By Morgan Rothborne, Rogue Valley Times
Rogue World Music looks proudly at the Ashland World Music Festival as an increasingly expanding offering of global music and culture, balanced between celebration and education. In 2017 — one year after Ashland Parks and Recreation Commission created the festival — APRC realized it needed help to fully realize the idea and leaned on Rogue World Music, said Ana Byers, the nonprofit’s executive director.
“It’s turning out to be a really cool partnership. They have the infrastructure support, and as a nonprofit, we have different kinds of experience. We can pivot and lead planning,” she said.
“We’ve really worked on expanding who we’re bringing in and what we’re offering, while still keeping it a free event, to keep it reachable and as inclusive for everyone as possible,” Byers said. Total immersion in global music traditions is at the heart of the festival. As much as possible, organizers chose artists who are both skilled musicians and teachers. She held up Ashland-based Brazilian musician Felipe Archer as an example.
“Samba is music not unlike blues and jazz in the U.S., a music of resistance and reliance,” she said.
“We love gathering with many generations present. Our music is really geared toward a family friendly feeling. It’s more of a tribal style gathering when we play. It’s kind of an inherent thing for us. It’s the way our ancestors have gathered for centuries,” said Yelena Valerievna, a member of Malinka.
She was elated to say Rogue World Music is holding Balkan dance lessons to help the crowd more deeply enjoy the band’s music.
“We want it to feel like it’s your tribe — this is your community,” she said.
Valerievna is from Latvia and one of three members of the band from outside the U.S. Her husband is from England with an Irish background, while another member is from Puerto Rico.
“We like to play music in other languages — there are five different languages spoken in the group. We play music from many parts of the world,” she said.
The members of the band lean deep into their own heritages and their international curiosity to find connections. Valerievna said with her own Slavic background, she sees continuity in musical traditions throughout Eastern Europe, while her Puerto Rican bandmate is pulling in French and Italian music, the romance languages familiar to her own Spanish.
“Some songs are very old, played by many artists, and we play them our own way. It’s kind of the way folk music is; it’s how it moves and changes as different people pick it up and it moves those people,” Valerievna said.
The festival runs on grants and community partnerships to keep it a free event as it continues to expand, Byers said. Since 2020, organizers have partnered with a different organization directly helping fire recovery efforts.
“We were actually supposed to have a virtual festival on Sept. 12 in 2020. But after Almeda we were like, ‘This is not what the community needs right now, not the right tone,’ so we waited a while. I mean, I was evacuated from my own home. But after a while, we thought, ‘This is our organization’s mission — to build community, cultural community,’” Byers said.
This year the festival will support ACCESS; last year it supported the Coalición Fortaleza’s Resident-owned Mobile Home Project.
Byers was excited to announce that next year, Rogue World Music will hold smaller events in Medford and Central Point through new partnerships with the parks commissions of those cities.
“They’ll be small concerts at first, just one concert in the parks, and in Talent, we plan to hold an instrument-making workshop. It’s that slow relationship building. We’ll do these, get all the feedback and find out what people like, what they want,” she said.
All festival events are free, family friendly and ADA accessible.
For information on the festival, including a full schedule of events, see rogueworldmusic.org/awmf.
Reach reporter Morgan Rothborne at [email protected]. This story first appeared in the Rogue Valley Times.
