WARNING: This is a very long file.
hey guys,
thought you all might enjoy reading this piece from
the NY Times. this article is pretty surface level and
has some obvious omissions, in my humble
opinion. for instance, bebel gilberto's wonderful
"tanto tempo" album is missing from the brazilian
section, as is suba's "sao paolo confessions." nitin
sawhney's amazing "broken skin" LP is absent from the
indian section. and up, bustle and out is not
mentioned in cuba's area, despite recording their
whole album, "rebel radio," in cuba. and that's just
some off the top from a guy who isn't nearly as versed
in these genres as others on this list.
but like i said, it's a nice introduction -- for a
hack from the new york
times.
you may want to print it out and read
it over a cup of java later.
-B-
=======
A UNIVERSE OF MUSIC
By JAN PARELES
c.2001 New York Times News Service
The grandly amorphous term “world music” is now
applied
comprehensively to field recordings and big-budget
studio pop, to
deep-rooted traditionalism and cross-cultural
experiments, to gimmicky
one-shots and venerable non-Western classical styles.
Yet amid the
confusion, world music has never been less foreign to
American ears.
What immigrants haven’t taken with them, musicians
have tracked down
and imported.
Classical composers have increasingly been looking
outside the
European tradition for structures and timbres;
consider the cellist
Yo-Yo Ma’s international Silk Road Project, which has
been
commissioning
works inspired by the centuries of cultural
intermingling on the
ancient
trade route through Asia and the Middle East.
Soundtrack compilers use music from afar to provide
subliminally
startling effects or instant exoticism. And
particularly in the last
year, electronica producers in search of head-turning
sounds have
realized that world music offers magnificent
untempered voices and
countless rhythmic complexities that can teach
so-called “dance music”
some lessons.
Musical ideas never travel just one way, and many
of the last year’s
best world music albums reveal globalization at work.
Reggae, hip-hop
and house music are now internationally diffused and
on their way to
being customized by countless local tastes. At the
same time,
instruments and vocal inflections once heard only in
the most
specialized styles are being transplanted across
oceans and language
barriers. For instance, Mexican producers are sampling
brass bands into
computerized dance tracks.
Purism and provincialism, as useful as they have
been for saving
local styles in the face of corporate marketing, are
giving way to the
hope that vital music will continue to emerge as
memory collides with
modernity. A conference on ethnomusicology on March 9
and 10 at New
York
University, for example, will feature papers on
“cultural boundaries”
and “transnational musics,” the sounds made where
borders dissolve.
This is the third annual survey in these pages of
world-music albums
released over the previous year: a guide to some of
the most enjoyable
releases in a realm of unfamiliar names and
bewildering packages. It is
by no means exhaustive. It features music with
traditional elements in
or near the foreground and generally ignores new-age
ethnic dabblings
as
well as reggae, international rock, jazz and current
salsa, all of
which
are too copious for this space. But even a quick
hopscotch across
continents yields a bounty of remarkable music.
Most of these albums can be found at larger stores,
like Tower
Records and the Virgin Megastore. They can also be
ordered online
through CDNow.com and Amazon.com. The World Music
Institute, (212)
545-7536, has an extensive mail-order catalog of
traditional music.
Prices range from $16 for domestic CD’s to $25 for
imports.
Amid all the choices, musicians proceed by
instinct, seeking
pleasure
without many preconceptions. That’s how listeners
should approach these
albums, too. Electric or acoustic, raw or synthetic,
in idioms that may
be slightly familiar or intriguingly alien, the music
offers not just
vicarious travel, but also renewed reasons to
appreciate all the ways
humans have devised to communicate, with and without
words.
ALGERIA
Rai, the Algerian pop that places rough-edged
Arabic vocals in all
sorts of semi-Western hybrids, has a fan in Sting,
whose “Desert Rose”
features the rai star Cheb Mami. Rai (Arabic for
opinion) has been
evolving fast in Algeria and among North African
expatriates in France
as it latches onto every gadget and dance-music effect
within earshot.
There’s no ideal collection of recent rai, but “Rai:
The Best of the
Original North African Grooves” (Manteca), despite
sketchy liner notes
and a few skippable songs, provides a glimpse of rai’s
variety as it
leapfrogs around the last two decades. The singers
emote alongside
blues
guitar licks, hard funk, hallucinatory programmed
percussion and, in
the
final tracks, old-fashioned flutes and hand percussion
that are every
bit as otherwordly.
