The winner of the Roskilde Festival World Music Award for 2011 is the Egyptian Centre for Local Music (Al-Mastaba Centre), Rania Khallaf reports The board of the Roskilde Festival World Music Award (RFWMA) has chosen the Mastaba Centre for Egyptian Folk Music as this year's winner of an international award. Founded in 2000 by Zakariya Ibrahim, the Mastaba Centre aims to spread knowledge and to document, preserve, play and develop a full range of traditional Egyptian music genres. Although Rango music is not that popular in Egypt itself, the centre has won the award from the RFWMA in large part for its efforts to reintroduce traditional Egyptian music to young people. Ibrahim points out that the centre also has a spacious audio-visual archive hall that contains examples of folk music from several governorates in Egypt. The chairman of the Roskilde Festival Charity Society is Steen Jorgensen, explains why the Mastaba Centre was chosen as this year's winner in a press release issued by the centre. The RFWMA was founded to support development through education in traditional as well as contemporary local music forms with the aim of ensuring a cultural stepping stone in developing countries with particular regard to children and young people.Peter Hvalkof, who books international musicians for the Roskilde Festival, welcomed the 2011 RFWMA award to the centre. "The kind of work that the Mastaba Centre does to ensure a basis for traditional Egyptian music needs to be recognised for its inspirational value to the entire scene of world music. It makes really good sense to be able to follow up on an outstanding Rango concert presented by the Mastaba Centre at this year's Roskilde Festival by awarding the RFWMA to the centre," he said. Ibrahim said that the centre's staff were very honoured to be given the award and were delighted to join other award winners in Zanzibar and Mali, whom they understood to share similar motivations in developing cultural projects and preserving traditions. He added that he was happy to be granted the opportunity to visit the Roskilde Festival in the summer for a performance with Rango musicians on the new Gloria stage. Ibrahim's efforts and endeavours to protect local music started as early as in 1989, when he founded the famous Al-Tanboura troupe in Port Said to preserve the special type of dance and song in this region. "My efforts met success in 1994 when Tanboura started to hold its concerts in Cairo and gained peerless popularity," Ibrahim told Al-Ahram Weekly. "After that, I began to roam the country to discover local traditional music, especially in cities of Ismailia, Suez and Port Fouad." On his own initiative Ibrahim started two traditional music classes, one in Port Said and and the other in Suez, to train children under 16. "As new generations join my troupe, two other classes are under construction, one in Al-Arish for Bedouin music and the other in Cairo for Nubian music," he told the Weekly. Ibrahim struggled on his own for five years before being given some financial support from the Ford Foundation from 1994 to 1997. The new classes will be sponsored by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA). Ibrahim complains that he has never received any support from any governmental or private organisation in Egypt. The first prize he received was from the Montreal Music Festival in 2000 for his unique work with the Tanboura troupe. It was in 2000, while on one of his musical tours, that Ibrahim, discovered Rango, which dates back to 1820 when Ibrahim, son of Mohamed Ali settled in Sudan and started bringing Sudanese labourers to work for the Egyptian Army and in the cotton fields of Egypt. The labourers from South Sudan brought with them Rango. The instrument they used, sometimes known in the West as a marimba, is fashioned from a special Sudanese melon and cannot be made in Egypt. The last professional player was Abbas Mastoura, who died in 1975. "I managed to find another player, Hassan Bergamon, who used to play Rango in the late 1960s but had abandoned it for another genre," Ibrahim says. The Rango troupe presents Sudanese folk and Zar music, which is increasing in popularity now that millions of Sudanese live in Egypt and have since become Egyptian citizens. Ibrahim also founded the Jerkin Bedouin Troupe in Sinai in 2003, as well as co-sponsoring the Barameka troupe, which presents the special songs of fishermen and fellahin (peasants). Born in 1952, Ibrahim is himself a singer and a folk dancer. He also does the marketing of all the songs of his groups at international music festivals, such as World of Music and Dance (WOMAD.) Ibrahim also told the Weekly that he had so far released five albums with international music companies, 30IPS being one of them, and that the albums are on sale in Europe and the United States. Egyptians in Cairo, however, can only find those unique CDs in a few outlets in Zamalek bookshops, but they do have the opportunity to attend Rango music concerts every Thursday at the Mastaba Centre in Downtown Cairo. The RFWMA award will be presented to Ibrahim by the director of the Oslo World Music Festival, Alexandra Archetti Stolen, during the WOMEX (World Music Expo) award ceremony in Copenhagen at the end of this month. For any readers who happen to be in the vicinity, this event will take place on Sunday 30 October from noon to 2pm at the DR Koncerthuset Studio 2, Copenhagen. One might expect that, in a transitional period like ours in Egypt, many cultural idols and false conceptions will come crushing down and that private cultural centres like the Mastaba will take their rightful place on Egypt's cultural chart. Otherwise, why did we revolt?
