This is a selection of Argentinian sound experiences between 1976 and 1998. I hope you enjoy it. Thanks.
Tracklist:
1. Hebe Rosell – Lacandonia (1995)
2. Roberto Détrée – Sonne (1982)
3. Lito Vitale – Un Paseo En Chindirica (1991)
4. Comedia – Los Días Antes a Melina (1989)
5. Claudio Caldini – Celebración I (1989)
6. Litto Nebbia y Mirtha Defilpo – Los Motivos Del Azul (1979)
7. Pedro Aznar – Azul 20 Música Para Ballet (Obra En 10 Movimientos) (1987)
8. Fernando Kabusacki – Una de Estas Noches (1998)
9. César Franov – La Charola (1987)
10. Lito Vitale con Mono Fontana – Río Limay (1993)
11. Hebe Rosell – Viento II (1995)
12. Guillermo Cazenave – Aries (1988)
13. Nebbia, Baraj y González – Algo Muy Sano (1987)
14. Gabriela – Altas Planicies (1991)
15. Quique Sinesi y César Franov – Olía (1987)
16. Los Músicos Del Centro – Canción Para Dario (1982)
17. Jorge López Ruiz – El Viaje De Dumpty (1976)
A record comprised entirely of mama likembi, a homemade instrument consisting of a grouping of African thumb pianos (aka likembe, mbira, or kalimba), meant to be played with the fingers rather than the thumbs. Before his conversion to Islam, Nadi Qamar was known professionally as Spaulding Givens, and you may know him as a revered jazz pianist and composer. Born in Cincinnati in 1917, of “Seminole, Cherokee, and African heritage,” he recorded extensively with Mingus in the early 50s and performed with Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, Lucky Thompson, and Buddy Collette. His later career saw him focused on African instrumentation and ethnomusicology: he produced several large-scale performances of his own compositions, toured with Nina Simone, taught voice, piano, and orchestra at Bennington for seven years, and made a series of mama likembi records for Folkways,* some of which are highly instructional and technical audio guides.
The Nuru Taa African Musical Idiom is gorgeous. Under deft hands, Qamar’s mama likembi sounds like a harp, a classical guitar, a koto, and still like itself. Cloaked in a thick layer of roomtone, these recordings feel just as small and intimate as one might hope. You can hear she shifting of Qamar’s clothing, hear his hands brushing up against wood. And you can hear him shifting in and out of different tunings, “draw[ing] from many sources to project a contemporary Black expression,” as he writes in the liner notes. Though Qamar’s interest in music’s spiritual potential is plain, this is shy, discreet music, ideal for background music while working or even for meditation. It’s also excellent music to hole yourself up indoors with when it’s suddenly very cold outside.
*If you’re unfamiliar with Folkways, it’s a terrific catalogue to sift through if you have a free afternoon or ten. It was founded in 1948 to document “music, spoken word, and sounds from around the world” and was acquired by the Smithsonian Institute in 1987. Since then, the Smithsonian has kept all of their 2000+ titles available on their website.
Apologies for a few weeks of silence–I fractured a finger in a bike accident recently, and while I’m happy to be otherwise unscathed it’s made typing a nuisance. I’ve also been feeling so depleted by and sad about our ongoing Supreme Court drama that I haven’t had it in me to think about much else. But, it’s fall, which means I’m listening to Robbie Băsho, and maybe you should too.
Though Băsho’s life was tragically cut short by a freak chiropractic accident, he accomplished so much in his twenty years of making music and left us an impressive catalogue to celebrate. He went to military school, then pre-med. He painted, sang, played trumpet, played lacrosse, lifted weights, wrote poetry, and changed his name to Băsho after the Japanese poet. He went through phases of cultural and musical obsession, including Sufi, Buddhist, Hindu, Japanese, Indian classical, Iranian, Native American, English and Appalachian folk, Western blues, and Western classical “periods.” He “used open C and more exotic tunings and he developed an esoteric doctrine for 12- and 6-string guitar, concerned with color and mood. He spoke of ‘Zen-Buddhist-Cowboy songs’ a long time before Gram Parsons mentioned his vision of Cosmic American music.” He studied under Ali Akbar Khan. He pushed for a broader appreciation of the steel-string guitar as a classical concert instrument. He made 14 studio albums in 19 years. He wrote “a Sufi symphony” and another for piano and orchestra about Spanish and Christian cultures coming to America. He’s considered one of the geniuses of American folk and blues, and yet his name often gets lost in conversations about John Fahey, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.
Visions Of The Country was recorded at what was arguably the peak of his musical power, two years before he played the concert recorded in Bonn Ist Supreme(you’ll notice some of these songs show up there as well). It’s a sprawling love song to America, and it seems to exist fully outside of 1978, with Băsho’s voice and sensibility looking both backwards, to early Americana folk and blues; and forward, with his explicit borrowing from global music traditions. He contributes some gorgeous whistling, most notably on “Leaf In The Wind,” and his whistle is every bit as theremin-like and expressive as his singing voice would suggest.
This is a potentially blasphemous thing to say about such a singular guitarist, but my personal standout is “Orphan’s Lament,” which features only Băsho accompanying his signature quaver on a slightly out-of-tune piano being played with the kind of abandon you might expect to hear after a few drinks. I love that the piano part alternates between a very pastoral folk melody and sounding almost like a hammered dulcimer. His voice is at its most brutally effective and emotively pure here, which is to say, blast this in headphones if you want to do some real ugly crying: “Born for love and nothing more/Given away cause we was poor/Will you wait, will you wait for me?” Băsho himself was orphaned as a baby, and the liner notes dedicate this song as follows: “To all the little orphans of the rainbow; and may they find the gentle hand of the Creator.”
Still, though he gives airtime to piano, strings, voice, and whistle, he never lets us forget what he can do with a guitar. I love that Visions of the Country houses a few bare bones guitar parts that feel more in line with what a 2018 audience might associate with “folk music”–“Blue Crystal Fire,” for example, could hardly be more simple, and yet it’s broken wide open by, yet again, that plaintive and tremulous voice. Elsewhere, we hear more classic Băsho guitar construction: long builds of dazzling finger picking with big, cascading crescendoes, and always so much warmth. I’m reminded of his assertion that nylon-string guitars were suitable for “love songs,” but that steel-string guitars could communicate “fire.”
Take this for an afternoon walk if you’re able. I hope you enjoy it.
“My philosophy is quite simple: soul first, technique later; or, better to drink wine from the hands than water from a pretty cup. Of course the ultimate is wine from a pretty cup. Amen.”
At a time when self-care is as much a multibillion dollar industry as it is a punchline, it seems wise to look back to a more substantial model for the articulation and maintenance of self. I’m confident that no better an example can be found than Jeriann Hilderley’s wonderful 1978 avant-folk record, Jeritree’s House of Many Colors. Jeritree is both persona and methodology, one that Hilderley inhabits and directs. Coming from a tradition of sculpture and instrument-building, she describes her work as “ritual dramatic music (creating conscious space that is healing, releasing and expressive), women’s music (diving deeply into my own womoon-self for the materials…) and creative music (creating a whole new world of meaning that comes out of the particularities of my existence).” Healing, specifically healing oneself through self-directed activity, is a central theme.
I haven’t found a lot of biographical information on Jeritree, save for the wooden yet enchantingly solipsistic jacket text. The LP was distributed by Kay Gardner‘s Wise Women Enterprises in Maine and lists a P.O. Box at Madison Square Station. 1978 was an extraordinarily generative time for the downtown music scene, which would soon give rise to New Music America, an annual nomadic festival showcasing New Music. House of Many Colors is a record equally at home with the Takoma stable as it as among members of this scene who experimented with vocals, such as Shelley Hirsch, Kirk Nurock, and Anna Homler.
“Sea Wave,” the nine minute opener, is buttressed by rolling, cacophonous cymbal crashes. To say that these evoke, symbolize or otherwise represent the ocean’s violent cycles would be entirely wrong. These thunderous crescendos are waves. They physicalize the music, inscribing the body of the listener and binding her to its rhythmic imperative. Hilderley’s vocals are shimmering specters that emerge from the stereo and linger in space long after the record has stopped spinning. Less about communicating or aligning the song with a particular style or expressive mode, they are a kind of personal evidence in the offing. The album’s title number (alternately, “Symphony of Little Sprouts”) is shortened from a 30 minute ritual performance piece and is described as a “meditational healing chant.” For me, the true delight here is the final piece, “Through Your Blue Veil,” a stirring devotional tune in which Hilderley somberly returns her lover’s assorted virtues, somewhat tarnished (“I give you back your perfect mouth/Less perfect since I have known you”). Its emotional power is shocking, disarming, and without comparison.
Hilderley’s vocals work against the marimba’s casual agreeability, and, as is the case with Robbie Basho, I imagine them to be the record’s polarizing aspect. While the instrumentation is an ode to the sonic and psychoacoustic possibilities of the marimba, her mournful warble has more in common with jazz and soul singers, taking her project out of the folk register. Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and even Maya Angelou’s 1957 one-off Miss Calypso all come readily to mind. Hilderley worked closely with recording engineer Marilyn Ries to “milk” the marimba’s rich overtones, drawing on Japanese, Mexican, African and Central American traditions.
The power of House of Many Colors is in many ways demonstrative, and it more closely resembles a kind of praxis than a display of artistic talent or ambition. Its politics operate on a broad formal level, without slogans or entreaties to identify or exclude. I am reminded happily of the experiments of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, who by 1970 had given up plastic art for individualized psychotherapeutic encounters, or what she called “ritual without myth.” I can think of no better way to describe Hilderley’s stunning achievement.
Peak private press folk. Moody, gorgeous, stripped down acoustic guitar and flute, all written and performed by Javier Somarriba. Plenty of warm room tone and vinyl static if you’re into that sort of thing. The last track of the b-side, “Dos Samurais Continúan Luchando Aún En Las Nubes” (“two Samurai still fighting in the clouds”) reminds me, perhaps very deliberately, of the Kwaidan soundtrack, with its howling wind flute dissonance and metal-edged koto mimicry. Ideal reading indoors music.
Tracklist:
1. Michael Tanner & Alison Cotton – Masts of Rown-Tree
2. Bongwater – The Drum
3. Kraftwerk – Tanzmusik
4. Paul O’Dette, Andrew Lawrence-King and David Douglass – The Glory of the Sun
5. Palace Music – West Palm Beach
6. Julianna Barwick – Adventurer of the Family
7. Zbigniew Preisner – L’enfance
8. Richard Youngs with Alasdair Roberts ft. Donald WG Lindsay – Kinning Park
9. Sonic Boom – Ecstasy in Slow Motion
I hope that if it’s still torrential downpouring where you are, this gets to you in time to be a helpful addition! Peter Walker is a Boston-born steel string guitar legend who left home at 14 to begin his lifelong project of musical study and research. He traveled, toured, and hitchhiked through America, Mexico, North Africa, Algeria, Morocco, and Spain, but it was seeing Ravi Shankar perform in San Francisco in the early 60s that sparked his fascination with Indian classical–he went on to study under both Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. In the mid-60’s he embedded himself in the Greenwich Village folk scene, becoming close with Sandy Bull, Karen Dalton, Joan Baez, and eventually Timothy Leary, for whom he served as a “musical director.”
This was the first of two full lengths he recorded before a 40 year hiatus, until he was later coaxed out of retirement by Joshua Rosenthal of Tompkins Square Records in 2007, at which point he went on to release a slew of new material and tour extensively. Though his interplay with Appalachian (and more generally American) folk, Indian raga, and flamenco was still taking shape upon the release of Rainy Day Raga (his follow-up “Second Poem To Karmela” leans into Indian traditions much more explicitly), I love it for its raucous joy, tumbling lines of masterful fingerpicking building into extended crescendoes before a long cooldown. A very appropriate indoor rainy day soundtrack. For fans of Robbie Băsho, Leo Kottke, and Sandy Bull.