The fervid singing that makes rai cross language
barriers has deeper
roots. A concert recording by the Algerian singer Amar
El Achab, “Le
Chaabi des Grands Maitres” (Institut du Monde
Arabe/Harmonia Mundi), is
an uninterrupted suite of songs in a style called
chaabi (popular) that
arose in the early 20th century in Algiers,
contemporaneous with other
urban styles like Portuguese fado and Argentine tango.
Chaabi brings folk inflections and Western instruments
like piano,
banjo
and mandola (a viola-sized mandolin) to older Arabic
song-suite
traditions. It’s a stream of elegant melodies that
unfold in bursts of
string-band improvisation, as El Achab’s singing rides
curlicued
ornaments to emotional peaks.
BRAZIL
Music may be Brazil’s most perpetually renewable
resource. When
individual creativity doesn’t immediately yield
brilliant ideas, as it
often does, young Brazilian musicians can draw on an
inexhaustible
trove
of regional styles and memorable songs. And older ones
sustain their
creativity for decades.
Moreno Veloso, the son of the great songwriter
Caetano Veloso, has
made a quietly confident debut album, “Music
Typewriter” (Hannibal/Palm
Pictures). The gentle songs hark back to the delicacy
of bossa nova but
with glimmers of distortion or a theremin swoop every
so often for a
modern bite. Supple melodies and the soothing, almost
androgynous voice
the younger Veloso inherited from his father give the
songs a
benevolent glow.
Meanwhile, Caetano Veloso has produced a gloriously
understated solo
album, “Voz e Violao” (Verve), by the enigmatic but
definitive bossa
nova singer Joao Gilberto. (The elder Veloso’s own
forthcoming album,
due out next month, is superb.)
Some of the year’s best Brazilian albums show a
renewed infatuation
with the music of Brazil’s hardscrabble Northeast.
Gilberto Gil, a
major
force in Brazilian music since the 1960s and no slouch
as a songwriter
himself, has made what is nearly a tribute album to
Luiz Gonzaga as the
soundtrack for a movie set in the Northeast, “Me You
Them” (Atlantic).
Gonzaga’s frisky summation of rural styles, the baiao,
swept Brazil in
the 1940s and 50s, and Gil deftly recreates Gonzaga’s
effervescent
blend
of accordion, triangle and flute, although his own
personality peeks
through.
Musicians from a younger generation have made their
own Gonzaga
tribute, “Baiao de Viramundo” (Stern’s Music). In 16
tracks from as
many
bands, a few old-fashioned baiaos are surrounded by
affectionate
reinterpretations via jungle, dub reggae, punk rock,
lounge jazz and
barrages of Afro-Brazilian drumming. Both Nacao Zumbi
and Andrea
Marquee
appear on the Gonzaga tribute.
Nacao Zumbi, the band led by the innovative Chico
Science until his
death in 1997, continues its hard-nosed merger of
funk, hip-hop,
Afro-Brazilian drumming and rock cantankerousness on
“Radio S.AMB.A”
(Stern’s Music).
Finally, three albums create unmistakably Brazilian
takes on club
culture. Zuco 103’s “Outro Lado” (Six Degrees) by a
Brazilian singer,
Lilian Veira, with a Dutch drummer and a German
keyboardist, floats her
velvety voice above lean sampled backdrops that lace
acid jazz with
touches of Brazilian drumming, as does Andrea
Marquee’s “Zumbi”
(Stern’s
Music), which has a more eccentric undertow.
Marquee’s producer and collaborator, Rica Amabis,
has also released
his own “Sambadelic” (Stern’s Music), a wilder, nearly
unhinged ride
through what sounds like a Brazilian disc jockey’s
subconscious, with
samba drumming and bits of old songs peeking through
the hyperactive
electronics.
CANADA
The Celtic diaspora has a Nova Scotia outpost on
Cape Breton Island,
where Acadians expelled from Brittany stopped before
being driven to
Louisiana. Natalie McMaster, a fiddler and singer who
has been
stretching and fusing her traditionalism, proves she
hasn’t forgotten
her essentials on “My Roots Are Showing” (Rounder).
It’s a set of
traditional fiddle tunes played as they might have
been in her parents’
parlor, mostly as duets with a guitar or a piano. She
lends unforced
melancholy to the ballads, while her well-placed
scrapes, stutters and
slides push the uptempo tunes toward the dance floor.
