If traditional music denotes the enduring and lasting, there was ample evidence of the tenacity of centuries-old diversities of music, during the splendid New York World Festival, "Music Around the Mediterranean." Co-presented and curated by the World Music Institute and the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, the festival was a musical feast spanning a planned 15 of the 25 countries around the Mediterranean rim where a unique confluence of geographies links three continents: Europe, Asia and Africa. The region comprises wondrous complexities in languages and dialects, three dominant world religions, epic ancient histories and brilliant cultural syntheses, all of whose combined influences have forged their way deep into the histories of the entire planet, notably the Americas and Latin America, over the past two millennia.

Festivals are part of the Mediterranean heritage throughout all the countries, and provide cause to celebrate communities and special occasions. Last weekend, September 20-22, New York's "Med Fest" brought symbolic solace for last year's tragedy and offered a musical model for peace.

Under the boughs of the linden grove in the garden courtyard of the historic Bohemian Hall & Park in Astoria, Queens, a canopied tent stretched over the main performance stage, dance floor and audience seating. The air was redolent with pungent spices and slowly simmering tagines, Moroccan preserved salty lemons and Atlas olives, grilled lamb, fragrant couscous, spinach pies, koftas, kibbi and tabouli, honeyed pastries and fruits, all serving to intensify the musical palate. Surrounding picnic tables were filled with convivial crowds, quaffing mugs of beer and sipping glasses of wine. The open-air festivity ambiance suited so well this magnificent, groundbreaking tribute to a significant part of New York City's essential cosmopolitan character, of which at least 25% of the population traces heritage to the Mediterranean.

Friday Night

The music came from all over the Mediterranean, moving west to east and southwards to North Africa around the rim throughout the festival. Brooklyn's own Giglio Brass Band, from Williamsburg's July Giglio Feast, launched the opening night with a blasting fanfare procession and a medley of songs beloved to Italian immigrant communities. The bandleaders' families were originally from Nola, near Naples. Following the rousing opening, a more tempered atmosphere settled over the stage with Launeddas, the name of the group and also, the ancient instrument from Sardinia, where a strong tradition of polyphonic singing styles abounds. Three tubes of cane form a kind of triple clarinet with the droning timbre of bagpipes creating subtle harmonies. Usually associated with sacred processional music, Launeddas' players, Roberto Corona and Stephano Pinno, performed sacred melodies and dance tunes that could make anyone feel homesick, whether or not Sardinia is home.

Aramire, certainly one of the greatest ever pizzica tarantata groups to emerge from Italy, sang and played infectious dancing songs from the agricultural fields of Puglia where a Griko-speaking minority in Salento has influenced a dance style to heal the bite of a spider (tarantula). Jig-like tempos are so lively, it's easy to understand how the quickening, trance-like dance rhythms will speed up circulation and rid the body of poison…. Or uplift the weary and depressed with amusing and erotic love songs and gentle ballads, after hard field labor. Aramire's leader, Roberto Raheli, researched the long history of the tradition, and many of the songs are actual covers of the originals. Lusty overlapping vocal harmonies, flute, guitar, accordian, violin, and tamborine wove rollicking tarantella rhythms back and forth with circular patterns, casting a spell-like mood over joyous dancing crowds.

More star power hit the stage with Radio Tarifa's performance. The Spanish group is known for their considerable research into traditional flamenco, Andalusian and Sephardic music with musical bridges to the North African coast. Their superb set covered songs from their three albums on World Circuit/Nonesuch, but the real pleasure lay in watching such incredibly good musicians work through the interwoven styles as a group, on percussion, bass, several different flutes, clarinet, electric and acoustic guitars and the oud. Add the hoarse gypsy vocals of Benjamin Escoriza, who paced the stage and grabbed the mike like a rocker, and occasionally completed his ornamented vocal phrasing with a flourished flamenco dance pose. On Friday evening, women filled the dance floor and took on the personae of a Sheherazade or Carmen, and suddenly the festival took on a deep night, club-like atmosphere.

