Music for the people, and everything under the sun
|||This week, the Blah Blah Bar shoots for the stars - and the moon and the whole galaxy. Through The Interplanetary Folk Music Festival, which kicks off today and ends on Sunday, the Cape Town venue will be bringing audiences a myriad of music that falls under the folk genre.
Over seven days, there will be master classes with the likes of Hilton Schilder during the day. There will also be performances by the likes of Mr Cat & The Jackal, Paige Mac, Ottoman Slap, Anton Goosen, Qadasi and Maqhinga as well as Josie Field and Laurie Levine.
After each festival performance, there will be an opportunity for new acts to grace the stage in Best of Launchpad - to which admission is free. To Carsten Rasch, the festival organiser and Blah Blah Bar owner, Launchpad - a regular open mic session on Tuesdays - is particularly important.
He told me: “It’s a platform for musicians who don’t have one. It’s very hard to put yourself on a stage somewhere and show you have the talent. So we provide that stage. We’ve been running LaunchPad for almost a year so we’ll be selecting five people who are the most suitable to perform on those particular nights. We’re hoping people will stay for that after the festival shows. It’s the best place to expose artists to new audiences.”
Those audiences may not include martians - that we know of - but the name of the festival sure is something that isn’t from this world. “The name comes from the fact that we wanted it to be as inclusive as possible,” explained Rasch.
“We thought by giving it a name like Interplanetary, it would give the impression that even people from outer space can be playing here. One of my concerns about folk music, in the Cape Town especially, is exclusive in a way. The folkies who normally get put onto events and festivals are always the same bunch of people.”
“Our belief is folk music deserves a wider description,” he continued, “It’s essentially music of the people: traditional music, ethnic music, it’s the first kind of music that existed. We do have the big folk artists on the stage at this festival.”
“But to include someone like Dizu Plaatjies [and the Ibuyambo Musical Group], who has never played at a folk festival before, is important because it’s traditional Xhosa music. I met him when I was 22 and he was doing Amapondo which was the first marimba band that Cape Town saw.”
Unlike other festivals, The Interplanetary Folk Music Festival doesn’t rely on the mad rush of the weekend to fill the venue. Instead, the fest will run for seven days. Rasch said the reason behind that was simple: “We wanted to make a splash of being unconventional.”
“The bar can seat about 100 people so it’s small and intimate. The only other way we could be unconventional was to have a festival over seven days. Twenty-six artists over seven days had a nice ring to it. We chose to go across age, race and music lines.”
“We have something for everyone. If this one is successful, next year, we hope to do it with a sponsor and we would like for it to become an institution and maybe include some international acts as well.”
• The Interplanetary Folk Music Festival takes place at the Blah Blah Bar on 84 Kloof Street, Gardens in Cape Town from September 26 to October 2. Tickets are available at the door.