Both the Jazz Festival and the Blues Festival took a hit from the tough economy this year—the former lost its big Thursday-night kickoff show, the latter its entire Thursday—so I was expecting the World Music Festival to slim down too. In fact, early this summer festival director Michael Orlove told me that there would probably be only 20 acts total, about 60 percent fewer than in past years.
The show with Watcha Clan on Friday night at Navy Pier will be broadcast live on WBEZ (91.5 FM), and the early weekday performances at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater will air as part of Continental Drift on Northwestern University’s WNUR (89.3 FM). As it has for the past few years, the festival closes with “One World Under One Roof,” a free extravaganza that transforms the Cultural Center into a minifestival, with overlapping sets in three different halls inside the building. —PM
Watcha Clan On last year’s Diaspora Hi-Fi (Piranha) this group from Marseilles, France, sings in six languages—French, Arabic, Yiddish, English, Spanish, and Hebrew—and borrows musical influences from the Mediterranean, northern Africa, and even the Balkans. The Watcha Clan’s dance-floor eclecticism is the kind that gives multiculturalism a bad name, though—not to knock dance music, but topping off programmed beats with superficial nods to a hodgepodge of traditions is hardly the best way to encourage your listeners to appreciate the integrity of other cultures. —PM
Music | $15, $13 members
8 PM | World Music Company | $15
Orkestar Sloboda Milwaukee’s Orkestar Sloboda are the Platonic ideal of the Balkan wedding band—sometimes when immigrants try to re-create the old country, what they end up with is more refined and transcendent than anything that ever actually existed back home. Master accordionist Milan Kontich formed Sloboda in 1972, drawing on the membership of two local Serbian Orthodox churches, and over the course of several hiatuses and regroupings its repertoire has come to include traditional tunes from Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Armenia, Russia, and Israel. (Yes, they will play “Hava Nagila” if you ask.) Kontich is still the star of the show, and rightfully so. —MK
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Red Baraat This young New York nine-piece, led by jazz percussionist Sunny Jain, calls what it plays “dhol ‘n’ brass”—a cute pun that didn’t prepare me for the vibrance and heft of the music. With six horn players and three percussionists, including superb jazz drummer Tomas Fujiwara, the band artfully hybridizes Indian bhangra and something akin to New Orleans second-line funk. I agree, it sounds iffy on paper, but Red Baraat kills it. On the group’s forthcoming debut, Chaal Baby (due in January), Jain leads the way on the double-headed Punjabi drum called the dhol, chanting terse phrases, shouting encouragement, and banging out the kind of snaky, propulsive beats you’ll recognize instantly if you’re ever heard a bhangra record. The group plays a mixture of originals, covers, and traditional songs, and despite the number of directions the music goes in at once—jazz-level improvisation, low-end funk courtesy of tubaist John Altieri, wild skeins of vibrato-heavy saxophone that suggest the great wedding bands of India—it never sounds schizophrenic. Plus it’s fun as hell. —PM
