Boka Halat
Forum Stage 4.45 pm - FREE

FOLK? WORLD? ROOTS? FORGET THE LABELS, LISTEN & DANCE TO THE MUSIC!

The one question about their band Boka Halat which makes band leaders Roger Watson and Musa Mboob take deep breaths and roll their eyes is: "What kind of music is it then?" How do you classify the unclassifiable? Particularly when the whole point of the band is to breakdown stereotype images of the people who play in it. Their wry answer to the genre question is: the music you’d expect this group of people to make.

The Boka Halat technique is not ‘serial multiculturalism’. The name means ‘mutual inspiration’ in Musa’s native Gambian Wolof language, and the technique is INTERcultural: to see what a group of diverse musicians can create which none of them could arrive at on their own. Wherever the melodic or rhythmic stimulus originates, the band builds its arrangement on each member contributing a response from his own experience. Don’t expect the African songs to sound like Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Yussou N’Dour, nor the English ones like Show of Hands or Maddy Prior. Instead, be amazed at how naturally an English ballad sits with rhythms from the Gambia and the haunting sound of the riti, or at how a song based on the Mandinka rice harvest can move smoothly into a jig from Wessex. Try finding a genre pigeon-hole for that!