Archive of the show:
More pics on Flickr
Harris Brothers Balkan Band on Myspace
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Harris Brothers Balkan Band on WPKN
The WPKN "Live From Where? / Sunday Brunch" concert series continued today with some great Balkan music from right here in CT. Live on the air and at the Kasbah Garden Cafe in New Haven - The Harris Brothers Balkan Band
Archive of the show:
More pics on Flickr
Archive of the show:
More pics on Flickr
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
National Day in Iceland
June 17 is National Day (Þjóðhátíðardagurinn) in Iceland (Lýðveldið Ísland). This is the birthdate of Jón Sigurðsson, a noted Icelandic independence figure.
Like most places, it is celebrated by community parades.
But I prefer to commemorate it with musical art, of course:
Anna Palina and the band Draupner sing the traditional "Ásu Kvædi." Listen!
Klakki is a contemporary ensemble led by Icelandic singer Nina Björk Elíasson. Listen!
Read more about Icelandic musicians on RootsWorld
Buy Icelandic music at cdRoots
Like most places, it is celebrated by community parades.
But I prefer to commemorate it with musical art, of course:
Anna Palina and the band Draupner sing the traditional "Ásu Kvædi." Listen!
Klakki is a contemporary ensemble led by Icelandic singer Nina Björk Elíasson. Listen!
Read more about Icelandic musicians on RootsWorld
Buy Icelandic music at cdRoots
Monday, June 15, 2009
Tinariwen release free download from their new CD
Touareg desert rockers Tinariwen release their latest CD the end of June, but The Guardian in London is offering a free track from it today.
Listen
Find out more about the new CD at the band's web site
Get the rest of the recordings at cdRoots
Read a review of their live concert DVD in RootsWorld
Listen
Find out more about the new CD at the band's web site
Get the rest of the recordings at cdRoots
Read a review of their live concert DVD in RootsWorld
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Trio Mio stakes out new territory in the Danish folk music scene
Take a look at the Danish folk music scene and you will find a wide variety of subspecies. Folk musicians throughout the country specialize in many different types of folk music, so, though it's a small country, an unusually broad selection of musical styles is represented. Some musicians travel around with bands designed specifically to play concert series in Danish schools, others are so knowledgeable about the many musical traditions in Denmark that they can offer precisely the right drinking song or dance tune to weddings or harvest parties in any given region . And of course there are a good many bands that specialize in playing the clubs and little venues round the country and abroad, actively spreading the word about Danish music and culture.
The Danish-Swedish group Trio Mio falls into this latter category. The trio began in 2004 when violinist Kristine Heebøll recorded her first solo album, Trio Mio - the album title simply became the band name. Trio Mio play mainly their own compositions, giving a Scandinavian sound to their traditional Danish and Swedish, jazz and classical inspired music. Five years on, the three musicians can look back on three critically-praised albums featuring an imposing list of Danish and Swedish guest musicians, six Danish Music Award statuettes and a long series of concerts in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Italy, England, Ireland and Canada.
Read the rest of Morten Alfred Høirup's interview with Trio Mio and listen to some of their music in RootsWorld
Two new looks at the ancient tarantella
Rione Junno
Taranta Beat Project
Rai Trade/CNI (www.cnimusic.it)
Listen: http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/rionejunno.html
Mimmo Epifani
Zucchini Flowers
Finisterre (www.finisterre.it)
Listen: http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/zuchinni.html
It's amazing that the pizzica, a centuries-old folk music from an obscure part of southern Italy, not only has survived but now thrives, as both a living tradition and as a foundation for some exciting and forward-looking new music.
The pizzica (also known as pizzica pizzica and pizzica taranta) originally was the music of tarantismo, a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the southern Salento peninsula of the Puglia region. Music and dance were employed in a symbolic ritual to cure peasants, mainly women, from illnesses purportedly caused by the poisonous bite of the tarantula.
The afflicted would dance, to the point of collapsing, to the frenetic rhythms of the pizzica songs (usually in straight or accented 6/8 time) played by a small group that included tamburello (large tambourine), violin, chitarra battente (a large four- or five-string southern Italian guitar), and organetto (a type of accordion).
The spider's bite, however, was a metaphor for other conditions, such as grief, depression, and sexual frustration. Dancing the pizzica was a culturally-sanctioned and collective way for poor, politically disenfranchised peasants to act out and exorcise individual psychological conflicts.
Nandu Popu of Sud Sound System, a band that mixes traditional Salentine styles with reggae and rap, has called pizzica "the music of our grandparents, who were slaves of the aristocrats."
Tarantismo has pretty much died out, albeit relatively recently; psychotherapy has taken its place. The pizzica "has acquired a new function, that is, to represent the cultural identity of Salento," according to ethnomusicologist Tullia Magrini.
But not only Salento: the pizzica long ago spread to other parts of Puglia, mixing with various local idioms. The tarantella, the "spider's dance" common throughout southern Italy and Sicily, developed from the pizzica taranta.
Today there are musicians who specialize in traditional repertoire and performing styles (Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, Uccio Aloisi Gruppu, Tarantolati di Tricarico), those that perform new material in traditional styles (Officina Zoe, Aramirè), and others that fuse pizzica with global sounds, mainly reggae and dub, rock, rap, and techno (Nidi D'Arac, Sud Sound System, Ammaracicappa). Since 1997, pizzica has been the drawing card at La Notte Della Taranta, an annual event held in the Salento town of Melpignano that has become one of Europe's major music festivals.
In 2000, the Neapolitan singer-songwriter Eugenio Bennato founded Taranta Power to promote the pizzica and other southern Italian music, through concerts, recordings, and music education initiatives. The Taranta Power project, says Bennato, aims to counter "the unfortunate backward image that the tarantella has assumed in the world's collective imaginary, conveyed by lame folkloric groups and by banal musical expression totally divorced from the raging reality of the taranta ritual."
Bennato hails Rione Junno, a new sextet made up of young musicians from Monte Sant'Angelo, a city in Puglia (but not Salento), as exemplars of the Taranta Power ethos. Eschewing "backward-looking folklorism," they instead are "part of an alternative and contemporary wave in ethnic music…one of the most outstanding representatives of the new music rooted in tradition but looking toward the future."
Tarant Beat Project, their first album, for the most part justifies Bennato's praise. As the title suggests, the rhythms of pizzica are the main focus. The band uses traditional instruments -- chitarra battente, tamburello, and zampogna, southern Italian bagpipes -- but also electric bass and programmed beats. Recorded in Naples, the album's chief auteur is Vinci Acunto, of the Neapolitan rock band Bisca, who produced, arranged, and mixed Taranta Beat Project, as well as programming the electronics on every track.
Rione Junno - named after Monte Sant'Angelo's Junno neighborhood, the city's ancient historic center - don't have a charismatic frontman like Nidi D'Arac's Alessandro Coppola or virtuosic instrumentalists. With no one personality dominating the band, the ensemble sound - lean and beat-y, rooted in tradition but definitely non-folkloric -- is the thing.
A roster of guests joins the core band on most tracks. Sha-One from the Neapolitan rap group La Famiglia shows up for "23 Marzo," which recounts the violent police repression of a 1950 workers' demonstration. Guitarist Elio "100 Grammi" joins his Bisca bandmate Vinci Acunto on several selections.
Eugenio Bennato's on board, too, singing lead on "Sponda Sud," one of his recent songs about "zingari ed emigranti" (gypsies and emigrants) traversing the seas of the global South. Several African vocalists who've worked with Bennato, and other Italian artists -- Mohammed el Alaoui, Assane Diop, Samir Toukour, and Zaina Chabane - augment the band's singers, who favor the plaintive monody typical of much southern Italian folk and folk-derived music.
Rione Junno's first record is a bit thin - nine tracks, plus three re-mixes. The group's identity doesn't quite seem fully formed.