CONGO
The Congolese rumba pealed across Africa in the
last half of the
20th
century. It’s a compounded crossbreed, a result of
Afro-Cuban music’s
finding a receptive audience in Africa, then being
remade into
guitar-band music with a new lilt, an endless braid of
interweaving
guitar lines and a Congolese ear for melody. In recent
decades it has
been sped up and studio-sweetened into soukous and
often cluttered with
synthesizers and drum machines.
Sam Mangwana, a honey-voiced tenor who became a
star in the 1960s as
the singer with Congo’s two pre-eminent bandleaders,
Rochereau and
Franco, believes that the music he loves is
endangered. He sets out to
revive and revitalize it with “Sam Mangwana Sings Dinu
Vangu” (Stern’s
Africa). Vangu’s new songs and his multilayered
guitars give Mangwana
the framework for a supernally graceful album that
simply takes for
granted the timeless charm of the music and proves it
anew.
One of Mangwana’s heirs is Koffi Olomide, a
superstar in Europe and
Africa. He’s popular enough to record “Live at Bercy”
(Sonodisc) in
concert at the Paris equivalent of Madison Square
Garden. With his
suave
baritone, which he sometimes uses for recitations a la
Barry White,
Olomide sings a breezy variant of soukous he calls
Tcha Tcho.
In concert, he trades studio production for the
comradely backup
vocals and slightly distorted guitars of his band,
Quartier Latin.
While
some songs were probably more fun on the spot, with
the stage
choreography and the enthusiastic crowd, Olomide and
his band need no
outside assistance to maintain the grooves of songs
that sometimes
stretch for more than 10 minutes.
CUBA
As if to make up for four decades of lost time, or
at least to
capitalize on the popularity of the “Buena Vista
Social Club” album,
recording companies continue to pump out recordings of
Cuban music old
and new. Two Buena Vista members have released
follow-up albums of
romantic songs. On “Buena Vista Social Club Presents
Omara Portuondo”
(World Circuit/Nonesuch), fastidiously arranged
strings and big bands
accompany Portuondo in ballads, mostly boleros, that
she suffuses with
torchy longing.
On “Las Flores de la Vida” (World
Circuit/Nonesuch), Compay Segundo,
whose nickname, “Compadre Second,” comes from his
career of singing not
lead but lower harmony with another man, revives a
courtly style in
which the men’s self-pity is answered by pairs of
gently chiding
clarinets.
Meanwhile, American recording companies have also been
digging into
their archives of pre-1959 Cuban music for anthologies
like “El Son No
Ha Muerto” (Rhino) and the scholarly “Music of Cuba,
1901-1959”
(Columbia).
Cuba’s contemporary pop, timba, is flashier and far
more frenetic;
songs
change groove almost every minute to keep dancers
jumping. Bamboleo’s
“Que Bueno Esta” (Ahi-Nama) includes 32 minutes of
live recordings that
capture the way songs progress from slick harmonies to
unstoppable
horn-section riffing. Unfortunately, the remainder of
the album is
disc-jockey remixes that smother the Cuban rhythms
under dance-music
cliches. Issac Delgado’s new “Formula” (Ahi-Nama)
shows the variety of
timba but doesn’t quite take off.
The best collection of timba (and its predecessor,
songo) is still
Los Van Van’s 1999 collection, “30 Years of Cuba’s
Greatest Dance Band”
(Ashe).
INDIA
Indian music encompasses the rigorous disciplines
of classical raga
improvisations, countless far-flung folk traditions
and popular songs
that are giddy combinations of music from inside and
outside India.
Lately, Indian disc jockeys and expatriates have also
created a
dance-floor style that has changed its name from
bhangra (after its
original Punjabi influences) to the more open-ended
Asian underground.
Among recent classical releases, “Lady Astride the
Tiger” (Water
Lily
Acoustics) is an album of gorgeously recorded raga
duets by Ranu
Majumdat on the bansuri (bamboo flute) with the
drummers Abhijit
Banerjee on tabla or Pavalu Srinivasan on mrdangam.
Majumdat draws
deep,
melting tones from the bansuri in the meditative
preludes to the ragas,
as if dreaming the melodies, and when the tempo picks
up and the drums
join in, his phrases still hover with an otherworldly
tenderness.
Gopal Shankar Misra’s “Out of Stillness” (Real
World) is a rare
recording featuring the vichitra veena, a stringed
instrument that
predates the sitar and has a deep, regal tone. The
vichitra veena was
primarily used for accompaniment, and isn’t as nimble
as the sitar, but
in fast passages it has an endearing, pungent attack.
