Habib Yammine: Thurayya Pleiades

Habib Yammine is a Lebanese percussionist, composer, ethnomusicologist and teacher whose doctoral dissertation was on the popular music of Yemen and this album, released on the French Le Chant du Monde label in 2008, is a masterful display of Arabic percussion.  Yammine plays the riqq, a small frame drum with cymbals held in the hands, the daff, a larger frame drum, and the darbouka, which has a goblet shape.  

Yammine is joined by his wife Aicha Redouane, who also plays the daff as well as chants, while Oussama Chraibi, a native of Morocco, plays the bongo, the double drum often associated with Cuban music, though Yammine noted in a very helpful interview in the liners that 1940s music in Egypt fused Cuban with native sounds.

Naturally, a listener of this album has to really like percussion, especially those of the Arabic world played by the hands, because there is well over an hour with the eleven pieces, but for those who do get a chance to hear this or other recordings of Middle Eastern percussion (including amazing Persian music, for example), the rewards are many.

The precision, varied rhythms based on several beat patterns, and the chants, along with the crystalline production is quite hypnotic and entrancing and it is not only great to read Yammine's interview with ethnomusicologist Gilles Delebarre, but Redouane's essay gives a poetic interpretation of her husband's art.  For example, she writes of the alchemy in his work that "is quite simply love, a love recounted . . . in flashes of light as he tells of the seasons and their passing, of succeeding generations of human beings, rolled out by his drums across the way of Time."

It is telling when Yammine, is replying to a question from Delebarre about the first piece having an unusual 19-beat rhythmic pattern, tells him that "you don't go to the sea to count the waves, you go to be lulled by it, to be carried aloft on the crest of the waves."  This is a reminder of the best advice this blogger has heard about how to listen to music:  try to follow the sounds, not the notes.  As adherents of the mystical Sufi form of Islam, the musicians compose and play in such a way, as Redouane noted, that it is "a nver-ending source of joy [that] fills the present moment with fruitfulness."

Takini: Music and Chants of the Lakota Sioux

This is a fascinating recording from the French Le Chante du Monde label of twenty songs recorded at the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Lakota Sioux Indians in 1994 by the Takini Dance Group, an ensemble of  professional dancers from various reservations.  Hearing the chants, flute music and other songs performed by modern Sioux is as close as we can get to a snapshot of the time-honored musical traditions of their ancestors.

It is easy to overly romanticize native peoples and understandable to a significant degree because of the brutality to which they were subjected in the relentless move across the continent by Euro-Americans during the 19th-century and then the poor treatment of them by the government afterward.

Still, listening to these songs representing a variety of aspects of everyday life, from dance music, to the celebration of animals, a victory song, an honor song--some of which are traditional, others modern compositions in the spirit of ancient traditions--there is a strong sense of dignity, respect for the natural environment in which the Sioux have lived, pride, and communal understanding.

Most importantly, perhaps, these songs are a vibrant reminder that, for all that has been done to them, the Sioux have survived by holding fast to the kinds of traditional lifeways and practices emboided in this music, as well as in other ways.

The brief, but informative, liner notes give historical context to the music and then an explanation of what the songs are generally about and that the music is based on the pentatonic scale and the use of higher registers for vocalizing along with percussion for keeping time and reflecting the heartbeat during dances at pow-wows.

Interestingly, the continuing interest in warrior songs from times that are becoming more and more remote is their identification with modern warriors, Lakota Sioux that have and are fighting in the American military.  The social songs are a way for today's Sioux to have a deeper, spiritual connection to their ancestors, the land, and the ways of life which their people have  maintained, even in crisis, for centuries.

A remarkable photo is reproduced in the liners of an Omaha Dance from the summer of 1891, the year after the horrific Wounded Knee Massacre.  It, like this album, is a testament to native resilience and determination in the face of grave threats to a worldview and a way of life.