Anthology of World Music: The Music of Laos

This is another stellar Rounder Records release, from 1999, of the fantastic series of fifty world music recordings overseen by Alain Danielou and produced by the International Institute for Traditional Music between 1968 and 1987.

The recordings are from Radio Vientiane, the Vientiane School of Music, the Palace Orchestra at Luang Prabhang and a village recording.  The mouth organ, percussive instruments of various types (gongs, kettledrums, and others), and vocals evoke the rich history of music in the land-locked nation between Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and China.

Danielou's notes give a good general background of musical traditions in the nation and explains the connection of indgenous developments with influences from China and India.  The variation in large ensemble pieces (including an excellent one drawing on the Hindu masterpiece, the Ramayana) and solo and smaller group works is notable, as well.

Rounder deserves much praise for reissuing the Danielou records on disc and having about a dozen or so of these from various parts of the world, I'm looking forward to getting as close to completing the set as possible.

Alhaji Bai Konte: Kora Melodies from The Gambia

This was another memorable purchase in the early Nineties as explorations in "world music" were beginning and it was the first introduction, outside of an abridged piece on a JVC sampler CD, to the amazing and rich sound of the kora.

The 21-stringed gourd-like instrument has so much range and complexity and, in the hands of a master griot like Bai Konte, it takes on an otherworldly quality to it.  Beautiful melodies, deft arpeggios, and an assured technique mark this 1973 recording, released to coincide with Bai Konte's first tour of the United States and released by Rounder Records.

Then a three-year old company, Rounder was becoming well-known for its releases of folk, bluegrass and other American forms of music, but the beauty of this music inspired the label to issue the album because it seemed to relate in spirit to the rest of Rounder's expanding catalog.

The 1990s purchase of the album was on cassette, so the great thing about the CD version is the presence of four extra tracks, three of them recorded at a college concert in Pennsylvania.  The remainder of the album was recorded in The Gambia, including one of the bonus tracks which was taped at a performance in the town of Sinanor.

Most of the insert is about the sights and sounds encountered when the producers spent time with Bai Konte in The Gambia and give some idea of the important of Islam, Gambian traditions, and family in the musical world of the kora master.

After this first foray into world music, Rounder later released over fifty volumes of the remarkable "Anthology of World Music" series.  More selections from that series to come soon!

The Rounder Records Story

For sheer volume, the 25th anniversary box set, The Real Music Box, issued in 1995 by the amazing Massachusetts label, Rounder, is pretty tough to beat for value, as it includes four double-disc sets on Louisiana-based, blues, folk and bluegrass music, plus a bonus disc with a wide variety of material on it.

However, the 40th anniversary four-disc compilation, The Rounder Records Story, is highlighted here because, though it offers less music, it does provide overviews by each of the four decades, including, of course, material from the latter half of the 1990s and the 2000s, giving a different kind of range of the prodigious and diverse output of this exemplary record label.

The other attraction to this set is that, by going through the four decades, the music is intermingled, so that a bluegrass piece is followed by a zydeco tune, which then is followed by a blues song and so on.  That kind of sequencing is more jarring and gives something of a different sense of adventure to the listener than music organized around a genre (this is, by no means, a big knock on The Real Music Box, which is a real pleasure to listen to, as well.)

Starting from a song from its first artist, bluegrass legend George Pegram, up through material by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and from the Holy Modal Rounders to Rush, and from Buckwheat Zydeco to George Thorogood, the music may be highly differentiated in sound, but there is one characteristic that spans the whole set.  That is the absolute devotion of the founders of Rounder to present American "roots" music in all of its diversity and quality.  Well, not quite all American--there is a song from African kora master, Alhaji Bai Konte  and another from the great Jamaican reggae outfit, Culture (the albums from which these songs came were favorites of this blogger back in the early 90s, but were on cassette--CD versions are hard to come by.)

It's hard to pick out highlights, but there are some standouts, including the amazing but troubled piano James Booker and his "Classified"; the amazing The Three Pickers of Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson and Ricky Skaggs in a stirring live "Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms"; teen sensation Mar O'Connor's "Tom and Jerry" from the mid-70s; a great "Down to the Wire" by Son Volt; the intricate lyrics of Bill Morrissey in "Birches"; Plant and Krauss's "Please Read the Letter"; anything Krauss, actually; Thorogood's popular version of "Who Do You Love"; "La Porte Dans Arriere" by D.L. Menard and the Louisiana Aces; Bela Fleck's banjo workout, "Whitewater"; the strange, but really pleasurable "Tipitina" by Professor Longhair; Charles Brown's "A Virus Called the Blues"; Linda Thompson's beautiful "Versatile Heart"; Tish Hinojosa's plaintive protest song, "Something in the Rain"; and the aforementioned Alhaji Bai Konte's "Jula Jekere" and Culture's "Babylon's Big Dog."

Again, though, there are dozens of great songs in this set of 87 tracks, but the biggest takeaway from this set for this listener was the material relating to bluegrass and Cajun and other Louisiana-based music.  This is simply because these arenas of music were not familiar at all, as opposed to the blues, rock, folk and other forms represented.  The quality of the performances by so many violinists, banjoists, horn players and singers is uniformly excellent and opened this blogger's eyes to large swaths of American music that had, regrettably, been unheard before.

So, kudos to Rounder for 45 years of great work and for issuing box sets that really give a nice cross-section of the immense music the label has issued over the near quarter century since its very modest start in 1970.

Anthology of World Music: The Music of Pakistan

Another installment in Rounder Records' reissuing of fifty fantastic albums from around the world collected by Alain Danielou for this International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation and released on vinyl between 1968 and 1987, this album features the magic sitar playing of Mohammad Sharif Khan.