Unlike their Western counterparts, leading Indian
classical
musicians
are willing to collaborate in pop projects. One that
fits no category
is
Tabla Beat Science’s “Tala Matrix” (Axiom/Palm
Pictures), a project by
the producer Bill Laswell that places the unstoppable
tabla drumming of
Zakir Hussain, and sometimes the drone of a tamboura
or the voice of
Ustad Sultan Khan or a dub-reggae bass line from
Laswell, in an
electronic wilderness of assertive riffs, surreal
echoes and
cross-timed
rhythm salvos. The music is too aggressive to be
ambient and too
abstract for the dance floor; it’s a genuine fusion
that pours energy
into the air, pauses to meditate and then rushes
foward again.
“The Rough Guide to Bhangra” (World Music Network)
is a cram course
in bhangra, which took a forceful Punjabi folk style,
carried it to
England and merged it first with reggae and later with
every electronic
beat that club disc jockeys could come up with.
“Bhangra Beatz” (Naxos
World) is a more utilitarian compilation of 1990s
bhangra, aimed at the
dance floor. Current Asian underground music, like
State of Bengal’s
vertiginous “Visual Audio” (Six Degrees), gleefully
tears apart songs
in
search of momentum.
INDONESIA
“Music of Indonesia” (Smithsonian/Folkways), the
20-CD series that
documents traditional music from all over the
Indonesian archipelago,
is
a remarkable achievement in ethnomusicology; it’s also
daunting.
“Discover Indonesia” (Smithsonian/Folkways) edits all
the diversity
into
a manageable one-CD sampler that includes music from
gongs, guitars,
brass band, bamboo and singers whose voices invoke
Asia, the Middle
East
and nameless spirits.
“The Rough Guide to the Music of Indonesia” (World
Music Network)
includes a few traditional selections but also covers
what the
folk-oriented Smithsonian downplays: Indonesian pop
styles like
kroncong
and dangdut that carry the imprint of gamelans and
shadow-puppet plays,
not to mention Arabic and Japanese pop, into
three-minute songs.
IRAN
Kayhan Kalhor, who plays the kemancheh (Persian
fiddle), is both
steeped in classical Persian improvisation and ready
to reach out. He
collaborated with Indian musicians in the group Ghazal
and is to
perform
with Yo-Yo Ma at Lincoln Center in New York in Richard
Danielpour’s
Concerto for Cello and Kemancheh from March 14 to 17,
part of the Silk
Road Project.
His latest album, “Night Silence Desert: Khorasan
Suite”
(Traditional
Crossroads), is a fusion closer to home. It’s based on
folk music from
Khorasan, in northeastern Iran, and brings together
Persian classical
musicians with folk musicians and one of Iran’s most
celebrated
singers,
Mohammed Rez Shajarian. It’s a far-reaching meditation
on folk
materials, by turns reflective and vigorous, using
traditional
instruments as well as occasional overdubbing and
computer manipulation
to rejoin two disparate branches of Persian music.
IRELAND
Celtic traditional music is still recovering from
what might be
called “Riverdance” syndrome, which convinced some
musicians that they
could reach a broad public only if they abandoned
subtlety. Luckily
there are also old-style diehards and smart innovators
at work.Green
Linnet Records has been recording many of the best of
them,
particularly
the fiddlers, and its latest collection, “Green Linnet
Records: 25
Years
of Celtic Music,” earns its straightforwardly
self-congratulatory title
with tracks from Altan, Lunasa, Kevin Burke, Liz
Carroll and Patrick
Street. It also includes Celtic music from Scotland,
Brittany and Nova
Scotia.
For stricter traditionalism, there are good
compilations from the
catalogs of two longtime Irish folk labels: Claddagh
Records’ “Come
Dance With Me in Ireland” and Temple Records’ “Irish
Traditional Music”
both present traditional tunes in austere traditional
arrangements,
usually just solos or duets.
ITALY
Spaccanapoli, from Naples, is an institution of
Italy’s folk
revival,
the new name for the group that was formed in 1974 as
E Zezi. On
“Spaccanapoli” (Real World/Narada), the group mixes
vigorously strummed
guitars and studio production with old Neapolitan
instruments like
tambourines and the double-reed ciamarella. The songs
invoke tradition
or confront current troubles with hearty, unflinching
voices.
The history of the tarantella rhythm that drives
some of
Spaccanapoli’s songs reaches back to a time when it
drove ecstatic
rituals of healing and exorcism. The singer and
tambourine virtuoso
Alessandra Belloni has done extensive research on the
music in Southern
Italy, and her album “Tarantata: Dance of the Ancient
Spider” (Sounds
True) reimagines the old songs. There are reverent
ballads about
madonnas and saints that parallel Renaissance music
and songs that pick
up Arabic influences from across the Mediterranean.
