MUMBAI: Held at Udaipur’s popular locations like Manji Ka Ghat, Fateh Sagar Paal and Gandhi Ground, the three-day music celebration at Udaipur World Music Festival (7 Feb-9 Feb 2020) was truly a treat to music lovers.
Carrying immense hopes and an overdose of our excitement levels we left Bombay on Feb 7th to attend this bodacious festival. On our arrival to the city we could see festival posters hung at prominent locations obviously for attendees which too helped us navigate there.
We were well greeted at our hotel -Mumbai House by Ramada who took care of us for three days at Udaipur, moreover there was a buzz about the festival even there. It was Day 1 and finally, we all were excited for the festival to roll out. Split at three different locations (Manji Ka Ghat, Fateh Sagar Paal and Gandhi Ground) the evening session held at 8 pm saw performances of Ginni Mahi- an Indian Punjabi folk, rap and hip-hop singer hailing from Jalandhar, Punjab, popular band When Chai Met Toast, Jail University, Mame Khan, Ankur Tewari, Pakshee, Taba Chake, Sudha to name a few along with international artists like Habib Koite, Sara Correa, Sattume, No Jazz marked remarkable memories for us to take back home.
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The three-day annual festival featured many genres of music, drawing musicians from countries such as France, Spain, Africa, and many more, besides India. With a footfall of over 50,000 people every year the festival was an amalgamation of music streams from around the globe.
The second day of the festival started in the morning with devotional music by renowned Carnatic music singer Sudha Raghuraman. Apart from other songs, she sang ‘Guru Ashtakam’ by adi guru Shankaracharya in Raag Jog, Todi, Durga and Sindhu Bhairavi which is a morning raga.
This guru Vandana was a composition by the singer herself, Kiya Tabassian, Charbel Rouhana Duet presented integration of music from Iran and Lebanon. They played on ‘Oud’ which is an Arabic instrument and Sitar which is an instrument from Persian music and sung poems of Sufi poet Amir Khusrau/ Amir Khusrow and 13 th century Persian poet Maulana Rumi. Their music dialogue between Arabic Maqam and the Persian Dastgah was much loved by the audience. Mame Khan, one of the most popular Rajasthani singer bowled over the crowd by spectacular folk music.
Habib Koite from Mali presented West African folk-blues and Indian band Thaikkudam Bridge presented Indian Pop and Rock Music. They sung songs from their debut album ‘Navarasam’ and from their new album ‘Namah’.
The theme of the 5th edition ‘We are the World: Unity in Diversity’ had brought together 150 global artistes from countries including Spain, France, Kurdistan, Portugal, Mali, Russia and Switzerland among others in all these years. The festival saw audiences that had specially come all the way from Kerela, Abu Dhabi, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Mumbai.
Udaipur World Music Festival was free of cost music extravagance – which happened to be an icing on the cake at this marvellous event.
No doubt overall the festival turned out to be massively successful, but we felt there should have been added food delicacies for people to try out as there were very few options and ‘security’ could have been tighter.
The festival instilled beautiful memories and we could not get enough of it, literally a big thumbs up to the makers of this music celebration who truly showcased magic of the unknown to the world.
