1 June 2010, World Cafe

1 Khaira Arby – Goumou (Clermont Music/Lusafrica)

Khaira Arby has been part of the music scene in Mali, especially around Timbuktu from whence she hails, for decades but only brought out her first international release, “Timbuktu Tarab”, last year. Like Oumou Sangare, she’s a women’s rights activist and an inspiration for women singers around Mali. She’s also Ali Farka Toure’s cousin. We’ve just listened to “Goumou”, the opening track from “Timbuktu Tarab”.

2 Tamikrest – Tarhamanine Assinegh (Glitterhouse)

Tamikest is a band of twenty-something Tuaregs who formed in 2006 around the city Kidal, NE of Timbuktu and relatively close to the Algerian border. Tinariwen are their total heroes. The song comes from their second LP, just released, called “Toumastin”.

3 Ricky and Mbasalala – Biby Neny (Haus der kulturen der welt)

Ricky and Mbasalala sing a vocal style that comes from the Antandroy, the “people of the land of thorns” - the dry, low lying southern region of Madagascar. Legend has it that the people of this region are descendents of Arabs who landed there in the 5th century. The area, like the rest of Madagascar, is a serious melting-pot. However, the culture of the area is apparently quite unified and based on hunting and animal breeding. There are stylistic elements in the singing that bear this out, like the rough, breathy singing in imitation of wheezing cattle that you heard in this song. “Biby Neny” is a legendary nocturnal monster, deployed by parents to terrify their children into submission.

4 Vaovy – Angira (Indigo)

Staying in Antandroy, Vaovy are a mainly vocal group. “Angira” is an invitation made to neighbouring villages to sing and revel. Vaovy is the brainchild of the songwriter and choral composer, Jean Gabin Fanovana, who sings the lead vocal parts on this track. There are imitations of cattle and cattle herding sounds here too.

5 Daniel Tombo – Tsara Ny Manam-Pahaizana (Buda)

Daniel Tombo, a marovany maestro, lives in the eastern part of Madagascar, a monsoon forest area in which grow the hardwoods used to produce the marovany box resonator. Containing the first big port of Madagascar, it’s also a very multicultural area. The marovany is a descendent of the valiha, a bamboo harp that originates in Upper Vietnam and Malaysia. The song, very soberly, but probably not very traditionally, advises against sacrificing education for early marriage.

These three Madagascan recordings each come from separate albums, and were all recorded in the mid to late 90s. If you’re interested in getting them, check out the Freedomblues blog.

6 Aurelio – Yurumie (Stonetree Records)

The super-rich mélange that is Madagascan music, for some reason always reminds me of Garifunan music, from the Caribbean.

“Yurumai” is another name for the island of St Vincent which is a kind of promised land for the Garifuna people. It’s the place where the Garifuna culture was originally born 200 years ago, from the interaction between shipwrecked slaves from West Africa and Caribbean Indians. The Garifuna people were expelled from the island by the British and wound up in Honduras and Belize. The tune gives this history, and expresses a longing to return. It comes from Aurelio Martinez’s new album, “Laru Seya”.

7 Curro Fuentes & the Big Band – Yolanda (Soundway)

Sticking to the Caribbean, “Yolanda” is from vintage Columbian label Discos Fuentes, founded in 1934 in the Caribbean city of Cartagena. Curro Fuentes, the youngest brother in the original founding family, produced a mass of material for the label in the 60s and 70s, and Soundway recently put out a collection of this stuff. The tune “Yolanda” is by Orlando Fortich. One key feature of Curro’s sound is a studious avoidance of the drum kit. So on “Yolanda” instead of the hi-hat on the upbeat, you get the guiro – a washboard – which makes things funky, but not Funky with a capital F. It comes off the album “Cartagena Curro Fuentes & the Big Band Cumbia and Descarga Sound of Colombia 1962-72”.

8 Bill Frisell & Vinicius Cantuaria – Mi Declaration (Entertainment One Music)

American jazz guitarist Bill Frisell and Brazilian guitarist, singer and percussionist, Vinicius Cantuaria, have pushed musical boundaries in the past as part of the Intercontinentals. Their 2011 teaming up, “Lagrimas Mexicanas”, takes various kinds of Latin music as the starting point, but moves thing a lot further.