There are also
speedy, tambourine-driven tarantellas filled with
fierce elation.
MADAGASCAR
Madagascar, the island off Africa’s east coast,
boasts an assortment
of unique guitarlike string instruments. D’Gary, a
guitarist and singer
whose given name is Ernest Randrianasolo, doesn’t play
any of them on
“Mbo Loza” (Indigo/Harmonia Mundi), just an ordinary
six-string guitar.
Yet he makes his instrument sound like whole families
of Madagascar’s
small and full-sized lutes, picking out quick patterns
that pelt like a
syncopated tropical downpour.
“Mbo Loza” is no-frills music: just D’Gary joined
by a female singer
and a percussionist playing a rattle made from a jam
jar. But the songs
flies by, dizzying and graceful. The CD booklet
details the unusual
tunings D’Gary uses, as if daring other guitarists to
try to keep up
with him.
Amampondo, from Cape Town, sounds startlingly
different from most of
the music South Africa has exported. Most of the songs
on “Vuyani”
(MELT
2000) are based on the traditions of the Xhosa tribe.
They’re layered
around patterns played on up to three marimbas,
intertwined with
drumming and topped with a byplay of male and female
voices, smoothly
harmonized or rough-hewn and urgent.
Sometimes horns or piano join in, tilting the tunes
toward ebullient
Cape Town jazz; others sound like Steve Reich working
with African
choruses. The complex constructions are polished in
the studio yet sung
with unmistakable fervor, piling up riffs and voices
for music that’s
both mesmerizing and jubilant.
SWEDEN
Consonance is king in Scandinavian folk music, and
the nyckelharpa,
a
keyed fiddle that is the national instrument of
Sweden, resonates
magnificently in tunes built on arpeggios and drones.
The Nyckelharpa
Orchestra brings together up to six nyckelharps, from
bass on up, and
nothing else on “Byss-Calle” (NorthSide), named after
the fiddler who
was the Paganini of the nyckelharpa. The tunes sound
like kin to Celtic
reels, but the ethereal, all-nyckelharpa arrangements
carry them toward
realms of glacial translucence.
TURKEY
The sultans of the Ottoman Empire, who ruled from
Constantinople
from
1453 to 1922, cultivated music as both patrons and
composers, and their
tastes affected music across their domain. The Lalezar
Ensemble from
Istanbul has just released four CD’s of Ottoman music
on the
Traditional
Crossroads label.
The music is somber, with its stately melodies sung
and played in
unison on instruments including oud, kemence
(three-stringed fiddle)
and
ney (reed flute). The Lalezar Ensemble’s sound may
remind some
listeners
of European medieval music ensembles. “Volume II:
Music of the Dancing
Boys,” a suite of songs that once accompanied young
transvestite
dancers, is the most approachable one, merging folk
and popular
elements
with classical ones.
But for more gusto, try gypsies. The same
instrumental textures and
unison melodies, modernized by a clarinet, reappear in
“The Road to
Kesan: Turkish Rom and Regional Music of Thrace”
(Traditional
Crossroads) and the Istanbul Oriental Ensemble’s
“Caravanserai”
(Network/Harmonia Mundi). “The Road to Kesan” features
the clarinetist
and singer Selim Sesler’s band, bending notes every
which way while two
drummers boot the rhythm forward.
The Istanbul Oriental Ensemble, slightly more
refined, plays
compositions by the group’s leader, Burhan Ocal, that
are rooted in
gypsy music and propelled by Ocal’s hand drumming on
the darbuka. Both
ensembles are only a few long leaps away from klezmer
music.
VIETNAM
Saigon Masters of Traditional Music: “Tai Tur Nam
Bo” (Wergo) is an
album of “music of the talented,” a 19th-century style
that emerged
when
what is now Ho Chi Minh City swelled with migrants
from northern
Vietnam
and China, and the closed circles of musicians were
opened to new
pupils. This four-man ensemble plays various lutes,
zithers, flutes and
fiddles, sharing melodies but rarely playing in exact
unison.
Instead, the players often seem to improvise
simultaneous
variations,
with wriggling bent notes or fiddle slides or
glimmering zither strums;
now and then, distinct counterpoint emerges. It’s
companionable-sounding
music, as if everyone’s were entitled (within its
rules) to wander off
on tangents as long as he ended up in the same place.
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