Auckland Folk Festival 2025 – Kumeu Showgrounds, 24 – 27 January: Review Part One

31st January 2025

Auckland Folk Festival 2025 proved again to be a bag of riches with music of the highest quality from diverse sources and traditions.

On Saturday morning I was asked by someone in the Deep South, via Zoom, what is Folk music? A genuine query which I couldn’t answer in the moment.

After catching as many of the acts as I could in two days and one barmy evening, I realised it is World music as we now enjoy each year at WOMAD.

More manageable with four principal stages, a dance hall, a children’s stage, along with what you’d expect in ethnic catering and merchandise.

The 52^nd one, over half a century and still strong after suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortunes in recent times.

Virus lockdowns 2020 when forces conspired to crush the human spirit with banishing the essential life spirit of music. Still healing that trauma.

A biblical cyclone and floods which came close to washing away the 50^th anniversary.

Regenerated in the previous year and showing continued strength this year. Being perfectly pragmatic it is because of the great music and camaraderie that most of us come.

It would not be a Kiwi Summer Music Fest if we didn’t have four seasons in one day. At times in one hour.

Adam McGrath is the leader of one of the most fertile Folk bands in the country, the Eastern.

Spawned several other performers here this weekend. Krissy Jackson, Tess Liautaud and Jessie Rose Shanks. Also, Adam Hattaway and the great Reb Fountain.

A bear of a man with big beard and covered in tats. A booming voice when he banters from the stage and today, he sounds like Springsteen in his phrasing. A Folk shouter analogous to a Blues shouter like Big Joe Turner.

Opens with Creedence’s Fortunate Son. It ain’t me I/ I ain’t no Senators son.

McGrath is responding to the recent Trump victory and recalling how he sang the song at an earlier Folk Festival when the first Trump win came in 2016. He received an angry message from a punter about NOT making the music political.

He responded by doubling down. My sympathies lie with McGrath. Folk music has always included strong political sentiments, mostly left wing liberal. Trade Union centres and beer hall singalongs.

Woody Guthrie’s guitar and This Machine Kills Fascists.

He’s a true Kiwi troubadour who displays his compassionate heart on his sleeve.

Dulcie Said is a song about heartland mothers.

Great Society is a socialist polemic, encountering struggling men that needed more help than I could give.

Ends it with…tell them all to get fucked/ No Great Society on the back of tax cuts.

Ingrained in my memory is the time McGrath opened for Alejandro Escovedo at the Tuning Fork in Auckland, the evening of the Christchurch Mosque massacre.

I was full of rage. Friends of mine from Christchurch were distraught and tearful. McGrath helped us all that night.

Chrissy Jackson has accompanied him on fiddle, and she plays her own set earlier with husband Peter Jackson on keyboards.

My wife will fiddle with anyone is what Peter proclaims is on a t-shirt as part of their merch.

Over the last eight years I have seen her playing with everyone, starting with Bluegrass teenagers Rhodeworks before they became You, Me, Everybody.

She does drones like John Cale playing with Velvet Underground. The tradition is much older than that and mines all manner of ancient European Folk.

One which starts… You and me we belong together… reminds me of Richard and Linda Thompson, maybe the greatest married Folk duo before the did the Fleetwood Mac (You Can Go Your Own Way).

One of the best musical programmes was Songs from The Old Country curated by Tui Mamaki.

She led her own Medena Ensemble, a remarkable all-female choir which brings to life the celestial music of Mystere De Voix Bulgare in New Zealand. The mysterious voices of Bulgaria

See if you can track down any of those albums and you will have to try YouTube first.

Mamaki was born in France and raised in New Zealand, and she has spent years in Bulgaria chasing after this otherworldly music as if under a spell.

The music is like that, and witch power is predominant. Bulgaria could be Thrace, the place of hypnotic trance music which appears in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.

The more you learn, the more you realise there is much more to learn, to paraphrase Mamaki.