But if the band isn't yet as commanding as Nidi D'Arac, whose brilliance was evident on their first recordings, Rione Junno is nonetheless a promising new addition to Puglia's rich musical scene.
I like to think of Mimmo Epifani, a terrific musician from San Vito dei Normanni in Salento, as the Yomo Toro of Italian roots music. Like the great Puerto Rican cuatro player, a stalwart of so many classic Fania salsa records of the 1970s as well as a solo artist, mandolinist Epifani is rooted in folk tradition yet hardly limited to it. Like Toro, he's a virtuoso and a bold improviser. Now that Epifani has grown a mustache and has given up his shiny black pompadour for a shaggier 'do, they even resemble each other.
Epifani has collaborated with some top Italian musicians -- Roberto de Simone, the esteemed musicologist and founder of La Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, vocalist Massimo Ranieri, Eugenio Bennato, Avion Travel, jazz pianist Danilo Rea, and Tuscan rocker Piero Pelu. He released his first album as a leader, Marannui (Forrest Hill Records), in 2004. A wide-ranging but cohesive mix of pizzica and other styles (there was even a jazz ballad), Marannui ranks as one of the best Italian recordings of the past decade.
There was a good story to go with it, too. Mimmo called his band the Epifani Barbers because he'd learned to play mandolin and mandola in a barbershop owned by Costantino Vita, a musician well versed in traditional Salentine music. Vita, along with Peppu D'Augusta, who led several pizzica groups, schooled the young Mimmo in pizzica and other local styles. Following his apprenticeship under Vita and D'Augusta, Epifani studied mandolin at the Padua Conservatory.
His new record, Zucchini Flowers, continues Marannui's blend of tradition and innovation, but it's even more adventurous. Produced by Fausto Mesolella, the guitar wizard of Avion Travel, the album's 12 tracks give Epifani plenty of space to display his remarkable technique on mandolin, mandola, mandoloncello, and guitar. His instrumental versions of Domenico Modugno's "La Donna Riccia" and "Lusingame," a fine if lesser-known canzone napoletana by Nino Taranto, are dazzling but not show-offy; Epifani's embellishments serve, and enhance, the songs.
Epifani sounds even more self-confident as a leader than he did on his debut. On Marannui he shared vocal duties with several singers. He handles most of the leads on Zucchini Flowers, and his singing is as distinctive as his playing - a big, earthy voice with a pronounced vibrato. Sometimes his vocals have a bleating quality that sounds Balkan, not surprising given the longstanding Greek influence in southern Puglia and the region's proximity to Albania.
Listeners used to smoother and less rustic Italian vocal styles may be in for a shock. But to me his vocal attack is as bracing as a glass of good primitivo, Puglia's best-known grape.
He shares vocals with flautist Giorgia Santoro on "La Pizzica delle Fate," an a capella number that's the album's most unusual track. "Fate" is Italian for "fairies," and Santoro's breathy lead sounds like it's emanating from some ethereal being. When Epifani leaps in, the piece becomes something else altogether - an encounter between the otherworldly and the material world, the latter incarnated in Epifani's gritty voice.
"Cucuzza e acqua," "Lu Sittaturu" and "Garbato e Saporito" should make his teachers Vita and D'Augusta proud of their former pupil- they're pizziche that demonstrate Epifani's mastery of the traditional form and his gift for making the ancient idiom sound absolutely up to the minute. "Lu Sittaturu" starts off slow and mournful before exploding into an up-tempo rave up, Epifani playing and singing like a man possessed. "The raging reality of the taranta ritual" that Eugenio Bennato misses in lesser artists' work is fully present here.
Sud Sound System's Nandu Popu, noting that the pizzica was born out of poverty and oppression, has expressed the hope that "we will come to sing fewer songs of suffering and more hymns of freedom."
There's not much that's hymn-like in Mimmo Epifani's zesty music, but there's definitely the sound of freedom, and a lot more. - George De Stefano
Listen to Rione Junno
Listen to Mimmo Epifani
Artist' web sites:
www.rionejunno.com
www.mimmoepifani.it
CDs available via cdRoots
Read more about Italian world music at RootsWorld
Someone suggested this video in a follow-up comment.
Taranta Beat Project
Rai Trade/CNI (www.cnimusic.it)
Listen: http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/rionejunno.html
Mimmo Epifani
Zucchini Flowers
Finisterre (www.finisterre.it)
Listen: http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/zuchinni.html
It's amazing that the pizzica, a centuries-old folk music from an obscure part of southern Italy, not only has survived but now thrives, as both a living tradition and as a foundation for some exciting and forward-looking new music.
The pizzica (also known as pizzica pizzica and pizzica taranta) originally was the music of tarantismo, a cultural phenomenon that emerged in the southern Salento peninsula of the Puglia region. Music and dance were employed in a symbolic ritual to cure peasants, mainly women, from illnesses purportedly caused by the poisonous bite of the tarantula.
The afflicted would dance, to the point of collapsing, to the frenetic rhythms of the pizzica songs (usually in straight or accented 6/8 time) played by a small group that included tamburello (large tambourine), violin, chitarra battente (a large four- or five-string southern Italian guitar), and organetto (a type of accordion).
The spider's bite, however, was a metaphor for other conditions, such as grief, depression, and sexual frustration. Dancing the pizzica was a culturally-sanctioned and collective way for poor, politically disenfranchised peasants to act out and exorcise individual psychological conflicts.
Nandu Popu of Sud Sound System, a band that mixes traditional Salentine styles with reggae and rap, has called pizzica "the music of our grandparents, who were slaves of the aristocrats."
Tarantismo has pretty much died out, albeit relatively recently; psychotherapy has taken its place. The pizzica "has acquired a new function, that is, to represent the cultural identity of Salento," according to ethnomusicologist Tullia Magrini.
But not only Salento: the pizzica long ago spread to other parts of Puglia, mixing with various local idioms. The tarantella, the "spider's dance" common throughout southern Italy and Sicily, developed from the pizzica taranta.
Today there are musicians who specialize in traditional repertoire and performing styles (Canzoniere Grecanico Salentino, Uccio Aloisi Gruppu, Tarantolati di Tricarico), those that perform new material in traditional styles (Officina Zoe, Aramirè), and others that fuse pizzica with global sounds, mainly reggae and dub, rock, rap, and techno (Nidi D'Arac, Sud Sound System, Ammaracicappa). Since 1997, pizzica has been the drawing card at La Notte Della Taranta, an annual event held in the Salento town of Melpignano that has become one of Europe's major music festivals.
In 2000, the Neapolitan singer-songwriter Eugenio Bennato founded Taranta Power to promote the pizzica and other southern Italian music, through concerts, recordings, and music education initiatives. The Taranta Power project, says Bennato, aims to counter "the unfortunate backward image that the tarantella has assumed in the world's collective imaginary, conveyed by lame folkloric groups and by banal musical expression totally divorced from the raging reality of the taranta ritual."
Bennato hails Rione Junno, a new sextet made up of young musicians from Monte Sant'Angelo, a city in Puglia (but not Salento), as exemplars of the Taranta Power ethos. Eschewing "backward-looking folklorism," they instead are "part of an alternative and contemporary wave in ethnic music…one of the most outstanding representatives of the new music rooted in tradition but looking toward the future."
Tarant Beat Project, their first album, for the most part justifies Bennato's praise. As the title suggests, the rhythms of pizzica are the main focus. The band uses traditional instruments -- chitarra battente, tamburello, and zampogna, southern Italian bagpipes -- but also electric bass and programmed beats. Recorded in Naples, the album's chief auteur is Vinci Acunto, of the Neapolitan rock band Bisca, who produced, arranged, and mixed Taranta Beat Project, as well as programming the electronics on every track.
Rione Junno - named after Monte Sant'Angelo's Junno neighborhood, the city's ancient historic center - don't have a charismatic frontman like Nidi D'Arac's Alessandro Coppola or virtuosic instrumentalists. With no one personality dominating the band, the ensemble sound - lean and beat-y, rooted in tradition but definitely non-folkloric -- is the thing.
