) is the closest term we could come up with to represent the idea of what we are presenting. One the one hand, it’s almost the equivalent of global music, but it is folk music, in its essence.
Badenya Drum & Dance
“We have such a pre-conditioned notion that folk music is the Pete Seeger thing, and we lost the broader definition of folk music that is inherent in every culture. We are bringing more of the sounds of other lands.”
A member of the Celtic-infused world music group An Dro, Koebel is a music therapist and teacher with a passion for studying and performing rhythms from around the world, including western Africa, Asia and Latin and South America. She performs with four groups, a variety of singer-songwriters as well as solo. Recently she has been studying Japanese taiko drumming.
Carolyn Koebel
Each day of the Michigan Global Roots Music Festival features the same three bands: Wisaal (Mediterranean fusion), An Dro (Celtic/global) and Badenya Drum & Dance (original and traditional west African-inspired drumming).
Expects lots of percussion and indigenous melodies.
“We were looking at a way to create multi-generational and family programming,” Koebel said. “You don’t have to be a certain education level or certain demographic to relate to this kind of music. I am interested in music that is immediate and accessible to anyone who steps inside. It’s barrier-free music.
Wisaal
“It’s a collaborative partnership between different groups in each of these cities,” she added, citing Josh Dunigan of Cabildo and Igor Houwat of Wisaal for their participation in organizing the festival. She said they hope this year’s festival is the grass-roots start of an annual event.
The suggested donation at each location is $5 per person or $10 per family at the door.
— Elizabeth Slowik, LocalSpins.com
Email John Sinkevics at jsinkevics@gmail.com.
Copyright 2014, Spins on Music