9 Miguel Aceves Mejia – El jinete (RCA Victor)

Miguel Aceves Mejia, the “king of the falsetto”, was one of Mexico’s most popular singers, especially in the 50s and 60s, and is known for his interpretations of various Mexican folk styles, like ranchera. But he was also a composer and a movie actor. He died at the age of 91 in 2006. “El jinete” (“The horseman”) was one of his biggest hits. It comes from the LP “Canta canciones de Jose Alfredo Jimenez”.

10 Professor Longhair and his Blues Scholars – Tipitina (Proper)
The city of New Orleans fronts onto the Gulf of Mexico, and is a site of great cultural mixing and musical innovation. Here are two great New Orleans pianists.

Professor Longhair, in the words of journalist Tony Russell, developed a kind of “vivacious rumba-rhythmed” piano blues and “choked singing” style that spawned a whole sub-genre of New Orleans rhythm and blues. This version of “Tipitina” was recorded in 1953.

11 Allen Toussaint – Whirlaway (RCA)

Allen Toussaint is one of the Professor’s followers, who eventually took things in a polished and sophisticated soulful, almost orchestral, singer-songwriter direction – but not here. This version of “Whirlaway” was recorded in 1958 under the name A. Tousan, when he was 20.

12 Mayos Muana Ngombo – Nalembi-kotuna (Eddy’Son Consortium Mondial)

Speaking of the rumba, “Nalembi-kotuna” is a quite obscure, but very infectious Congolese rumba. The red hot drumming is by Nole Ti-Paul, and Eddy Gustave, who is also the producer, supplies the sax.

13 Sunny Ade & his Green Spot Band – Gbe mi debute ogo (African Songs Ltd)

Sunny Ade & his Green Spot Band from the mid 60s with his pre-juju Nigerian brand of hi-life. It’s from his 1966 collection “The Master Guitarist vol 1”.

14 Mahmoud Ahmed – Kulun Mankwelesh (Buda Musique)

Some absolutely classic Ethiopean funk circa 1973. “Kulun Mankwelesh” is a wedding song. The title means “Who put the kohl on your eyes?”. It comes from “Ethiopiques vol 6: Almaz”.

15 Sim Sisamouth – Don’t let my girlfriend tickle me (Sublime Frequencies)

Last month we listened to a classic Cambodian 60s and 70s folk and rock singer, Ros Sereysothea, who died during the Khmer Rouge. Sim Sisamouth was one of her musical partners, and a singer-songwriter, who also died during the Khmer Rouge. Sublime Frequencies in another one of their daring acts of exhumation and resurrection – the niceties of hi-fi and copyright be damned – has rescued for posterity his music and the music of others from 150 ageing cassettes found at the Asian Branch of the Oakland Public Library in California. They put it out on “Cambodian Cassette Archives: Khmer Folk and Pop Music Vol 1”.

16 Mar Mar Aye – Beautiful Town (Sublime Frequencies)

Sublime Frequencies are also active with their gonzo acts of restoration in another South East Asian hotspot of repression, Burma. The track comes from “Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar Vol 1”. There is some exquisite, subtle piano playing here. The SF blurb puts it eloquently “What the Burmese have done with a piano is so precise in the adaptation to their existing form and melody that one would think they invented it [the piano]”.

17 Saing Saing Maw – Lake Thay Mah Shoke (Sublime Frequencies)

“Lake Thay Mah Shoke” is taken from “Guitars of the Golden Triangle: Folk & Pop Music of Myanmar (Burma), Vol 2”. The Golden Triangle was a poppy-growing area in Burma in the Shan State when this was recorded (it now also produces masses of methamphetamine), and Saing Saing Maw was a legendary singer-songwriter/electric guitarist from this area.

18 Natacha Atlas – Hayati Inta Reprise (Hayatak Ana) (World Village)

“Hayati Inta (Hayatak Ana)” means “You’re my life and I am your life” and is off the 2008 release “Ana Hina”.

19 Googoosh – Gol Bi Goldoun (Caltex)

Faegheh Atashin, or as she is better known, Googoosh, is a legendary singer from Iran, very well known throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. Her father was partly of Azerbaijani extraction, and besides her silken voice, she is known for her ability to sing in several Central Asian languages. She was forced to stop singing in public after the revolution in 1979, but remained in Iran until 2000. Since then she’s given concerts in America, where she now lives, and the Middle East – people come from far and wide to see her. The song comes off “The Best of Googoosh, Volume 3”.