A roster of guests joins the core band on most tracks. Sha-One from the Neapolitan rap group La Famiglia shows up for "23 Marzo," which recounts the violent police repression of a 1950 workers' demonstration. Guitarist Elio "100 Grammi" joins his Bisca bandmate Vinci Acunto on several selections.
Eugenio Bennato's on board, too, singing lead on "Sponda Sud," one of his recent songs about "zingari ed emigranti" (gypsies and emigrants) traversing the seas of the global South. Several African vocalists who've worked with Bennato, and other Italian artists -- Mohammed el Alaoui, Assane Diop, Samir Toukour, and Zaina Chabane - augment the band's singers, who favor the plaintive monody typical of much southern Italian folk and folk-derived music.
Rione Junno's first record is a bit thin - nine tracks, plus three re-mixes. The group's identity doesn't quite seem fully formed.
But if the band isn't yet as commanding as Nidi D'Arac, whose brilliance was evident on their first recordings, Rione Junno is nonetheless a promising new addition to Puglia's rich musical scene.
I like to think of Mimmo Epifani, a terrific musician from San Vito dei Normanni in Salento, as the Yomo Toro of Italian roots music. Like the great Puerto Rican cuatro player, a stalwart of so many classic Fania salsa records of the 1970s as well as a solo artist, mandolinist Epifani is rooted in folk tradition yet hardly limited to it. Like Toro, he's a virtuoso and a bold improviser. Now that Epifani has grown a mustache and has given up his shiny black pompadour for a shaggier 'do, they even resemble each other.
Epifani has collaborated with some top Italian musicians -- Roberto de Simone, the esteemed musicologist and founder of La Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare, vocalist Massimo Ranieri, Eugenio Bennato, Avion Travel, jazz pianist Danilo Rea, and Tuscan rocker Piero Pelu. He released his first album as a leader, Marannui (Forrest Hill Records), in 2004. A wide-ranging but cohesive mix of pizzica and other styles (there was even a jazz ballad), Marannui ranks as one of the best Italian recordings of the past decade.
There was a good story to go with it, too. Mimmo called his band the Epifani Barbers because he'd learned to play mandolin and mandola in a barbershop owned by Costantino Vita, a musician well versed in traditional Salentine music. Vita, along with Peppu D'Augusta, who led several pizzica groups, schooled the young Mimmo in pizzica and other local styles. Following his apprenticeship under Vita and D'Augusta, Epifani studied mandolin at the Padua Conservatory.
His new record, Zucchini Flowers, continues Marannui's blend of tradition and innovation, but it's even more adventurous. Produced by Fausto Mesolella, the guitar wizard of Avion Travel, the album's 12 tracks give Epifani plenty of space to display his remarkable technique on mandolin, mandola, mandoloncello, and guitar. His instrumental versions of Domenico Modugno's "La Donna Riccia" and "Lusingame," a fine if lesser-known canzone napoletana by Nino Taranto, are dazzling but not show-offy; Epifani's embellishments serve, and enhance, the songs.
Epifani sounds even more self-confident as a leader than he did on his debut. On Marannui he shared vocal duties with several singers. He handles most of the leads on Zucchini Flowers, and his singing is as distinctive as his playing - a big, earthy voice with a pronounced vibrato. Sometimes his vocals have a bleating quality that sounds Balkan, not surprising given the longstanding Greek influence in southern Puglia and the region's proximity to Albania.
Listeners used to smoother and less rustic Italian vocal styles may be in for a shock. But to me his vocal attack is as bracing as a glass of good primitivo, Puglia's best-known grape.
He shares vocals with flautist Giorgia Santoro on "La Pizzica delle Fate," an a capella number that's the album's most unusual track. "Fate" is Italian for "fairies," and Santoro's breathy lead sounds like it's emanating from some ethereal being. When Epifani leaps in, the piece becomes something else altogether - an encounter between the otherworldly and the material world, the latter incarnated in Epifani's gritty voice.
"Cucuzza e acqua," "Lu Sittaturu" and "Garbato e Saporito" should make his teachers Vita and D'Augusta proud of their former pupil- they're pizziche that demonstrate Epifani's mastery of the traditional form and his gift for making the ancient idiom sound absolutely up to the minute. "Lu Sittaturu" starts off slow and mournful before exploding into an up-tempo rave up, Epifani playing and singing like a man possessed. "The raging reality of the taranta ritual" that Eugenio Bennato misses in lesser artists' work is fully present here.
Sud Sound System's Nandu Popu, noting that the pizzica was born out of poverty and oppression, has expressed the hope that "we will come to sing fewer songs of suffering and more hymns of freedom."
There's not much that's hymn-like in Mimmo Epifani's zesty music, but there's definitely the sound of freedom, and a lot more. - George De Stefano
Listen to Rione Junno
Listen to Mimmo Epifani
Artist' web sites:
www.rionejunno.com
www.mimmoepifani.it
CDs available via cdRoots
Read more about Italian world music at RootsWorld
Someone suggested this video in a follow-up comment.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Ethiopia's Mulatu Astatke goes to England
Mulatu Astatke/The Heliocentrics
Strut Records (www.strut-records.com)
You can hear the creative sparks flying on this self-titled collaboration between renowned Ethiopian instrumentalist and bandleader Mulatu Astatke and The Heliocentrics, an innovative musical collective from the UK. The Heliocentrics backed Astatke on a rare live appearance in London in 2008 and joined him a few months later to capture in the studio some of what had worked so well on stage. It’s a good thing that everyone involved (including some other London-based Ethiopian players and singers) had time and energy to spare, because the resulting CD melds Ethiopian tradition and freewheeling fusion as perfectly as Dub Colossus linked Jamaica and Ethiopia on last year’s In a Town Called Addis. If you’ve heard any of the discs from the Ethiopiques series on Buda Musique, several of which feature Astatke’s work, some of these pentatonic scale arrangements and jagged rhythms will be familiar. But that’s only part of the story. There’s strains of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, Latin grooves, vintage analog effects, mysterious melodies, intros that go from kitschy to way cool and Far Eastern riffs, all wound around ear-grabbing piano, percussion, vibraphone, horns, strings, guitar, standup bass and rustic Ethiopian harp and flute. Most of the tracks are instrumentals carried along on currents of pure inspiration and musical ideas seemingly coming together on the spot but too perfectly realized to be arbitrary. It’s as though everyone involved knew something special would happen and just let it flow. This disc is not really a combination of old and new; it’s more an instance of the old being brilliantly expanded. -Tom Orr
Listen
Buy the CD at Amazon.com
Read more about world music at RootsWorld and cdRoots
Strut Records (www.strut-records.com)
You can hear the creative sparks flying on this self-titled collaboration between renowned Ethiopian instrumentalist and bandleader Mulatu Astatke and The Heliocentrics, an innovative musical collective from the UK. The Heliocentrics backed Astatke on a rare live appearance in London in 2008 and joined him a few months later to capture in the studio some of what had worked so well on stage. It’s a good thing that everyone involved (including some other London-based Ethiopian players and singers) had time and energy to spare, because the resulting CD melds Ethiopian tradition and freewheeling fusion as perfectly as Dub Colossus linked Jamaica and Ethiopia on last year’s In a Town Called Addis. If you’ve heard any of the discs from the Ethiopiques series on Buda Musique, several of which feature Astatke’s work, some of these pentatonic scale arrangements and jagged rhythms will be familiar. But that’s only part of the story. There’s strains of Fela Kuti's Afrobeat, Latin grooves, vintage analog effects, mysterious melodies, intros that go from kitschy to way cool and Far Eastern riffs, all wound around ear-grabbing piano, percussion, vibraphone, horns, strings, guitar, standup bass and rustic Ethiopian harp and flute. Most of the tracks are instrumentals carried along on currents of pure inspiration and musical ideas seemingly coming together on the spot but too perfectly realized to be arbitrary. It’s as though everyone involved knew something special would happen and just let it flow. This disc is not really a combination of old and new; it’s more an instance of the old being brilliantly expanded. -Tom Orr Listen
