Great Friday: Part 2

Bodur Plays it By Ear at Cinema City

This was a show with a strong basis, neatly executed: a concept album, with accompanying arthouse film, sync'd with the singer and her band playing in the near dark, to a very comfortably seated audience, in Norwich's classiest fleapit. 

The musical heart of the show uses music known as Maqam. This is an Arabic music form that gives a structure of scales for building a melody, within which each musician is free to improvise.  It is how melody developed in Mesopotamia and Persia, absorbing influences from indigenous Arabic practise, Ancient Greece and Byzantium. It is the music of Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkey and throughout Central Asia. There has been the usual ooohing and aaarghing about a young musician bringing new music into the ageing Hipster world of North London, but maqam is older in origin than London itself and is why, when we travel eastward musically, we hear marked differences to western European originated melodies, which evolved in parallel. Learning about the origins and structure of maqam, from these compositions, has been enlightening, but what about the songs Bodur has written for her debut album?

In Chloe Bodur's debut album, she addresses important matters that have arisen, not least from one of modern history's greatest conundrums, how to live a free life in a world politically shaped by imperialists using straight-edged rulers on maps.

As the crisis and cruelty in Gaza is being confronted, the continuing anguish of the Kurdish people, who's land is torn in half between Turkey and Iraq, persists.  Where the global twitterati chatter is about reinforcing borders and preserving culture in aspic, the ignorance of this is laid bare by art, such as this performance, showing how important it is to talk and think about the flesh and blood of individuals and loving families, not aggregated numbers of de-personalised labels. 

The Kurds, Palestinians and the Tamils are three such cultures that have imperially imposed international borders sawing through their worlds, with the Palk Strait also separating Sri Lanka from India, as an added complication, yet within these cultures there are deeper concerns of their own too.

Opening with Morning and proceeding to its conclusion with the poignant MyBlood: Is In The Soil, MAQAM is a thought provoking, challenging work, visually slow moving perhaps, but musically engaging. A friend of mine was really caught up in the film, as I was by the music, mirroring our respective preferences. For a detailed breakdown of the album, follow the link to an illuminating article in the Wonderland online magazine. 

This performance of MAQAM would not be everyone's cup of tea, even so, this event was noticeably under-subscribed, which was a shame. Perhaps it was too early in the evening. Maybe the day of the week was unfortunate, a heavy watch at the end of the working week, when a dose of Vanity Fairy was needed. Hard to say. 

However, I was glad to have been at Cinema City and impressed that Wild Paths Festival made use of an impressive space for such art. 

This show by Bodur and the performance by the band Piss at St Peter's Parmentergate challenging the malignant, ignorant avoidance of society, politicians and mainstream media to the daily horror of domestic violence, are performances that need a platform to spread understanding. 

I didn't get to the Piss show, but was told by one of the official festival photographers, Adam Williams, how the band used multi-media technology to supplement their music to memorably communicate their important message. Adam had been deeply moved by what he witnessed, learning a lot about the dreadful bodycount of women and children, (the over-whelming majority of victims of violence in homes are women and their children). No naïf, Adam was impressed by what the event taught him. This was the Wild Fields Festival doing more than just showcasing the music venues of Norwich, but here, highlighting how contemporary new music is more than mere variations of pop and rock. 

A less dramatic, but equally community supportive aspect of Wild Fields Festival, is the panel forums run with Norwich's Access Creative College, a post-16 education college, focusing on the music and media industries.  Held this year in the Minstrels' Room of the Maid's Head Hotel on Thursday and Friday afternoon's of Wild Paths, insiders from the music industry answer questions from a chair person and the attending students and audience members. The aim is to shed some light on how to navigate this notoriously rapacious industry. 

These events are worthy and well-received elements of this compact, packed, multi-venue festival, as is its partnering with Shelter, this year's chosen charity. 

Spencer Ide

18/10/2025