Saturday

All of these groups performed once again on Saturday to a packed crowd, but now the festival moved farther eastward on the rim to the Balkans and the Levant. Klapa Astoria, an all-male a capella vocal group, formed 12 years ago in the Croatian immigrant community in Queens, delivered a set reminiscent of the Whiffenpoofs. The simple four part harmonies date back to the 19th century, having evolved from the Gregorian chant, and now guitar, mandoline and mandola accompany this popular local group. Naji Youssef, one of Lebanon's leading voices of Lebanese folk music, sang a repertoire including folk, urban and pop songs. A beautiful, nuanced tenor, Naji Youssef also serves as a cantor in the Catholic Melchite Church of the Virgin Mary in Brooklyn. Accompanied by the darbuka (hand drum), tamborine, kanun (plucked laptop zither), oud (fretless lute), violin and nay flute, his lavish melismatic vocal work incorporated sinuous Arabic melodic patterns (maquamat) intended "to touch the heart." Kemani Cemal, the renowned Rom (Gypsy) violinist from Istanbul and his group had their US debut in the festival. The gypsy group carries the same instruments as Naji Youssef's ensemble, except a clarinet is the main reed instrument. Kemani Cemal is one of the last living Turkish links to two major classical traditions: the gypsy wedding ensemble based on elaborate improvisation (taksim) and the Istanbul nightclub ensemble based on complex interpretations of the classical modal (maquam) system. The merging of the two over time has influenced music from Bulgaria to Egypt.

Merita Halili, one of Albania's most popular singers gave the last outdoor performance of the evening. Gowned in antique ivory silk with a vest decorated with gold and silver passementerie , her shimmering voice swooped and darted over Central and Northern Albania, Macedonia, Kosova, and Southern Albania. Accompanied by her husband Raif Hyseni, the accordion wizard from Kosova, and his Ensemble including clarinet, sax, bass, percussion and guitar, she sang love songs and historical narratives from the region. Merita's melismatic elaboration of Ottoman compositional techniques alternated with rippling chromatic work by Raif, who covers his keyboard with red satin, signaling his mastery of the instrument. The dance floor was filled with an ever-expanding ring of Balkan dancing.

Inside the Bohemian Hall, the festival continued on with a late-night Gypsy-Serbian dance party. The Boban Markovic Orkestar, 12 brass band players from Belgrade ripped through rural songs and undulating dance music with some syncopated military marching beats, while the seductive lead singer Boban had the high-intensity crowds bouncing up and down non-stop and women rushing the stage. Most hauntingly, many of the group's trumpet lines hark back to Andalusia and Spain. To have a taste of this wild, euphoric sound, at once sweet and melancholy, look for Live in Belgrade (Piranha).

Sunday
During the last day, the festival's music swung around the southeastern rim to North Africa. Shoshana Tubi, a Jewish singer from Yemen, who specializes in wedding songs from Sana, Yemen's capital, opened the afternoon's festivities. Her strong, declamatory vocals about love and life included songs from the 13-14th centuries, in Hebrew, Ladino, Yiddish and Yemeni Arabic. She accompanied herself on a frame drum and darbuka, while her young daughter performed with another dancer or sang along, placidly tapping on a round gong. Sout Al Ghorba, a traditional Gnawa group originally from Morocco, followed, entering the stage with a clattering of metal castanets and thumping drums, and whirled across the stage with crouch-leaps, somersaults and spinning twirls. Wearing black, red, turquoise and cobalt blue costumes decorated with cowries, and singing Gnawa trance-inducing songs, accompanied by sentir, handclaps, castanets, and drums, the group injected Africa's propulsive, syncopated power into the festival with a jolt.