Buy the CD at Amazon.com
Read more about world music at RootsWorld and cdRoots
Monday, May 25, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Italian Jazz and Ancient Sardinian 'Tenores' Collide
Enzo Favata Tentetto, featuring Tenores di Bitti
The New Village
Manifesto (www.ilmanifesto.it)
Composer Enzo Favata plays multiple woodwinds (saxes, bass clarinet, and an array of wind instruments from his native Sardinia and beyond), combining a foundation in free jazz and European classical music with elements from around the Mediterranean and the African diaspora. He joins forces with the Tenores di Bitti, a riveting Sardinian a cappella quartet, and an ensemble of trumpet, piano, Fender Rhodes, electric guitar, live electronics, upright and electric basses, and drum kit (avant garde journeyman U.T. Gandhi). Together they conjure up a decidedly global (village) revelation, antiphonal, and thoroughly (uprooted) cosmopolitan. Featuring enduring Sardinian texts, The New Village offers an interplay of voices and instrumentation (as on "Comare Mia," "T'amo," "Pullighita Blues," or the funkified "In su Monte Seris now," something late Miles would have been proud to call his own) that opens up transcendent beyond-the-conservatory musical territory, uneasy revelatory listening for those more at ease than not in a restless sonic world. - Michael Stone
Artist's web site: www.enzofavatta.com
Listen to "Te Amo"
CD available from cdRoots
Visit RootsWorld for more world music
The New Village
Manifesto (www.ilmanifesto.it)
Composer Enzo Favata plays multiple woodwinds (saxes, bass clarinet, and an array of wind instruments from his native Sardinia and beyond), combining a foundation in free jazz and European classical music with elements from around the Mediterranean and the African diaspora. He joins forces with the Tenores di Bitti, a riveting Sardinian a cappella quartet, and an ensemble of trumpet, piano, Fender Rhodes, electric guitar, live electronics, upright and electric basses, and drum kit (avant garde journeyman U.T. Gandhi). Together they conjure up a decidedly global (village) revelation, antiphonal, and thoroughly (uprooted) cosmopolitan. Featuring enduring Sardinian texts, The New Village offers an interplay of voices and instrumentation (as on "Comare Mia," "T'amo," "Pullighita Blues," or the funkified "In su Monte Seris now," something late Miles would have been proud to call his own) that opens up transcendent beyond-the-conservatory musical territory, uneasy revelatory listening for those more at ease than not in a restless sonic world. - Michael Stone
Artist's web site: www.enzofavatta.com
Listen to "Te Amo"
CD available from cdRoots
Visit RootsWorld for more world music
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Zanzibar's Culture Musical Club
Culture Musical Club
Shime!
World Village (www.worldvillagemusic.com)
The opening drumbeats sound like the heart of Africa, but soon an accordion, oud and qanun are adding an Arabic grace. Strings, a chorus of female voices and subtle shifts in rhythm emerge, hovering somewhere between Nubia and the Indian Ocean. Such is the beauty of taarab music, which originated on the spice island of Zanzibar, located just off the coast of Tanzania, and draws from every direction that such a cross-culturally opportune spot would suggest. Culture Musical Club isn't the oldest taarab outfit (they've been around a mere fifty years; the similarly venerated Ikhwani Safaa Musical Club was established a century ago), but they're the best known outside their homeland and, as their new release Shime! ("Keep it Up") shows, they cover the most ground stylistically. There's a clear link to Egyptian orchestral music in the combination of slow-building intensity and melancholy beauty, especially evident when the accordion takes on a mournful tone during the instrumental stretches. It's not sad stuff, though. Percussion and bass often kick the songs into a mid-point tempo increase that clears the way for male and female vocals to take a similar jump from blues-tinged to almost jazzy. And despite an ability to sound highly polished and sophisticated when they see fit, the group retains a certain rawness at the core, touching upon the sparser, drum-driven kidumbak style and ending the CD with a two-song suite that puts aside the full ensemble in favor of violins, percussion and the weathered voice of principal male singer Makame Faki. So whether taarab is new to you or you're already hooked, you will want to hear this music by one of its finest collectives. - Tom Orr
Listen: Kidumbaki:
CD available from cdRoots
Shime!
World Village (www.worldvillagemusic.com)
The opening drumbeats sound like the heart of Africa, but soon an accordion, oud and qanun are adding an Arabic grace. Strings, a chorus of female voices and subtle shifts in rhythm emerge, hovering somewhere between Nubia and the Indian Ocean. Such is the beauty of taarab music, which originated on the spice island of Zanzibar, located just off the coast of Tanzania, and draws from every direction that such a cross-culturally opportune spot would suggest. Culture Musical Club isn't the oldest taarab outfit (they've been around a mere fifty years; the similarly venerated Ikhwani Safaa Musical Club was established a century ago), but they're the best known outside their homeland and, as their new release Shime! ("Keep it Up") shows, they cover the most ground stylistically. There's a clear link to Egyptian orchestral music in the combination of slow-building intensity and melancholy beauty, especially evident when the accordion takes on a mournful tone during the instrumental stretches. It's not sad stuff, though. Percussion and bass often kick the songs into a mid-point tempo increase that clears the way for male and female vocals to take a similar jump from blues-tinged to almost jazzy. And despite an ability to sound highly polished and sophisticated when they see fit, the group retains a certain rawness at the core, touching upon the sparser, drum-driven kidumbak style and ending the CD with a two-song suite that puts aside the full ensemble in favor of violins, percussion and the weathered voice of principal male singer Makame Faki. So whether taarab is new to you or you're already hooked, you will want to hear this music by one of its finest collectives. - Tom Orr
Listen: Kidumbaki:
CD available from cdRoots
New CD series begins with Guinea-Bissau
The first release on the new Cumbancha Discovery world music line will be from Kimi Djabaté, a guitarist, percussionist and balafon player from the West African country of Guinea-Bissau who lives in Lisbon, Portugal. Djabaté's sound is acoustic and melodic with a bit of an Afro-Latin swing, reminiscent of Habib Koité. Djabaté's album Karam will be released in July.
Watch for a review in RootsWorld this summer
Get more info from the record label now
Watch for a review in RootsWorld this summer
Get more info from the record label now
Friday, May 15, 2009
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Esprit Follet 'Sous le Ciel de Paris'
Kicking off an accordion album with "Sous le Ciel de Paris" would seem like either an exercise in post modern irony or a display of total lack of imagination. When Esprit Follet does it, however, they give the Paris metro staple a spaciousness and generosity of spirit that immediately makes it your new old favorite song. Indeed this whole album of Franco-Italian music flows weightlessly on the vibration of a reed, or in this case, multiple reeds. Rinaldo Doro plays accordion and Sonia Cestonaro oboe and the two of them have a complex orchestral sound that plays on the pliability of both instruments...
Read more and listen to some audio
A 1966 video feature about Miriam Makeba
A 1966 video feature about South African performer and activist Miriam Makeba
Thanks to The Roots Cause for tipping RootsWorld to this one.
Evgenios Spatharis - Greek shadow puppets pioneer
Evgenios Spatharis, a Greek master of shadow puppet theater, died Saturday at the age of 85.
He was well-known throughout Greece for his puppet theater stories revolving around the hunchbacked character Karagiozi, who came to represent the virtues and vices of the average Greek. Cunning and rebellious, Karagiozi was often shown as a liar and petty thief who wormed his way out of difficult situations.
The full story in the LA Times
Here are a few nice tributes (in Greek) to the artist, that include a few images of his work.
He was well-known throughout Greece for his puppet theater stories revolving around the hunchbacked character Karagiozi, who came to represent the virtues and vices of the average Greek. Cunning and rebellious, Karagiozi was often shown as a liar and petty thief who wormed his way out of difficult situations.
