Chicago’s annual World Music Festival seems to have settled into a new identity—more modest in size and ambition than in its early years, but generally reliable and entirely free. (In the past, some shows in conventional venues charged admission.) This may feel like a sort of surrender by the festival’s organizers, but consistency isn’t something to take for granted—and this year’s edition has an awful lot of great artists, some of whom are visiting our city for the first time. On the flip side of that, though, several acts on the 2015 lineup have played Chicago in the past couple years—in some cases at the festival itself.
Hailu Mergia
Friday, September 11Cyro Baptista’s Banquet of the Spirits opens. 8 PM, Martyrs’, 3855 N. Lincoln, 21+
Saturday, September 12Ester Rada opens. 8 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, 21+
Ethiopian keyboardist Hailu Mergia has lived near Washington, D.C., since the early 80s, when he decided to stick around after a tour by his old group the Walias Band. For many international musicians, settling in the U.S. means the end of their international careers, and that seemed to be the case for him. In 1985 he recorded a one-man-band record called Shemonmuanay, his use of chintzy synthesizers and drum machines presaging a future when automated electronic instruments would widely supplant flesh-and-blood musicians in Africa and beyond. Though it became a hit in Ethiopia, it was released nowhere else and made no impact in the States—at least not until 2013, when Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued it. Last year that great label also reissued Tche Belew, a 1977 masterpiece that Mergia cut in Addis Ababa with a band called the Walias as the halcyon days of Ethiopian music drew to a close. It includes the funk instrumental “Musicawi Silt,” one of the most recognizable and irresistible jams the country has ever produced. These releases kicked Mergia’s career back into gear, and since then he’s toured all over Europe; he arrives in Chicago leading a trio, invoking the past while looking to a future that barely existed for him three years ago.
Tal National
Saturday, September 19 Orlando Julius (see above) headlines. 3 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, 201 E. Randolph, all ages
Sunday, September 20 Chicago Afro-beat Project opens. 7 PM, Mayne Stage, 1328 W. Morse, 18+
In January 2014, Chicago studio engineer Jamie Carter took his third trip to Niger’s capital city of Niamey, where he recorded another new album by high-energy guitar band Tal National—Zoy Zoy (Fat Cat), the group’s fourth and most assured LP. With each visit Carter has grown more tightly enmeshed in Tal National’s business; he’s helped them land a deal with a Western record label, and he’s served as their U.S. liaison on tours. Hard—hitting trap-set beats drive the band’s music, complemented by pulsing, frenetic spasms of talking drum, and its flesh and blood are the contrapuntal layers of liquid, skittering guitars, whose loosening—and-tightening sonic weave gives the songs lift and sparkle as it complements the polyrhythmic base beneath the soulful singing. Led by guitarist Almeida (aka Hamadal Issoufou Moumine), Tal National have always borrowed influences from nearby countries, and on Zoy Zoy the gallop of Senegalese mbalax percolates to the foreground.
Fri 9/11 through Tue 9/22, multiple venues and times, see worldmusicfestivalchicago.org for more. Free.
