7 October 2015, World Cafe

1 Canzoniere Gracanico Salentino – Tienime tata (Ponderosa music & art)

Album: Quaranta

Canzaniere Grecaonico Salentino from southern Italy has been going for 40 years.  They came out of the pizzaca taranta or tanrantella revival in Puglia region the 70s started by leftist writers.  What interest would leftists have?  Pizzaca was a cure for tarantismo –which was supposedly caused by tarantula bites and struck down farm workers.  60s anthropologist Ernesto de Martino put tarantismo down to a crisis of agency stemming from the sufferers’ lack of power.  Canzaniere performed at the Cambridge Folk Festival at end July – and there’s more about some of the musicians who played at the festival later in the playlist. 

2 Mbongwana Star – Shegue (World Circuit)

Album: From Kinshasa

Mbongwana Star, a new band from the DRC, has really come up something good – raved on about it last month. 

3 Pat Thomas – Odoo Be Ba (Strut)

Album: Pat Thomas & Kwashibu Area Band

A great veteran of Ghanian highlife, singer Pat Thomas, who started out in the 60s, off a brand new record with a cracking backing band that includes another veteran of West African music, Afrobeat drumming pioneer and general amazing musician Nigerian Tony Allen.    

4 Toto La Momposina (Real World)

Album: Tombolero

Another great veteran, this time of the vast music scene on the Caribbean coastline of Colombia: Toto La Momposina turns 76 this year.  John Hollis, her producer in the 90s has been going through outtakes and stripping things down and removing the gloss.  Always good, I think.  “El Pescador” is a cumbia about returning fishermen.

5 Bomba Estereo – Soy Yo (Sony)

Album: Amanecer

One of the two core members of Bomba Estereo, singer Liliana Saument, is from Santa Marta near city of Baranquilla on the Caribbean coast of Colombia – to continue the linkages there – sonic and natal, I guess.   

6 Novalima – Quebranto (Redeye Music Distribution / Wonderwheel Recordings)

Album: Planetario

Novalima from Peru also play a kind folk-tronica – more on the folk side than the tronica.  On “Quebranto” they take the 50s recording of Rosita Guzman and backed by guitarist Carlos Hayre and buoy it up with added cajon and electro dubbery.

7 Kelly Thoma – Flutter (Seistron)

Album: Anamkhara

The Cretan lyra, a three stringed pear-shaped bowed instrument, has quite a pedigree – going to back to the Byzantine lyra, the ancestor of most European bowed instruments.  It’s still played in Crete and surrounding the islands, and Kelly Thoma is a young player and composer who is taking the instrument into new dimensions.  The tune “Flutter” is from 2009. 

8 Olivia Chaney – There’s not a swain (Nonesuch)

Album: The Longest River

Olivia Chaney’s wonderful arrangement of Henry Purcell and Anthony Henley’s song from 1693 “There’s not a swain”.  Olivia Chaney also played the Cambridge Folk Festival this year.

9 Rura – Allegory (Greentrax Recordings)

Album: Break it up

Rura are from West Scotland with their soulful version of the Kris Drever song “Allegory” which they played quite a few times on the various stages at the Cambridge Folk Festival.  There were quite a big contingent of Scottish bands at the Festival, all wonderful, but I’ve not been able to track down any recordings to play here.  Will carry on looking. 

10 The Unthanks – Magpie (Rabble Rouser)

Album: Mount the air

Quite a highlight of the festival was The Unthanks doing their massive and pretty moving arrangements from their latest record “Mount the air” – mostly drawn from Northumbrian songs.  They had impressive string quartet on stage.  Anyway, they played the trad song “Magpie” - stripped down, chilling and eerie.

11 Martin Simpson, Nancy Kerr, Andy Cutting – Fair Rosamund (Topic)

Album: Murmurs

Sticking with the creepy and disturbing I guess.  Simpson says in the notes of the album “Young Clifford’s admiration for his sister is clearly incestuous, and the sense of covert activity on the part of the King is plain nasty.  Rosamund, the daughter of Walter Lord Clifford, became concubine to King Henry the second, and was reputedly poisoned by Queen Eleanor”.  Simpson says the version is based on fragment recorded by Hedy West in 1965.

12 Bella Hardy – Good Man’s Wife (Noe)

Album: Battleplan

Bella Hardy also played at Cambridge.  She often does rewrites of old ballads, putting the women characters more at the centre or exploring their feelings and motives more closely.  “Good Man’s Wife” is her reworking of Raggle Taggle Gypies, one of the highlights of her Cambridge set.