The full story in the LA Times
Here are a few nice tributes (in Greek) to the artist, that include a few images of his work.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Down the twittering path of kwassa kwassa
Well, Twitter and such led RootsWorld down an interesting world music path this week. A friend in Berlin posted a video on her blog of a NYC pop band called Vampire Weekend doing a song, with a Congolese guitar riff, called "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"
Further pecking on the keyboard uncovered this little gem:
Esau Mwamwaya from Malawi doing the same song, in a full trans-Atlantic turn around.
And of course, at that point, I needed to find some of the real deal, by
Pepe Kalle.
And finally, Kalle and Empire Bakuba show how the Kwassa-Kwassa should be done.
All the videos are on a playlist
Follow the next twisted path via:
http://twitter.com/rootsworld
http://blip.fm/RootsWorld
Thanks to Andrea at Spaetstueckerin for starting me down this path.
Happy pecking,
Cliff
Further pecking on the keyboard uncovered this little gem:
Esau Mwamwaya from Malawi doing the same song, in a full trans-Atlantic turn around.
And of course, at that point, I needed to find some of the real deal, by
Pepe Kalle.
And finally, Kalle and Empire Bakuba show how the Kwassa-Kwassa should be done.
All the videos are on a playlist
Follow the next twisted path via:
http://twitter.com/rootsworld
http://blip.fm/RootsWorld
Thanks to Andrea at Spaetstueckerin for starting me down this path.
Happy pecking,
Cliff
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Mr. Cronshaw's World
My friend and co-fanatic in music, Andrew Cronshaw, has been writing for many years about the world's musical gems, and at long last, he has taken all of the reviews he has done in fRoots Magazine and put them online in an archive. It's all neatly arranged and cleanly presented, in typical Cronshaw style. 1500 recordings, primarily from northern, central and eastern Europe and Iberia, with interesting forays into the rest of the world. He can be loving or searing as needed, and I hope you will take some time to just wanted aimlessly through this treasure chest in the months to come.
Check them all out here
Here is a sampling of the reviews you will find there:
Since Andrew and I first met in Finland in 1994, I thought that was an appropriate time and place to begin:
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Entiset Etniset - Historical direct disc recordings of Finnish folk music 1935-1954
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 29 (1993)
EINO TULIKARI
Traditional Finnish kantele music
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 1 (1993)
AARNION SISARUKSET (The Aarnio family band)
Hameen Polkka; Finnish folk music from the 1930s
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 28 (1993)
RÖNTYSKÄ
Röntyskä Songs
Mipu Music MIPUCD 203 (1993)
From 1935 until 1954 performances for A.O.Väisänen's Finnish radio programme Puoli tuntia kansanmusiikkia ("Half an Hour of Folk Music") were pre-recorded on 8-minute acetates. Most of these were scrapped after use, but a random selection were preserved, and selected items have now been No-Noise reprocessed and released on CD as Entiset Etniset. The result is a collection of music, much of it unheard since the 30s, produced by rural traditions around Finland before the Winter War changed everything - kantele masters such as the Karelians Vanja Tallas and Antero Vornanen, Ingrian-born wind-instrumentalist Teppo Repo, singers in the old styles, a scattering of ocarina, clarinet, harmonium and melodeon, and of course fiddlers.
Eino Tulikari appears too, but there are more recent recordings of him, in fact a whole LP, made in 1975 in the front room of the Folk Music Institute's beautiful wooden Pelimannitalo at Kaustinen, when this leading exponent of the still-flourishing Perho River Valley style of kantele playing was 70. (This CD reissue of that album adds four tracks from a recording made for radio twenty years earlier.) He played the large "board kantele"; in his Ostrobothnian regional style it's played with the shortest string toward the player and without damping. On record, the sound is attractively music-box-like, but the intricate and ingenious techniques Tulikari used in these tunes, largely polkkas, marches and waltzes, are a continuing strong influence on today's players, and to see someone today using what he had a major hand in developing makes clear how important he was. Kantele is music for the eyes as well as the ears.
Incidentally, I'm not a harp player but it occurs to me that some kantele techniques, particularly the ways of slipping across strings for fluid fast playing and grace-note turns, might be worth the attention of those who are.
The Aarnio Family Band album is also compiled from acetates from Väisänen's radio programme. Until this century instrumental folk music was played solo; folk bands didn't really exist until after the 1940s, though there were popular music dance bands and a considerable brass band tradition. Nevertheless, in a home with a number of instrumentalists it was natural that they'd play together. The Aarnio family, from Humppila, SW Finland, started performing in ceremonial wedding plays, with an unusual line-up featuring Väinö Aarnio on clarinet, fiddle and occasional ocarina and his sisters Lempi on fiddle and Hilja on a 24-string kantele (played in the hand-damping, strummed chordal style very unlike Tulikari's, but still with shortest string nearest the player). A third sister, Rauha, played fiddle in the band too but not on these recordings, made in 1936 and 1941. The material here is virtually all polkkas and waltzes, with three mazurkas and a polska, with some influence evident from brass band music, perhaps partly because of Väinö's earlier experience playing cornet. His fiddle solos in particular show him to have been a very able and lively musician.
The recordings of the Röntyskä group of women singers from Rappula in Ingria (the Finno-Ugrian territory in the part of Russia between Finland and Estonia at the head of the Gulf of Finland) aren't from the archives but were made in 1993 of a group formed by Hilma Biss in 1977 on her return from deportation to Siberia and a stay in Karelia to sing the old songs from her home region - ring dances and game songs. The Röntyskä song, a quick 2/4 or 4/4 ring dance after which the group is named, is of antiphonal form; the leader sings a couple of lines of usually light-hearted lyrics reflecting village life and the group repeats them, in unison, sometimes adding a refrain. The singing is straightforward, without grace-noting or harmony, and the main interest of this album, while it has unpretentious charm, probably lies for most listeners largely in the material. The Ingrian tradition is continuous with that of Finland, but until recent developments communication and movement across the border were difficult. Now this group's songs, some of which arrived in Ingria from Finland in the first place, are finding their way back into the repertoire of Finnish musicians.
=================================================
Another thing Andrew and I share is a passion for this unique American artist of Latvian descent:
INGRID KARKLINS & BACKBONE
Red Hand
Willow Music IK001 (1997)
I guess at first listen some Folk Roots readers might regard this album as pretty far from folk music. Ingrid Karklins is, though, a classic example of post-traditionalism, in which each musician has in effect a personal tradition built from all their influences. We just don’t live in villages, largely unaware of any ways of making music other than those in our immediate geographical vicinity, any more. Some of us give in more or less to the pressure of one or other global mainstream; Ingrid Karklins doesn’t.
Her name first appeared in Folk Roots when cassette releases were still reviewed, then again with her first two CDs (on Green Linnet), and in an interview piece. Having parted company with the label, she resolved to make the whole project of her next recording as deeply personal as her songs, and indeed it is, dramatically so. Red Hand comes in a package hand-made by her, using fine papers and red braids, bearing a red imprint of her right hand. The natural impulse of the recipient is the childlike and fundamental one of matching hands, and unwrapping like a present the entirely red, unmarked CD.
The main features of the sound are her voice, which as others have said has some similarity to Laurie Anderson’s, and her piano (and occasional Latvian kokle and fiddle) with Steve Bernal’s bass, Craig No.7’s guitars and the remarkable, innovative and powerful percussion of Thor, who was a shaping factor in her compelling first CD, A Darker Passion, and has returned for this one.
Karklins makes absolutely no claim to performing Latvian traditional music, but her songs, minimal in lyrics, showing her compelling tension between self-exposure and extreme privacy, combine what is deeply personal to her with the oblique symbolism of the Latvian dainas (folksong verses tunnelling through the Latvian experience of many centuries) which are a strong influence. She draws on Malayan pantun, Scottish song, Alexander Pope, Nick Drake, a Dobu Island charm and Randy Newman, but there’s no complete exposition of any of them - they’re threads in the weave.
