The Australasian World Music Expo comes to Melbourne in mid-November, and the list of acts on the bill displays the sheer diversity of music and nationalities on show. One of the feature acts, Dereb the Ambassador, is headed by Dereb Deselegn, an accomplished Ethiopian singer songwriter, and also features members with backgrounds in Australia, South Africa, Chile, Morocco and New Zealand. And that’s just in the one band. It’s just that they all now live in Sydney.
The band’s flautist and saxophonist Matthew Ottignon, speaking from his home in the New South Wales capital, agrees that the definition of what world music is has grown significantly over time.
“That’s right,” he says. “It’s a hopeless label, really. I don’t think anybody really can narrow that down. I know you can potentially have Australian bands playing at a world music festival. I think once upon a time ‘world music’ was just a label used to sell African music, back in the day. They needed something to sell it, so they called it ‘world music’. But of course now, having a label like that means that any music that isn’t mainstream top 40 or something like that!” he laughs.
Ultimately however, Ottignon is just happy to have this style of music represented in such a major way in mainstream Australia, with the event set to take place at the Melbourne Arts Centre and several well-known venues around town, because he very much enjoys immersing himself in this type of musical expression.
“I like this music because it’s a great mixture of African music,” he explains. “It’s from east Africa, from the ‘Horn of Africa’, it’s got a different flavour than the rest of African music. It’s got more of an eastern flavour to it, and the music itself is quite distinct. It also features jazz quite heavily, and it has a tendency to become quite ecstatic and hypnotic and even freeing, which is the sound of traditional Ethiopian music. Plus there’s a touch of James Brown and other soul music, so it’s quite an interesting mix.”
It’s that melting pot of styles, all rolled into one, that attracts Ottignon to this musical style. “When I travel the world, I always want to find out what the local and traditional music’s like. I find it fascinating and interesting, and mixing it all together, like reggae with jazz with rock or whatever. It’s fascinating.”
Of course, it’s not all sunshine and happiness. The man himself, Dereb, was originally from a tiny village in Ethiopia, and wound up as a refugee in the thriving, first world metropolis of Sydney, 12,000 kilometres away. Obviously two more different worlds cannot be imagined, and this presented its own issues.
“That’s an interesting question!” he says, when asked what it’s like to work with Dereb. “There’s been some cultural…err…hurdles that he’s had to jump over. He grew up in a really small village, and didn’t have the type of education that we take for granted. When he arrived in Australia, he had to learn, slowly but surely, what it’s like to live in Australia.
“And even after being here for quite a few years now, there are still issues on a day to day basis with being in a band together,” he continues. “And his expectations of the industry are, and what the reality of the Australian music industry is, they’re completely different things. And I think he finds it very frustrating in this country. He’s had a lot of success in Ethiopia, and he finds it hard to get that same success here. Dereb’s very passionate about his music, so much so that he’s only really into doing the music, and so when other things come up, he just seems to want to just roll off and go back to performing and rehearsing and all that.”
BY ROD WHITFIELD