13 Peggy Seeger – Do you believe in me (Signet Music)

Album: Everything changes

14 Chris Smither – Origin of the species (True North Records)

Album: Leave the light on

There were quite a few American musicians and bands at Cambridge this year (which I guess is the same for most years).  Among them were two veterans of folk-revival scene if you like.  Peggy Seeger, and probably not as well known, Chris Smither – both fantastic song writers.  Two songs about the strange beliefs held by people, and the more believable reliability of mothers and natural processes.

15 Punch Brothers – Passepied (Debussy) (Nonesuch)

Album: The Phosphorescent Blues

Prog-grass is the label that been applied to Punch Brothers.  Used to be called new grass back in the 70s and 80s – blue grass cut with just about anything else and played with vituousity often at breakneck speeds.  Mandolin genius (he got the McArthur award, so the title is official) Chris Thile is at the centre of the band, and in full eccentric, clownish cry at Cambridge.  This is one of the things they played. 

16 The Stray Birds – Black Hills (Yep Roc Records)

Album: Best Medicine

The Stray Birds from Lancester, Pennsylvania, really brought the place down with their great playing and singing, and heartfelt but witty stage banter, and their swooning at all the audience admiration for them.  “Black Hills” is about the Wounded Knee Massacre of Lakota people in South Dekota at the hands of the US Calvary in 1890. 

Most of the musicians at the Festival were from Britain, Ireland or the US, but there were a few from other places.  There was the Quebecoise band De Temps Antan and a klezmer band from the Netherlands, the Amsterdam Klezmer Band who mix up klezmer, Balkan brass and reggae in a way that sounds like nature always intended the mix.

17 De Temps Antan – Jolie et maquillee (L-A be)

Album: Ce Monde Ici-bas

18  Amsterdam Klezmer Band (remixed by Dunkelbunt) (Chat Chepeau Records)

Album: Morgenlandfahrt

  

A pretty interventionist remix of Amsterdam Klezmer Band by DJ Dunkelbunt, who played in Cape Town in July at the Nu World Festival.

19 Nneka – Book of Job (Bushqueen)

Album: My Fairy Tales

Nigerian singer Nneka produces some lovely poppy reggae on her new album her fifth since she started recording in 2005. 

20  Quantic feat Shinehead – Spark it (Tru-thoughts)

Album: Single

Sticking with recent sounds from poppier side of reggae, Quantic’s revival of dance hall raga-muffin, with Shinehead an old ragamuffin star toasting away.

21 Red Earth and Rust – Missing (Red Earth and Rust)

Album: The Mercy of Wild Things

Cape Town-based Red Earth and Rust released their third album earlier this year called “The mercy of wild things”.  As usual Jacques Coetzee and Barbara Fairhead come up with some fabulous songs, which they’ve worked up with some of Cape Town’s best musicians – too many mention.  But let’s mention bass player Brydon Bolton and drummer Ross Campell – because of their stuff as Benquela.  And let’s mention guitarist and producer Jonny Blundell and violinist Rayelle Goodman.

21 Jimmie Rodgers – Waiting for a train

Album: The Essential Jimmie Rodgers

22 Chemutoi Ketenya & Girls – Chemirocha

There was fantastic story the other day on NPR about a recording that SA ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracy made in 1950s of girls from the Kipsigis tribe in Kenya.  They were singing a song inspired by country music pioneer Jimmy Rodgers that the Kipsigis had heard from British missionaries during WW2.  The International Library of African Music, that Tracy set up in the 50s in Grahamstown, recently decided to take the music back to the people who sung it and managed to find two of the original singers.

http://www.npr.org/2015/06/28/417462792/in-a-kenyan-village-a-65-year-old-recording-comes-home

23 Quoc Hung – The Wind Blows It Away (Glitterbeat)

Album: Hanoi Masters: War is a wound, Peace is a scar

Quoc Hung from Vietman playing a k’ni or mouth violin.

24 Tafo Brothers & Nahid Akhtar – Tere Saath Mulaqaat Ek Raat Ki (Finders Keepers Records)

Album: Disco Dildar

One of the great groups behind the soundtracks of Pakistani film industry in the 70s and 80s – the Tafo Brothers with playback singer extradanaire Nahid Akhtar. 

25 Red Baraat - Bhangale (featuring Steve Marion) (Sinj Records)

Album: Gaadi of Truth

Red Baarat is a US based band started by dhol drum player Sunny Jam to combine Indian wedding music with New Orleans brass music.  Something definitely in the banghra tradition – Bhangale. 

26 Sky Cope – Blue Planet (Sky Cope)

Album: Flow State

Sky Cope is a young musician from Cape Town.  He’s just releasd his second album.  “Flow State”. 

27 Hauschka – North Brother Island (Temporary Residence)

Album: A NDO C Y

German composer Hauschka from his new album, a collection of songs he composed while putting together his 2014 record Abandoned City.  A bunch of letters are dropped to come with the title.