Remarkable and bold, and, like much great art, on the jagged edge between the mainstream and non-existence. Strangely liberating and encouraging.
=================================================
And finally, a bit of the acid that is an essential element of the Cronshaw DNA:
Oreka Tx
Quercus Endorphina
Elkarlanean KD-579 (2001)
Txalaparta. Two rough, thick planks of wood, resting on soft furs, leaves or cloth draped over upturned baskets or trestles. Two players strike them with thick wooden batons, one held vertically in each hand. A strange, old, minimalist music that explores the slight tonal and timbral variations to be drawn out of each plank by hitting it at the ends, in the middle, on the edge. A subtle musical conversation between two people, each appreciating and responding to the pitches and patterns made by the other.
Along come social and occupation changes, in Euskadi as elsewhere, and the txalaparta tradition gets close to dying out. But some young players, among them Igor Otxoa and Harkaitz Martínez who are Oreka TX, take it up, becoming skilful. They naturally experiment, not only with playing techniques but the instrument’s possibilities.
Why not add a whole lot more planks? Tune them to a scale. And of course if you’re going to want to play with other instruments, it’ll probably need to be that universalised sterilised equal temperament scale, not the old way of notes that sound right to the individual player. And look what you’ve got now! Hey, a rather big and dead-sounding xylophone!
And so, having created a “revamped, stronger and more attractive variant”, to quote the press release, you’re in a position to make it “a feature of cultural distinction, with a touch of ethnic flavour”. But surely the concept of extracting minute subtleties of tone, microtone and rhythm from a pair of heavy rough-hewn planks is more culturally distinctive than a big xylophone playing accordion tunes?
Oh sure, traditions must evolve or they die, and noticeable evolutionary clicks of the cog are usually criticised as crass and destructive, but no amount of criticism ever stopped the process and they often give rise to a new flowering; indeed Oreka TX and this album are a significant part of a considerable upsurge in txalaparta playing. It’s a well-made, stylishly presented record, destined to widen international knowledge and esteem of the instrument, with very skilful txalaparta players (who also make some use of tobera, the iron txalaparta, and the stone, lithophone version), neat trikitixa style tunes, and excellent Euskal and international guests (producer Kepa Junkera, Mikel Laboa, Glen Velez, Phil Cunningham, Justin Vali, Ibon Koteron’s alboka, Michel Bordeleau’s feet).
But something’s missing...
And then, in the 2 minutes 59 seconds of track 8, Oreka (“balance, equilibrium”), suddenly there it is. And on the last track, not just in the woody staccato from a 1990 recording of a pair who carried txalaparta through the thin times, Pello Zuaznabar and Ramon Goikoetxea, but also in the overlapping speaking voices, there it is again. Not neat tunes scored and transferred, not one-note-per-plank, but that sensitivity to mere hints of pitch variation, that delight and intensity of concentration of two people improvising in rhythmic co-operation. Txalaparta.
All these reviews appeared in fRoots over the years
All are ©Andrew Cronshaw
Check them all out here
Here is a sampling of the reviews you will find there:
Since Andrew and I first met in Finland in 1994, I thought that was an appropriate time and place to begin:
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Entiset Etniset - Historical direct disc recordings of Finnish folk music 1935-1954
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 29 (1993)
EINO TULIKARI
Traditional Finnish kantele music
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 1 (1993)
AARNION SISARUKSET (The Aarnio family band)
Hameen Polkka; Finnish folk music from the 1930s
Kansanmusiikki-instituutti KICD 28 (1993)
RÖNTYSKÄ
Röntyskä Songs
Mipu Music MIPUCD 203 (1993)
From 1935 until 1954 performances for A.O.Väisänen's Finnish radio programme Puoli tuntia kansanmusiikkia ("Half an Hour of Folk Music") were pre-recorded on 8-minute acetates. Most of these were scrapped after use, but a random selection were preserved, and selected items have now been No-Noise reprocessed and released on CD as Entiset Etniset. The result is a collection of music, much of it unheard since the 30s, produced by rural traditions around Finland before the Winter War changed everything - kantele masters such as the Karelians Vanja Tallas and Antero Vornanen, Ingrian-born wind-instrumentalist Teppo Repo, singers in the old styles, a scattering of ocarina, clarinet, harmonium and melodeon, and of course fiddlers.
Eino Tulikari appears too, but there are more recent recordings of him, in fact a whole LP, made in 1975 in the front room of the Folk Music Institute's beautiful wooden Pelimannitalo at Kaustinen, when this leading exponent of the still-flourishing Perho River Valley style of kantele playing was 70. (This CD reissue of that album adds four tracks from a recording made for radio twenty years earlier.) He played the large "board kantele"; in his Ostrobothnian regional style it's played with the shortest string toward the player and without damping. On record, the sound is attractively music-box-like, but the intricate and ingenious techniques Tulikari used in these tunes, largely polkkas, marches and waltzes, are a continuing strong influence on today's players, and to see someone today using what he had a major hand in developing makes clear how important he was. Kantele is music for the eyes as well as the ears.
Incidentally, I'm not a harp player but it occurs to me that some kantele techniques, particularly the ways of slipping across strings for fluid fast playing and grace-note turns, might be worth the attention of those who are.
The Aarnio Family Band album is also compiled from acetates from Väisänen's radio programme. Until this century instrumental folk music was played solo; folk bands didn't really exist until after the 1940s, though there were popular music dance bands and a considerable brass band tradition. Nevertheless, in a home with a number of instrumentalists it was natural that they'd play together. The Aarnio family, from Humppila, SW Finland, started performing in ceremonial wedding plays, with an unusual line-up featuring Väinö Aarnio on clarinet, fiddle and occasional ocarina and his sisters Lempi on fiddle and Hilja on a 24-string kantele (played in the hand-damping, strummed chordal style very unlike Tulikari's, but still with shortest string nearest the player). A third sister, Rauha, played fiddle in the band too but not on these recordings, made in 1936 and 1941. The material here is virtually all polkkas and waltzes, with three mazurkas and a polska, with some influence evident from brass band music, perhaps partly because of Väinö's earlier experience playing cornet. His fiddle solos in particular show him to have been a very able and lively musician.
The recordings of the Röntyskä group of women singers from Rappula in Ingria (the Finno-Ugrian territory in the part of Russia between Finland and Estonia at the head of the Gulf of Finland) aren't from the archives but were made in 1993 of a group formed by Hilma Biss in 1977 on her return from deportation to Siberia and a stay in Karelia to sing the old songs from her home region - ring dances and game songs. The Röntyskä song, a quick 2/4 or 4/4 ring dance after which the group is named, is of antiphonal form; the leader sings a couple of lines of usually light-hearted lyrics reflecting village life and the group repeats them, in unison, sometimes adding a refrain. The singing is straightforward, without grace-noting or harmony, and the main interest of this album, while it has unpretentious charm, probably lies for most listeners largely in the material. The Ingrian tradition is continuous with that of Finland, but until recent developments communication and movement across the border were difficult. Now this group's songs, some of which arrived in Ingria from Finland in the first place, are finding their way back into the repertoire of Finnish musicians.
=================================================
Another thing Andrew and I share is a passion for this unique American artist of Latvian descent:
INGRID KARKLINS & BACKBONE
Red Hand
Willow Music IK001 (1997)
I guess at first listen some Folk Roots readers might regard this album as pretty far from folk music. Ingrid Karklins is, though, a classic example of post-traditionalism, in which each musician has in effect a personal tradition built from all their influences. We just don’t live in villages, largely unaware of any ways of making music other than those in our immediate geographical vicinity, any more. Some of us give in more or less to the pressure of one or other global mainstream; Ingrid Karklins doesn’t.
Her name first appeared in Folk Roots when cassette releases were still reviewed, then again with her first two CDs (on Green Linnet), and in an interview piece. Having parted company with the label, she resolved to make the whole project of her next recording as deeply personal as her songs, and indeed it is, dramatically so. Red Hand comes in a package hand-made by her, using fine papers and red braids, bearing a red imprint of her right hand. The natural impulse of the recipient is the childlike and fundamental one of matching hands, and unwrapping like a present the entirely red, unmarked CD.
The main features of the sound are her voice, which as others have said has some similarity to Laurie Anderson’s, and her piano (and occasional Latvian kokle and fiddle) with Steve Bernal’s bass, Craig No.7’s guitars and the remarkable, innovative and powerful percussion of Thor, who was a shaping factor in her compelling first CD, A Darker Passion, and has returned for this one.
Karklins makes absolutely no claim to performing Latvian traditional music, but her songs, minimal in lyrics, showing her compelling tension between self-exposure and extreme privacy, combine what is deeply personal to her with the oblique symbolism of the Latvian dainas (folksong verses tunnelling through the Latvian experience of many centuries) which are a strong influence. She draws on Malayan pantun, Scottish song, Alexander Pope, Nick Drake, a Dobu Island charm and Randy Newman, but there’s no complete exposition of any of them - they’re threads in the weave.
Remarkable and bold, and, like much great art, on the jagged edge between the mainstream and non-existence. Strangely liberating and encouraging.
=================================================
And finally, a bit of the acid that is an essential element of the Cronshaw DNA:
Oreka Tx
Quercus Endorphina
Elkarlanean KD-579 (2001)
Txalaparta. Two rough, thick planks of wood, resting on soft furs, leaves or cloth draped over upturned baskets or trestles. Two players strike them with thick wooden batons, one held vertically in each hand. A strange, old, minimalist music that explores the slight tonal and timbral variations to be drawn out of each plank by hitting it at the ends, in the middle, on the edge. A subtle musical conversation between two people, each appreciating and responding to the pitches and patterns made by the other.
Along come social and occupation changes, in Euskadi as elsewhere, and the txalaparta tradition gets close to dying out. But some young players, among them Igor Otxoa and Harkaitz Martínez who are Oreka TX, take it up, becoming skilful. They naturally experiment, not only with playing techniques but the instrument’s possibilities.
Why not add a whole lot more planks? Tune them to a scale. And of course if you’re going to want to play with other instruments, it’ll probably need to be that universalised sterilised equal temperament scale, not the old way of notes that sound right to the individual player. And look what you’ve got now! Hey, a rather big and dead-sounding xylophone!
And so, having created a “revamped, stronger and more attractive variant”, to quote the press release, you’re in a position to make it “a feature of cultural distinction, with a touch of ethnic flavour”. But surely the concept of extracting minute subtleties of tone, microtone and rhythm from a pair of heavy rough-hewn planks is more culturally distinctive than a big xylophone playing accordion tunes?
Oh sure, traditions must evolve or they die, and noticeable evolutionary clicks of the cog are usually criticised as crass and destructive, but no amount of criticism ever stopped the process and they often give rise to a new flowering; indeed Oreka TX and this album are a significant part of a considerable upsurge in txalaparta playing. It’s a well-made, stylishly presented record, destined to widen international knowledge and esteem of the instrument, with very skilful txalaparta players (who also make some use of tobera, the iron txalaparta, and the stone, lithophone version), neat trikitixa style tunes, and excellent Euskal and international guests (producer Kepa Junkera, Mikel Laboa, Glen Velez, Phil Cunningham, Justin Vali, Ibon Koteron’s alboka, Michel Bordeleau’s feet).
But something’s missing...
And then, in the 2 minutes 59 seconds of track 8, Oreka (“balance, equilibrium”), suddenly there it is. And on the last track, not just in the woody staccato from a 1990 recording of a pair who carried txalaparta through the thin times, Pello Zuaznabar and Ramon Goikoetxea, but also in the overlapping speaking voices, there it is again. Not neat tunes scored and transferred, not one-note-per-plank, but that sensitivity to mere hints of pitch variation, that delight and intensity of concentration of two people improvising in rhythmic co-operation. Txalaparta.
All these reviews appeared in fRoots over the years
All are ©Andrew Cronshaw
Thursday, April 16, 2009
RootsWorld's future depends on you
RootsWorld needs your help to survive
Back in 1992, the dawn of time by internet reckoning, I decided to do something unheard of, and create an online global music resource. As it grew, I began to call it a "sharezine," an hommage to my many years as a volunteer DJ at various non-commercial radio stations, who share the music for free, and then ask you to voluntarily support it after the fact - free and open to all, access permitted at all times, to everyone. It just seemed like the right way to do it.
As RootsWorld grew over the years, it has been a search engine, a magazine, a juke box and much more, evolving, changing - growing and shrinking and growing again. It was sometimes a part time endeavor, sometimes my life's work. It has been a series of experiments. Some failed, some thrived.
But it has always been, in my opinion, about quality, not quantity, and it still is. We do not publish more reviews than most online resources - we publish more thoughtful reviews. We do not put out a steady stream of reiterated and regurgitated press releases and blurbs - we tell you about things we find interesting, important or inspiring. We do not flood you with content (how I hate that bit of internet phasing!) - we send you good reading and listening, only when we have it to send you - no filler, no dross. The volunteers who contribute to RootsWorld are free to tell you what they think - to enlighten you, not please an advertiser, a record label, an artist or a publicist. They write with passion, with spirit, with wit and intelligence.
So you know what comes now: the pitch.
This is the first time in the history of RootsWorld that I have dedicated this much space and time to asking you for your help, but today is that day. A few years ago, I changed RW's funding to a low-key voluntary system of support, and it has paid some of the bills. I added cdRoots to the mix and it was a successful subsidy for a while, as well, offering you a place to find the music you read about (and much more). But as I am sure you know, things change. CD retailing is waning. The internet is awash in "free information" (judge it as you will for value) delivered amid a sea of visual flotsam. Little discrete text ads and Amazon links do not pay the bills.
SO: The pitch is pretty simple:
Contribute to RootsWorld - I cannot do it without your support.
Many of you have responded over the last year with just that - generous financial support that allows me to continue to publish these newsletters and the web site without blocking it from all who want to read it - that SHAREZINE idea. I thank you for that support.
Now I need to ask YOU to join them, to make a financial contribution in lieu of a formal "subscription" to help me keep RootsWorld 'on the air.'
Please consider making that contribution right now, by clicking the button below, or ssimply drop a check to:
RootsWorld
Box 1285
New Haven CT 06505
Let's show the big business analysts, the flash-splash video ad-sellers and commercial nay-sayers that a small community can prosper in the big corporate world of the World Wide Web.
Thanks
Cliff Furnald
Writer wrangler, code puncher, web rider
If you have not yet decided to contribute, but you would like to be on our mailing list for a while to check it out, please sign up
Your e-mail address will NEVER EVER be given to anyone else, for any purpose.
Back in 1992, the dawn of time by internet reckoning, I decided to do something unheard of, and create an online global music resource. As it grew, I began to call it a "sharezine," an hommage to my many years as a volunteer DJ at various non-commercial radio stations, who share the music for free, and then ask you to voluntarily support it after the fact - free and open to all, access permitted at all times, to everyone. It just seemed like the right way to do it.
As RootsWorld grew over the years, it has been a search engine, a magazine, a juke box and much more, evolving, changing - growing and shrinking and growing again. It was sometimes a part time endeavor, sometimes my life's work. It has been a series of experiments. Some failed, some thrived.
But it has always been, in my opinion, about quality, not quantity, and it still is. We do not publish more reviews than most online resources - we publish more thoughtful reviews. We do not put out a steady stream of reiterated and regurgitated press releases and blurbs - we tell you about things we find interesting, important or inspiring. We do not flood you with content (how I hate that bit of internet phasing!) - we send you good reading and listening, only when we have it to send you - no filler, no dross. The volunteers who contribute to RootsWorld are free to tell you what they think - to enlighten you, not please an advertiser, a record label, an artist or a publicist. They write with passion, with spirit, with wit and intelligence.