Another dear favorite from Penguin Cafe Orchestra, a project spearheaded by UK-born composer and musician Simon Jeffes. Jeffes saw PCO as the ongoing soundtrack to a dream he had had while suffering from food poisoning in the south of France, as well as a vessel through which to explore his interest in “world” folk music, particularly African percussion. The project that didn’t exactly suffer from under-exposure, if their dozens of commercial song placements are any indication. Still, I think the music very much belongs here. Plenty of ink has already been spilled by much more knowledgeable people about the group, so without attempting to poorly explain what makes this music great, I’ll say that what I love about this record, as with much of PCO’s catalogue, is the way it challenges and subverts what background music is and what it can do.
Though the exuberant “Music From A Found Harmonium,” named after the discarded pump organ upon which it was composed that Jeffes found in an alleyway in Japan, is easily the record’s most famous track, I’m a huge sucker for more pared back moments like “Prelude & Yodel,” which milks little more than three string instruments for far more than the sum of their parts; and the heartbreaking “Isle Of View (Music For Helicopter Pilots).” Elsewhere are hints of reggae (“Music by Numbers”); baroque, as per usual (“Sheep Dip”); and the perfect Latin jazz riff “Heartwind,” co-written by none other than Ryuichi Sakamoto. Lofty, nostalgic, and unabashedly sentimental, but with enough warmth and playfulness to keep it precise and never saccharine. Razor sharp and meticulous musicianship from a group of musicians who, by this time, had fully locked into the ethos of what they were doing and how best to play with each other. I hope you have a great time with this.
Another one from the understatedly brilliant Soichiro Suzuki, aka World Standard. This is a completely different beast from the last of his records that I posted–it’s effectively lyricless, and is less a pop record than it is a somewhat anonymous amalgam of different folk traditions (though there’s plenty of Japanese folk in here). Hosono provides production and sounds; Hosono would later go on to release Soichiro Suzuki’s also excellent World Standard II on his then new FOA label.
This record is deceptive, heartbeaking, and again, understated–I think I probably heard it two or three times before I properly listened to it. It doesn’t command attention, but once it gets its hooks in you, they’re stuck. A slew of string instruments from all over, very tasteful percussion, and gorgeous wordless vocal layering courtesy of Pizzicato V (!) and Sandii (!). Alternately playful (opener “太陽とダァリヤ,” which, in perfect Hosono form, has an abrupt Beach Boys-esque reverb vocal harmony breakdown), moody (“逝ける王女のためのパヴァーヌ” is an appropriately cinematic version of Ravel‘s “Pavane pour une infante défunte”), and deeply emotive (“水夫たちの歌声” has left me in tears a few times). There’s something reminiscent of Penguin Café Orchestra–the music is pastoral and very evocative, but it’s not totally clear of where or what, and it feels oddly timeless. Weightless and heavy-hitting. If it’s for you, it’s definitely for you.
Pristine, jewel toned celestial new age from personal hero Laura Allan, who, in addition to being a gifted songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer, also made instruments for the likes of Joni Mitchell and David Crosby. Allan sadly passed away in 2008 after a six month battle with cancer. I’ve been enjoying reading through threads of comments written by those who knew and loved her:
Laura Allan was a true talent, could pick up any instrument and play it, and had a voice that only an angel would dare to have.
Getting ready for our 40th high school reunion, I saw Laura’s name on the list. I remembered in an instant her mesmerizing face as she played her kalimba out on the grass where we all hung out at lunch. Inspired, I went out and bought one which I have treasured and still sits on my bookcase. We became friends and she took a bamboo flute which I had with holes punched in some of the strangest places (no wonder it wouldn’t play) and she taped up the ones that shouldn’t be there until it found its voice. Laura was a very different and enchantingly beautiful friend who made a lasting impression on me.
Reflections is exactly as it should be, veering in between lyrical, devotional folk (“As I Am”) and more cosmic new age spirals (“Nicasio”). Though there are synth lines tucked in around the edges, Allan’s zither takes center stage, and as such there’s an acoustic roughness to this record that I love. I also love the reverb quality, particularly that on Allan’s vocals. Featuring Paul Horn on flute (he really goes off in “Passage”), Steve Halpern executive production, and Geoffrey Chandler on synth (you may know him from his excellent Starscapes, released the same year). Dappled with sunlight and pale green, Reflections is prime summer new age. Ideal for fans of Dorothy Carter and David Casper. Thank you Andy for the reminder about this!