The pieces consist of two longer ragas, the "Nur Gharii" of almost 24 minutes in length and the "Darbari" of 18 1/2 minutes in duration and a shorter collection of improvisations based on Punjabi folk songs lasting about ten minutes.

Unfortunately, there is no listing of either the tabla or tambura players who accompany Khan, but the sitarist is unbelievable.  As typically found, the pieces start slowly and contemplatively, with Khan introducing themes and then improvising off them, while building tension and intensity as the rhythms and tempos get stronger.  His deft, rapid runs are played flawlessly as the pieces develop and it is really a treat to hear this master develop his playing.  The unidentified accompanists also do their parts extremely well, making these three performances real gems.

As the liner notes explain, there is no fundamental differences between northern Indian and Pakistani classical music, other than the styles employed by the various gharanas or schools.  Of course, there wasn't a Pakistan, until the Muslim state was created out of the ashes of the British empire in the Indian subcontinent.  What Danielou explained, however, is that, unlike in India, the musicians in Pakistan have not received anywhere near the support for their art.

A newspaper article from the Pakistani Friday Times in 2011 made an interesting comparison between Khan and the great Ravi Shankar, noting that Khan had a "subtler, more sinuous" manner of performance opposed to Shankar's sarod-like playing (the sarod is another stringed instrument, which Shankar's one-time brother-in-law, the amazing Ali Akbar Khan mastered--and an album with Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan has been featured on this blog.)

Notably, the article also pointed out that Mohammad Sharif Khan and Shankar performed together at a 1971 concert in Bombay, in which "these differences were brought to the fore" over the course of the 4-hour (yes, 4 hour!) performance.  One wonders if this was recorded and, if so, released, because it must've been a remarkable concert.

The Anthology of World Music series is a great one, full of interesting and satisfying traditional world music performances, and this installment, with Khan's impeccable playing, is a highlight.

Masters of Turkish Music

Since we're on a bit of a roll with music recorded in the 78 rpm era, coming off the great Art Tatum, here's an offering from 1990 on Rounder Records of Turkish music that was produced between 1906 and 1949, in tandem with the University of Maryland-Baltimore County Center for Turkish Music.

Gorgeous male and female singing abounds on this album, full of keening, elongated melodies characteristic of the music of so much of the Middle East, but also with wonderful instrumental work, coming from the court of the failing Ottoman Empire, which collapsed after World War I in 1918, folk music, and urban music often performed by gypsies and other sources.  Improvisation, moreover, plays an essential part of this fantastic music.

As observed in the brief, but informative, liners, record labels from Germany, England and a local label in Istanbul owned by Jews, produced recordings from as early 1903 and records from Turkey began to be available in the U.S. from about 1912 thanks to migrants from the Middle East and Near East.  An overview of several styles of music, one of which, taqsim, has been covered here through the great album called Taqasim featuring Ali Jihad Racy and Simon Shaheen.

The first half of the disc features classical vocal music, including the gazel of the Ottoman court tradition which emphasizes the often staggering improvisations of a highly-skilled vocalist, while the second half highlights instrumentals, including, at the end, several excellent taqsim.

If one listens to flamenco singing or that of Bulgarian choral music, the clear connection to this vocal music is obvious.  Moreover, the use of stringed instruments on this album also had ramifications throughout the Arab world and parts of Europe that were either controlled by Islamic regimes, as in Spain for seven centuries, or in the Balkans.

A special note of praise should go to the sound restoration work of Jack Towers in transferring these old recordings from discs supplied by two collectors and creating as clean and clear a sound as possible (and the pops, clicks and hisses were wisely left in).  Truly, great music still comes through regardless of the technology.

Anthology of World Music: China

This is another entry in a stellar series of traditional world music reissued by Rounder Records from originals produced by the International Music Council and the International Institute for Comparative Music Studies and Documentation, edited by the institute's founder Alain Danielou and Ivan Vandor and done as a tribute to Danielou's long work in documenting indigenous music.  Vandor, who succeeded Danielou as director of the institute, continued the work of issuing the recordings, which comprised fifty albums released between 1968 and 1987.

The album consists of seven selections for the pipa (four-string lute--already focused on in this blog with the work of the great Wu Man); the zheng (a 16-string zither); the qin (a 7-string zither) and the xiao (a bamboo flute.)  The recording is bookended by the two lengthier tracks (which this blogger most enjoyed), the Haiqing na tian'e (Haiqing Seizing the Swan) and Guangling San (The Song of Guangling.)  But, all the pieces are excellent and highly enjoyable, reflecting the long tradition of Chinese classical music.

The 29-page booklet includes a general essay on Chinese music, including vocal music, as well as the three stringed instruments heard on the recording, commentary on each piece and biographies of the performers.  These latter include Chen Zeming on pipa; Li Tingsong, also on pipa; Ding Boling on zheng; Guan Pinghu on qin; Zha Yiping on xiao; Fu Xuezhai, also on qin; and Wu Wenguang on qin.  Some of them were born in the 1890s and 1900s and others are from a generation or so later.  The performances are striking and, while the sound quality is not likely to please audiophiles, it is hard to argue with the sheer beauty of the playing.

In addition to this great recording, others in the series will follow on Tibetan Buddhist music, Iranian classical music, and a 4-CD compendium of the music of North India.  Rounder, a label founded by three university students in 1970 and which was bought by the Concord Music Group in 2010, deserves a great deal of credit for reissuing this valuable and amazing music.