So you know what comes now: the pitch.
This is the first time in the history of RootsWorld that I have dedicated this much space and time to asking you for your help, but today is that day. A few years ago, I changed RW's funding to a low-key voluntary system of support, and it has paid some of the bills. I added cdRoots to the mix and it was a successful subsidy for a while, as well, offering you a place to find the music you read about (and much more). But as I am sure you know, things change. CD retailing is waning. The internet is awash in "free information" (judge it as you will for value) delivered amid a sea of visual flotsam. Little discrete text ads and Amazon links do not pay the bills.
SO: The pitch is pretty simple:
Contribute to RootsWorld - I cannot do it without your support.
Many of you have responded over the last year with just that - generous financial support that allows me to continue to publish these newsletters and the web site without blocking it from all who want to read it - that SHAREZINE idea. I thank you for that support.
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Mandolin, tuba and voice: the new sound of old Marseille
Daniel Malavergne, Patrick Vaillant and Manu Théron
Chin Na Na Poun
Daqui (www.daqui.fr)
I have been following mandolinist Patrick Vaillant's career for pretty much its entirety (well, its recorded entirety, anyway), from his folk and avant garde work in various ensembles with Riccardo Tesi through remarkable ensembles like the mando-centric Melonious Quartet. Of late he has been exploring songs instead of strictly instrumental work and Chin Na Na Poun offers one of his most unique works to date in a trio with Daniel Malavergne and Manu Théron .
Victor Gelu was a songwriter and poet of nineteenth century Marseille, classically trained but enamored with the streets of this rough and tumble seaport. The poems are earthy, sometimes crude in both content and construction, and the offer a clever musical ensemble an opportunity to expand their meaning. Singer Théron, tuba player Malavergne and Vaillant take full advantage of the structural quirks of Gelu and create a compelling poetry of their own, a conversational approach that is at times lyrical, at times confrontational. Their reinterpretations are not meant to be period pieces, and bear little resemblance to what Gelu might have intended for his times, but they are certainly of a street-wise style he would have embraced.
Victor Gelu's poetry was all written in Occitan, so the booklet's French translations of the title track (no other lyrics are included) are a welcome aid to exploring the poetry a bit, but for the most part, the instrumental arrangements provide their own rich, if more cryptic, interpretation of life in 19th Century Marseille, even if seen through a 21st Century 'world music' lens. - CF
Listen
CD available from cdRoots
Chin Na Na Poun
Daqui (www.daqui.fr)
I have been following mandolinist Patrick Vaillant's career for pretty much its entirety (well, its recorded entirety, anyway), from his folk and avant garde work in various ensembles with Riccardo Tesi through remarkable ensembles like the mando-centric Melonious Quartet. Of late he has been exploring songs instead of strictly instrumental work and Chin Na Na Poun offers one of his most unique works to date in a trio with Daniel Malavergne and Manu Théron .
Victor Gelu was a songwriter and poet of nineteenth century Marseille, classically trained but enamored with the streets of this rough and tumble seaport. The poems are earthy, sometimes crude in both content and construction, and the offer a clever musical ensemble an opportunity to expand their meaning. Singer Théron, tuba player Malavergne and Vaillant take full advantage of the structural quirks of Gelu and create a compelling poetry of their own, a conversational approach that is at times lyrical, at times confrontational. Their reinterpretations are not meant to be period pieces, and bear little resemblance to what Gelu might have intended for his times, but they are certainly of a street-wise style he would have embraced.
Victor Gelu's poetry was all written in Occitan, so the booklet's French translations of the title track (no other lyrics are included) are a welcome aid to exploring the poetry a bit, but for the most part, the instrumental arrangements provide their own rich, if more cryptic, interpretation of life in 19th Century Marseille, even if seen through a 21st Century 'world music' lens. - CF
Listen
CD available from cdRoots
Wednesday, April 01, 2009
Toubab Krewe surf the world
Toubab Krewe
Live at the Orange Peel
Upstream Records (www.toubabkrewe.com)
Detractors no doubt dismiss North Carolina-based Toubab Krewe as a bunch of white guys trying to Africanize jam-band music. Then again, that's probably exactly why their fans (of which I am one) love them. Whatever led them to visit Africa multiple times to discover and embrace the sounds of Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast, the results of their having done so can be heard in the authenticity of their own music, which combines the guitar/bass/drums toughness of rock with kora, ngoni and percussion straight out of West African griot tradition. And as to what side of it gets the upper hand, well, I hear more Africa than America on both their very good self-titled debut CD and this blazing follow-up, recorded before an appreciative audience in their hometown of Asheville, NC.
It's an hour's worth of taut, expertly played tunes, predominantly instrumental but with a couple of spoken word overlays (more on those in a moment) that give the mind a little extra to mull over amidst a party atmosphere. Specifically African textures often take the lead melodically as occasional harder bursts of electric instruments help with tightly accomplished changes in tempo and feel as well as detours into surf rock, reggae, highlife and psychedelia that display the same spirit of give and take between hemispheres as Africa's emerging "desert blues" bands of today.
If I could change anything here, it would be to reign in the contributions of spoken word artist Umar Bin Hassan, best known for his work with the Last Poets. His guest spots occur on the disc's two longest pieces ("Roy Forester" and "Moose" respectively), and while the first is an eloquently engaging perfect fit, the second- despite justly celebrating some blues greats and Jimi Hendrix in verse -gets too shrill and goes on for too long. The intention is good, but by that point (the next-to-last track) I was totally absorbed in the band's amazing playing and wanted to hear more of it without distraction. Of course, someone else could hear the track and disagree with me entirely. And I still would recommend this disc most highly. It's a praiseworthy work by an emerging band that knows the power of West African music and how to harness it. - Tom Orr
Read more in RootsWorld
Live at the Orange Peel
Upstream Records (www.toubabkrewe.com)
Detractors no doubt dismiss North Carolina-based Toubab Krewe as a bunch of white guys trying to Africanize jam-band music. Then again, that's probably exactly why their fans (of which I am one) love them. Whatever led them to visit Africa multiple times to discover and embrace the sounds of Mali, Guinea and Ivory Coast, the results of their having done so can be heard in the authenticity of their own music, which combines the guitar/bass/drums toughness of rock with kora, ngoni and percussion straight out of West African griot tradition. And as to what side of it gets the upper hand, well, I hear more Africa than America on both their very good self-titled debut CD and this blazing follow-up, recorded before an appreciative audience in their hometown of Asheville, NC.
It's an hour's worth of taut, expertly played tunes, predominantly instrumental but with a couple of spoken word overlays (more on those in a moment) that give the mind a little extra to mull over amidst a party atmosphere. Specifically African textures often take the lead melodically as occasional harder bursts of electric instruments help with tightly accomplished changes in tempo and feel as well as detours into surf rock, reggae, highlife and psychedelia that display the same spirit of give and take between hemispheres as Africa's emerging "desert blues" bands of today.
If I could change anything here, it would be to reign in the contributions of spoken word artist Umar Bin Hassan, best known for his work with the Last Poets. His guest spots occur on the disc's two longest pieces ("Roy Forester" and "Moose" respectively), and while the first is an eloquently engaging perfect fit, the second- despite justly celebrating some blues greats and Jimi Hendrix in verse -gets too shrill and goes on for too long. The intention is good, but by that point (the next-to-last track) I was totally absorbed in the band's amazing playing and wanted to hear more of it without distraction. Of course, someone else could hear the track and disagree with me entirely. And I still would recommend this disc most highly. It's a praiseworthy work by an emerging band that knows the power of West African music and how to harness it. - Tom Orr
Read more in RootsWorld
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