The Brooklyn Rail

What have you got planned for United Nations Day? Maybe you weren’t aware that it’s a holiday. That’s not surprising, most of us barely give the UN a second thought all year, unless we’re stuck working in Midtown East or maybe caught in traffic created by a visiting dignitary’s motorcade. And the watchwords associated with this international behemoth are hardly positive: bureaucracy, inefficiency, inaction. The General Assembly Building seems somewhat mute and forlorn, its marble and glass tower standing strangely apart from the city where it resides. As for the holiday commemorating the adoption of its charter (October 24), it doesn’t seem in danger of catching on with the locals any time soon.

This is a sad state of affairs for an organization that was founded in the aftermath of World War II with the eminently worthy goal of peacekeeping. It’s especially sad for the United States, which helped spearhead its creation and houses its principal headquarters, yet whose leaders routinely neglect or discredit the organization. Even the recent decision by the UN Security Council to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza was marked by the United States abstaining from the vote, following its three previous vetoes of the resolution. What are the prospects for peace when the UN host nation refuses to demand a ceasefire, despite the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, and the possibility of starvation from many thousands more?

In the face of this diplomatic morass stands a vibrant monument to internationalism: New York City itself. We know that a trip through Queens on the 7 train can expose you to literally hundreds of the world’s languages. You may have heard of the United Nations of Food, which chronicles one person’s attempt to try the cuisine from every country in the world without leaving New York (he is close, and I am jealous). And we know that, as with language and food, the music heard in every corner of the city provides a vehicle for understanding and participating in the entirety of the world around us.

There are organizations like the World Music Institute that make it their mission to present music and dance of different cultures throughout the year, and they do so brilliantly, recently putting on concerts of Sicilian, Tibetan, Spanish, and Indian music in the course of one recent month. There are also venues ranging from neighborhood bars to grand concert halls independently pursuing this task. In the midst of this is the Brooklyn International Music Festival, now in its ninth year and headquartered at the Jalopy Theatre in Red Hook. Over the course of one weekend in June, this ambitious festival is just one of the many initiatives created by the husband-and-wife team of Geoff and Lynette Wiley, who founded Jalopy in 2006 as a home for traditional music. Their focus had been on American folk music, but they have found common ground with roots music from around the world.

The festival this year takes listeners to a number of different continents. It kicks off on June 7 with Brooklyn Maqam, an ensemble that presents Arab music and that, just a few weeks earlier at Jalopy, is hosting the New York Oud Festival. Its founders—violinist Marandi Hostetter, bassist John Murchison, and guitarist/oud player Brian Prunka—have participated and cultivated an active Arab music scene in the city, including involvement with Bassam Saba and the New York Arabic Orchestra. The maqam is a form dating back to the fourteenth century that draws from set melodic patterns and encourages improvisation. It draws primarily from three cultures: Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. It can be heard in the context of Muslim as well as Sephardic Jewish liturgy, and its refined melodies produce a subtle and powerful emotional impact. Brooklyn Maqam is followed the first night by Shiva Lakhan, a singer trained in Indian classical music but at home in the genre of chutney, a type of fusion between Indian folk music and Trinidadian calypso and soca. The music developed through Indian workers brought by the British as indentured laborers across the Caribbean. Whether seated at and playing the harmonium or dancing along to the propulsive beats, Lahkan brings a polished melismatic voice to these cross-cultural songs. The opening day concludes with the Ghanaian band Wazumbians, whose lilting melodies recall a well-known earlier group from that country called Osibisa. The sizable ensemble maintains an active schedule of gigs, often playing to large, raucous crowds at the Shrine and Silvana in Harlem, and even hosting its own festival in Accra.

The second day takes place on the street outside Jalopy and features Tambor y Caña, a large, surging percussion-focused band playing Venezuelan music. Founded by conga player Willie Quintana, the band produces a relentless stream of sound. Later that day, the Center for Traditional Music and Dance presents Jalikunda: Home of the Griots, an ensemble featuring musicians and dancers, as well as griots (oral historians relating stories in song) whose traditional roots are in Gambia—though they are currently based in the Bronx. Using instruments like the kora and balafon, Jalikunda is allied with the Bronx Music Heritage Center, which acknowledges and preserves locally produced sounds from hip hop to salsa to West African grooves. That evening, the indoor Theatre Stage presents Saha Gnawa, a contemporary Moroccan ensemble led by Maalem Hassan Ben Jaafer. Gnawa has drawn the attention of many Western musicians, including Bill Laswell, Randy Weston, and Adam Rudolph. It is renowned for its trance-like qualities, and many of its melodies are played on a skin-covered lute called a sinter. On the nearby Tavern Stage that night will be La Banda Chuska, a popular local band combining the sounds of Peruvian cumbia and chicha with 1960s-era surf rock. Finally, the festival concludes Sunday with workshops aimed at bringing more people to these different international styles of music.

Of course, in the end no form of music is inherently international; it all depends on the vantage point of the listener. But making a conscious decision to expand beyond the boundaries of your usual musical universe has distinct advantages. The whole point of listening broadly—which is vastly enabled in the age of streaming, a rare pure positive for technology—is to hear different ways of thinking, different experiences of the world, with the chance to radically expand your own. On a recent day at the end of March, I went to hear the brilliant DJ who goes by the handle Awesome Tapes (who oversees an accompanying label Awesome Tapes From Africa); he was finishing a tour that had taken him halfway around the world at the lovely atrium space of Public Records in Gowanus. He spun track after track by artists I didn’t know: Askia Modibo, Dennis Mpale, Ata Kak. Each made me want to learn more. When I read further about the whole ATFA project, I learned about that label’s commitment to equity for the artists it represents. The result is a system that encourages fairness, inclusion, broadened awareness, and true international accord, all under a banner of blazing sound. That is a creed worth pursuing.