20 She’koyokh Klezmer Ensemble – Rampi Rampi (ARC music)

Cigdem Alsan is a Turkish singer based in Britain who forms part of the large and sprightly band, the She’koyokh Klezmer Ensemble. She leads them in the Turkish tune “Rampi Rampi” which seems to be about different kinds of personal resilience: “on the top of my tent the rain went shpp shpp; Allah did not take my soul away”.

21 Masada – Hekhal (DIW) (Disk Union Japan)

From John Zorn’s power jazz quartet, Masada, that was “Hekhal”, which was part of the Temple in Jerusalem, near the Holy of Holies… and that brings us to the sort of folk-jazz section of this show. Folk-jazz, for purposes of this show, being the intrusion of folk elements (melodies, harmonies, rhythms even instruments) into various kinds of jazz, but especially free jazz. The 70s appears to be the high point for this kind of stuff.

22 Francois Tusques/Sonneur Traditionnels /intercommunal free dance music orchestra - Les racines de la montagne (Le Chant du Monde)

Pianist and composer Francois Tusques is a pioneer of free jazz in France. In 1979 with his Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra, consisting of French, Corsican and North and West African musicians, he put together an album called “Apres la maree noire (after the oil slick): towards a new Breton music”. The track features the bombarde, a popular contemporary conical bore double reed instrument widely used to play traditional Breton music.

23 Ken Hyder’s Talisker – The men of Barra know how to drink but the women know how to sing (Japo)

Two tunes that either come from the Hebrides or are inspired by Hebridean music.

Ken Hyder’s Talisker, a free jazz group active in the 70s, often appropriated traditional Scottish elements. On the tune “The men of Barra know how to drink but the women know how to sing” they teamed up with free (improvisational) singers Maggie Nichols, Frankie Armstrong, Brian Eley and Phil Minton.

24 Mary Morrison – Pipe Imitations (Tradition TLP 1047)

Mary Morrison, who came from the Barra area, recorded her imitations of pipe music for musicologist Alan Lomax in the 50s. It’s on a collection called “Heather and Glen – A collection of folk songs and folk music from Aberdeenshire and the Hebrides”.

25 Marry Waterson & Oliver Knight – The Loosened Arrow (One Little Indian)

Marry Waterson and Oliver Knight are the daughter and son of Lal Waterson – from the legendary English trad group, the Watersons. Daughter and son have apparently been playing their own tunes for years, drawing inspiration from their mother’s unconventional approaches to writing, but only formally released the stuff this year on the album, “The Days that Shaped me”. “The Loosened Arrow” has their cousin, Eliza Carthy, supplying the fiddle.

26 Frank Proffitt – Satan, your kingdom must come down (Rounder)

Two musicians based in North Carolina.

Frank Proffitt was raised on a farm in the Appalachian mountains and lived on the farm for his whole life – growing tobacco, working wood, labouring in a spark plug factory and making his own banjos. This tune was recorded in the field by John Cohen and came out on the 1975 Rounder compilation “High Atmosphere”. Proffitt is most known for his version of “Tom Dooley” which he learnt from his aunt, Nancy Prather, who had actually known Tom Dula. The Proffitt version of the tune wound up in John and Alan Lomax’s 1947 print anthology “Folk Song USA”.


27 Hiss Golden Messenger – Super Blue (Two Days Clean) (Blackmaps)

Hiss Golden Messenger is basically Michael Taylor, originally of San Francisco, who apparently works as a folklorist. That’s from his recent album, “Bad Debt”.

28 Hazel Dickens, Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker – Times are not what they used to be (Rounder)

One of the touchstone singers and songwriters of Southern mountain music, Hazel Dickens, died in late April. Dickens was born in Mercer County, West Virginia, and lived a good deal of her life in West Virginia, although she wound up in the Baltimore area in the 50s and 60s (where she formed a musical partnership with Alice Gerrard - more about that in July). The track might have been from her last recording to be released – the album “Heart of the Singer” from 1998, which she did with singers Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker.