Just as you can never see every single showcase at WOMEX, it is almost equally hard to take in every booth at the trade fair. Each one has something special to offer: new music to discover, friends to greet, connections to be made, and (yes) parties to attend, because there are lots of little celebrations going on throughout the day. This is the first time I tried to blog the fair, and I have to admit it is only a small sampling of what was going on. But hopefully it does give some feel for the event. It's lively, it's fun and you never know quite what to expect. I decided to give a "most cool booth" award only AFTER I encountered the winners (Country & Eastern)! I thought they were such interesting folks, and their offerings were heartfelt, diverse and original. I think you'll agree.

A symphony of crickets. Now THAT'S world music!

Followers of this blog know that I try to spotlight some of the interesting musicians and world music projects that are working here in NYC. Sylvain Leroux is someone I'm going to focus on shortly, and you can see him in this clip by one of his bands, "Fula Flute." Link TV helped to make this clip a reality when we initiated a program with the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology to put talented media students together with world music musicians to make videos. The song "Djandjou" is ceremonial, something that would be played to accompany the arrival of a dignitary.

The technique for playing the Fula flute, or "Tambin", is fascinating, using a combination of singing and overblowing to create overtones. More about this soon.

Feels like it's raining Magyars lately. I got an email from David Sasvari in Hungary the other day. He really likes the music programming on Link, but thinks we're light on the Hungarian videos. So he sent me a few links, and that's how I found this video.

Even though I think this video is visually incoherent, I think "Csináld csináld jól csináld" is a cool mashup of Hungarian and Balkan sounds. Balkan Fanatik is a find, for sure. Thanks, David!

Keeping a band together in NYC is TOUGH.  I know because I've done it -- or tried to do it -- myself. So I have to hand it to Scott Kettner for sheer tenacity, regarding his pet project "Nation Beat." You may remember Scott as one of my very first interviews for this blog, about his Forro Brass Band. He made me promise back then to blog something about Nation Beat, so I started collecting and shooting footage, and letting the story develop.

Scott does raise an interesting issue, regarding "world music." In the fledgling days of the term, it was assumed that Cajun, Zydeco, Tex-Mex, Bluegrass, etc. were all part of world music. (Just check out the landmark "Rough Guide to World Music" published in 1994.) Since then, the term has expanded to include all kinds of hybrids. So in my opinion it's a kind of daft political correctness to exclude the Country Music influences in the Nation Beat repertoire...after all they aren't getting up there and doing an all-Country set; it's American Country filtered through Brazilian Country.  And anyway, our Country Music derives from our Scots-Irish heritage, does it not?  Or does that not qualify as world music to some folks any more?