Mela's Hidden Secrets

Upwards of 60,000 people are expected to rally to Edinburgh’s shoreline this weekend to celebrate the wide world with the Edinburgh Mela Festival, the last of the city’s nine August festivals. Mela means ‘gathering’ in Sanskrit and is a word often borrowed to describe a place of great ethnic or cultural diversity. Here it becomes a melting pot of artistry from around the globe, brought together in carnival spirit to Leith’s expansive Ocean Terminal area.

The Festival was originally established in 1995 by members of Edinburgh’s minority ethnic communities to show off Scotland’s diversity, and has steadily gained momentum from year to year to become the generously funded, week-long celebration it is today. If in its infant years Mela served as a hopeful showcase for lesser known arts and crafts, it has now matured into an ambitious, forward-thinking initiative that actively challenges the notion of artistic boundaries, making year-round efforts to forge new connections between cultures and fuse their practices. And it’s not just about paying respect to diversity in the way heritage organisations honour castles, it’s also about creating something completely new that the world has never seen or heard before. In true artistic spirit, it’s about working to produce something greater than the sum of its parts.

So this year’s Mela climaxes with Saturday’s world premiere of Yatra//Journey, the welding of three musical traditions hitherto alien to each other. 16 diversely experienced musicians will pave a common ground for the classical Scottish tradition, South Asian traditions and the art of Japanese taiko drumming in a 45-minute symphony featuring bagpipes, fiddles, dhols, tablas, award-winning vocals and the bellowing booms of big, big drums. Yatra is Sanskrit for Journey and the double slashes in between symbolise what one of the artists once said in a rehearsal: “it feels like this piece is on parallel tracks."

When the musicians first got together in April, the first great challenge was to understand where each other were coming from in their musical ideas. “We like to talk of music as a universal language, but it’s not; it’s deeply, fundamentally cultural,” says Barnaby Brown, one of Yatra’s three appointed musical directors – or ‘facilitators’ as he prefers to call it – who teaches in the traditional Scottish music department at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

“There are subtleties of rhythm, pitch, intonations that go right over your head if you’re not familiar with them, so we’ve each had to become more sensitive to what is valued in another artist’s tradition and understand at a deeper level the cultures we are collaborating with.”

Miyuki Williams is another of Yatra’s ‘facilitators’ and represents the voice of the taiko drummers. Her group Mugenkyo, meaning ‘boundless reverberations’ in Japanese, tours extensively throughout the year and is one of Europe’s most respected taiko institutions. She trained under one of Japan’s leading taiko masters Masaaki Kurumaya in the mid nineties and has since spearheaded operations to popularise the art in the UK, opening a purpose-built school, or dojo, near Glasgow in 2002.

“It’s been a process of give and take,” she says. “None of us knew each other before this and we all had our own ideas, but everyone gave each other the space to have an opinion and things naturally gelled together. I think we’ve ended up with something very unique and we’re all really pleased with the result.”

But how well will it please the average punter with an untrained ear if professional musicians have so profoundly struggled to get to grips with the concept? “We didn’t want to make it too challenging,” assures Brown. “We started off with enough for two hours but we whittled it down to the most successful items, a 45-minute, musically coherent set that audiences can follow.”

Williams adds: “I think we’ve managed to make it accessible in that it’s fast moving. We’ve cut all the flab and it’s constantly moving from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next.”

The journey has already begun for the musicians and Saturday will be the day that audiences will be invited to join the same path and discover the unknown. What’s more this is just one of the many attractions on offer this weekend, all of which we get for the token price of £2. That’s just half what we paid for a single burger on the Fringe.