Before light there was sound. The Big Bang was a noise first before energy could manifest as recognisable light. Upon first hearing this music it appears familiar as if you have always heard it. All the elements are there in perfect harmony as if there has never been a time where it didn’t exist. That’s Krishna talking to Rhadna.

Before dissolving into incoherence or speaking in tongues, once you are experienced (thank you Hendrix), then you will know. (I’ll stop invoking the Gods now).

There were two other outstanding ensembles I caught from this programme.

Rasoul Abbasi is an Iranian musician domiciled in NZ and is a musical scholar. His group presents some of the different style of Persian folk traditions, and it is clear the diversity and stylistic complexity of this.

As diverse as Americana, and clearly music is a tradition which bleeds out everywhere over the course of millennia and cannot be confined by borders.

He plays a kamancheh, a bowed instrument which is a variation on the fiddle and its many ethnic variations.

There is a principal singer, and the group goes through regional styles, many of which are Kurdish.

Some sound like Indian dialect, incantatory chants, dirge drones, some glottal yodel sounds.

A father and son pair enter. The young guy looks no older than 13, and plays a daf, a Middle Eastern frame drum resembling a bodhran, which he can produce drum riffs like Led Zeppelin! Fast rhythmic triplets.

The dad plays a tanbur stringed instrument, which sounds like the sitar sound that Brian Jones added to the Rolling Stones Paint It, Black.

A lot sound passionate and patriotic. There is one which has dark dirge chants to start, reminiscent of the Black Seeds A Box for Black Paul. Then the percussion takes off and you hear some Eastern yodels.

This is the tombak, a large hand drum which can sound like tablas, but it also has a higher resonance.

Basant Madhur is a virtuoso tabla player from India now also residing in NZ, and he brings an ensemble with him that includes his daughter on sitar.

Playing classical Indian ragas, again with wide regional variations. As I have discovered in recent years from visiting musicians and those which appear at WOMAD.

There are two sitars, and they combine on an electrifying breakdown which gets as complex and mesmerising as Black Metal guitarists. Since they are not amplified, the meshed sound is dramatic but not battering.

Over this, the tabla is setting the lead.

You can hear some of the cadences of Michael Bloomfield’s East West and the Doors The End. Expanded out with improvisation.

Hannah Wiskari comes on to play a soprano saxophone. Irish John Sanders is playing an eight-string hybrid of a bouzouki and guitar called a gouzouki.

They play some exquisite fusion music.

You hear the clear distinction between the resonant sitar tones and the heavier acoustic strings on the gouzouki.

At first like Davey Graham and when the strings mesh it becomes like Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Sanders has written an Irish raga. He asks everyone to chant Om, he has based it on Hare Krishna chants. Sounds like the magical tone of the Beatles’ I Feel Fine to lead off. The raga is there in structure. Saxophones sound like pipes and there is a definite Celtic presence.

These three would be well-served to have a main stage presence.

I catch a bit of Pony Baby, who are Jazmine Mary, witchy Macbeth Folk, and Arahi, Soul and Folk in equal amounts.

Together they present captivating music which blends in haunting style a little like the Handsome Family. They aren’t married so think of them as brother and sister. (No, NOT like the White Stripes).

Jazmine often plays a striking powder-blue electric guitar (it could be a Gretsch) but I really like the banjo tones she plays.

Like Angels Revenge, a Roots Country ballad with violence as the theme. Putting someone in the ground. They harmonize beautifully.

Another one starting with this town…also ends up with melancholy and regret as they sing about being closer to God. This is a Folk Festival so murder, and death are always close by.

Tom Rodwell is from England, and he plays a mean, electric Blues guitar. Hard-core Folkies I know would grumble and curse, but no one is yelling Judas!

He dives into Chuck Berry’s It Don’t Take But A few Minutes, throwing in a little of Robert Johnson’s Come on In My Kitchen.

Also reveals how much of Johnnie Johnson’s boogie-woogie piano went into the classic Berry oeuvre.

Several Australian acts here and they form a mainstay as they have done in past Folk Festivals.