Zal Idrissa Sissokho gave the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s 32nd edition a perfect global liftoff on Friday night (July 17). While the audience baked in the sun, the Senegalese kora player and singer—now a Montreal resident—and his Buntalo quintet delivered a shimmering set of music that ranged from traditional chants to original Afro-funk. The rippling arpeggios Sissokho plucked on his 21-string West African harp felt like cooling water. It was great music for dancing. People were listening intently and stayed hushed throughout Iron and Wine’s set. Singer-songwriter Sam Beam beguiled the crowd with his soft voice, beautifully nuanced phrasing, and finely wrought verses. Inspired by the beauty of the setting—to which he referred several times—the Austin-based artist delivered a masterly set of acoustic Americana that had a spiritual undertow and a poetic richness”¦

A number of informal collaboratories sprang up during the 2009 festival, with one of the most successful happening at Stage 6on Saturday afternoon (July 18). Spearheaded by British guitarist Justin Adams, Soul Science found musicians from three continents—Africa, Europe, and North America—working together as one band rather than taking turns at the microphone. After a somewhat tentative start, Adams and his musical partner Juldeh Camara joined kora master Zal Idrissa Sissokho and singer Tapa Diarra, American songster Corey Harris, and Pender Island guitarist Lester Quitzau’s trio in a rolling Afro-blues super-jam that eventually garnered a standing ovation. “That was the best thing I’ve ever heard here,” said one festival veteran, and we’re not going to dispute his claim”¦

New Folk-fest artistic director Linda Tanaka’s most controversial innovation, an on-site beer garden, turned out to be not so controversial after all, producing only a mild hum of revelry from its umbrella-shaded imbibers. One vocal critic, however, was folksinger Kate Reid—not because she supports a ban on alcohol but because beer has a way of competing for her girlfriend’s attention. “My baby’s in the beer tent again,” she sang from the main stage on Saturday night. If that’s the worst that came of this new distraction, it’ll probably be back next year”¦

Another new feature at this year’s VFMF proved a big success. On Saturday and Sunday (July 19) the audience was given an alternative to the main stage proceedings with a second evening concert stage at the southwest corner of the site, by the duck pond and bulrushes. Artists such as laid-back Afrobeat septet Mr. Something Something kept several hundred people dancing at Stage 5 @ Twilight, which had the feel of an outdoor club”¦

Old folkies welcomed this year’s return of Glasgow-born bard Dick Gaughan, who was in fine roaring voice following a throat ailment that had temporarily rendered him silent. But not everyone was quite so happy to see him, or so Tony McManus claimed at Stage 7 on Sunday morning. After joining a workshop named No Gods and Precious Few Heros with Gaughan and Canadian songwriter James Keelaghan, McManus had the daunting task of playing a solo guitar showcase with his former idol looking on from 10 feet away. “Go away, Gaughan,” he cracked, before claiming that he felt intimidated by his fellow Scot’s looming presence. It’s probably a good thing, then, that he didn’t notice another guitar god—the beaming Amos Garrett—checking him out just a few minutes later”¦

The notion that “folk music” is an elastic concept got a good workout on Sunday afternoon. At its Stage 5 feature, the Netherlands-based sextet Tarhana delivered a set that would have worked just as well at last month’s Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Playing a space-age electric saz, singer Ozhan Acikbas tapped into his Turkish roots, while Franz von Chossy wrung fusion-esque sounds from an electronic keyboard and percussionist Sjahin Durin roamed the world for an array of Latin, African, and Middle Eastern beats. Alex Simu was the crowd favourite, however, ranging easily from klezmer clarinet to jazz sax improvisations, with a vaudevillian detour into Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther””¦

Soul icon Mavis Staples and her band brought the festival to a moving and rousing close on Sunday night. It felt especially apt, in the first summer of Barack Obama’s presidency, to have a gospel- and blues-based singer remind us of the struggles of African-Americans past and present. Staples’s husky voice has lost none of its power and elasticity while acquiring an extraordinary growling quality in the lower registers. She opened with a soul version of Stephen Stills’s 1967 counterculture anthem “For What It’s Worth” and followed with the yearning “Eyes on the Prize” and the old spiritual “Wade in the Water”. The genial 70-year-old revisited material that her family, the Staple Singers, performed in the ’60s as the musical wing of Martin Luther King’s civil-rights movement—songs such as “Why Am I Treated So Bad?”, King’s favourite, according to Staples.