The Bosnian refugee youth dance corps, Sedef, then skipped and hopped across and around the stage area in circle dance formations, increasing in speed, never missing a step, during a sevdalinka set (music associated with Bosnian Muslims) by the Black Diamonds band from the Boomerang Club in Astoria. A gifted accordionist, Hari Besnicanin, lead singer Mala Kolakovic and a rai-influenced male singer spun tales of passionate love and longing, including a song about Sarajevo. Equally skilled audience members soon joined hands with the pretty girls in billowing white pantaloon skirts and their gallant escorts in bolero vests and cummerbunds, as the communal troupe raced around with the intricate step-dancing. At the finale, everyone was left breathless, including spectators. A Byzantine Church cantor, Grigoris Maninakis and the Mikrokosmos ensemble, wooed the crowds gently with smoothly styled classic Rebetika songs, the deep blues of Greek working class. A burnished tenor, Grigoris' phrased rhyming skimmed the surface of emotions, as he sang of women, pain and hardship in unison with his players on bouzouki, guitar, flute, tambourine and drum. Remarkably, his melismatic styling and the ornamented phrases recalled Andalusia and flamenco, although the songs originate in Smyrna and Constantinople more than a century ago.

Zakia Kara-Terki's performance was one of the great, magical ones during the whole festival. She was born in Tlemcen, Algeria, one of the greatest centers of Andalusian music in North Africa, carried there in the 15th century from Moorish Spain, al-Andalus, and re-conformed by Spanish Muslims and Sephardic Jews expelled from Seville, Granada and Cordoba due to religious intolerance. She sang 5 longish suites (nawba ), a classical Arab- Andalusian musical form that reflects each hour of the day and corresponds to specific modal patterns (maquamat) with different moods and rhythms, and reputed therapeutic spiritual powers. One of her inspirations lies in the poetry of Yafil, a Jewish poet expelled from 11th c. Spain. With exquisite melismatic control, her intonations soared and swirled in the twilight air, as she strummed away on her kwitra, a rare oud variant from Algeria and Morocco. Women swept over the dance floor to the sensuous, quickening music, and the mood was ecstatic.

Palestinian oud and violin maestro, Simon Shaheen and his Near Eastern Music Ensemble with special guest vocalist, Rima Khcheich, expanded parameters of Zakia's music by performing a soul-stirring repertoire also based on classical Andalusian suites and modes. The pieces were composed and sung by some of the Near East and North Africa's greatest 20th century legends: Egypt's Mohammed Abdl Wahab, Mohammed Qasabji and Oum Kalthoum; Lebanon's Rahbani brothers and Fairuz. During the excellent Afropop radio archive program, "From Mesopotamia to Andalusia," Simon spoke of the profound influence of Moorish poetry on the beautiful vocal genres throughout North African countries; specifically, the al-Andalus environment, reflected in the poetic imagery of "the gardens, the mountains, the beauty of the stars… and drinking wine…that never before existed for the east. For the east [Mesopotamia or Arabia] the lyrics were always imaginative." During this great period over 800 years in Mediterranean history, 711 to 1492, religious tolerance, philosophical exchange and shared encounters between vast cultural diversities throughout the Mediterranean allowed music and poetry to reach a zenith of expressive power. It is to the credit of the immense artistry of Simon Shaheen and Zakia Kera-Terki that we can still experience those musical pleasures today.

This festival was a historic first for New York. Although New York world music fans have had scattered opportunities to attend concerts by many musicians from Mediterranean countries, these distinct cultural strands have never before been woven together in such a comprehensive way. After months of research and planning, the combined curatorial expertise and knowledge of the Festival Directors, Robert Browning and Ethel Raim, produced a formidable collaboration between their respective organizations, including several ethnomusicology panels and workshops. Throughout the marathon concert event, diverse contemporary expressions of ancient Mediterranean styles and forms, accompanied by identical or variant instruments, shed light on the origins and interrelationships of the music. Each performance illuminated the Festival's theme, while resonating within the order of the program schedule.

Contributed by Evangeline Kim, Afropop Worldwide Board Member. Photographs contributed by Tom Van Buren and Jack Vartoogian.