Camarão Plays Forró: Dance Music From Northeastern Brazil

This is fabulous music from northeastern Brazil with emphasis on virtuoso accordion playing by Reginaldo Alves Ferreira, known as Camarão (shrimp in Poruguese because of a sunburn he once sported in the studio), who gets billing and a few pieces by Arlindo Dos Oito Baixos, whose work with the eight-bass button accordion is featured on four pieces.

Released in 1998 on the great British label Nimbus, which has issued so many remarkable recordings of world music, this album's music employs several styles including forró, baião, xote, arrastapé and chachado, which are basically unknown to most foreign listeners who identify Brazilian music with the samba and bossa nova.

This is also more country music, though migrants seeking work and better opportunities have brought the music of the northeast to the large cities of the south.  Accompanying the accordions on these pieces are light percussion on the triangle, cow bells and bass drum, while some guitar and vocals are interspersed, giving the tunes additional variety.

Camarão was quoted in the liner notes about the importance of not "modernizing too much" and keeping tradition in a way that was "essentially simple and direct," while he strives to "play music that smells of the land" in his native Pernambuco town of Caruarú.

In America, we think of dance music as often very beat heavy, whereas this music is light and airy, with the mastery of the accordion sensitively complemented by the other instruments and the vocals also treading softly but with much melodic emphasis.  This is a gorgeous recording not often heard here and a welcome addition to the fine collection of world music offered by Nimbus.

Mick Harris: Hednod Sessions

This two-disc set released in 2004 on Hidden Art Recordings were culled from sessions created by the former Napalm Death drummer who turned to dark, slow tempo electronics in all kinds of guises including Scorn, Lull, Quoit and in many collaborations, but who has largely been silent for a number of years.

Harris' forte consists forbidding washes and undercurrents of processed sound over steady, heavy beats, or, as often was the case with Lull, pulses.  Variability is often subtle and slowly evolving and the simplicity can be deceiving when he introduces change in ways that are disarming.  While Scorn was generally very heavy on the beats and Lull increasingly mitigated them with a glacial pace of change in pulse, the Hednod Sessions strike something of an (un)happy medium.

These thirty tracks were created in 1999 in Harris' minuscule home studio, a converted bathroom labeled "The Box."  They were initially issued as a quartet of 12" singles on the hushhush label with additional tracks provided to subscribers of a series comprising the four sessions and five bonus pieces added later.

As befits the location where these works were created, there is often a claustrophobic, or, if preferred, intimate sense in hearing these pieces.  Some of this is the muted percussion, but a great deal of the effect comes from the eerie employment of sound sources.  There is something compellingly immersive about listening to these recordings, especially with headphones.

In instances like this, Harris can be at his most appealing and interesting when he creates that atmosphere and environment in music that essentially consumes the full attention of a dedicated listener.  Again, the results tend to be best appreciated by focusing attention on the subtleties of the sound as it works through and around the steady application of rhythm.

When this set was purchased new some fifteen years ago, the shock was that it was acquired extremely cheaply—literally a few dollars on eBay—for reasons that remain a mystery.  This is hardly a "you get what you pay for" statement, but it did seem like a stroke of great fortune in getting such a bargain for such utterly absorbing sound worlds.

John Zorn/George Lewis/Bill Frisell: News for Lulu

For all his reputation as a musical enfant terrible in the late 1980s, master saxophonist and composer John Zorn could create some pretty accessible and impressive recordings.  His 1988 album News for Lulu with compatriots George Lewis and Bill Frisell and released on the Swiss Hat Hut label is perhaps the best example of this.

Just as importantly, this amazing album is a heartfelt and deeply respectful tribute to some of the most talented, but not as well known jazz composers of so-called post-bop period of the 1950s.  Zorn, a master saxophonist with an impeccable pedigree in jazz (best epitomized by his staggering Masada quartet) built News for Lulu on compositions from Kenny Dorham, Hank Mobley, Sonny Clark and Freddie Redd.

These are not the familiar names of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and other notables, but here Zorn gives them and their work their full due. As Peter Watrous points out in his liner notes essay, the musicians employ "hard bop as a base from which to build their own ideas on improvisation, arrangements, melodies."

Additionally, by eschewing a rhythm section of bass, drums and piano, Zorn and his partners "expose the way the tunes work, making them even more intense, and taking the project out of the constrains of the jazz tradition."  Art Lange, in his remarks, observed that the trio could play these tunes largely as conceived "or break free into contrapuntal abandon, energized every step of the way by bebop's enthusiastic buoyancy and an added jolt of 80s adventurism."

Zorn added his own reflections, emphasizing the telepathic interplay he shared with trombonist Lewis and Frisell, whose wider exposure as a guitarist was yet to come.  He highlighted the former's "beautiful sense of harmony and counterpoint," while the latter "kills you with one of his tasty country funk lines" and his "tonal blend."

As challenging as Zorn's music could be in these early years, News for Lulu is a paramount example of how he could experiment and yet provide a clear listenable experience.

Franz Schubert: Piano Trios D.929 and D.897

The tragically short-lived composer Franz Schubert left behind a remarkable body of work in so compressed a span, including eight symphonies and the amazing unfinished ninth, lieder or songs of significant number and import, and a great many works for small ensembles.

This Naxos release from the late 1980s is a masterful recording by the Stuttgart Piano Trio, comprised of violinist Rainer Kusmaul, cellist Claus Kannglesser, and pianist Monika Leonhard, of two of the master's piano trios, the E-flat and the Nocturne.

The former is a stunning evocation of the form, spanning over 45 minutes through four movements.  It displays beautiful melodicism, exquisite harmonies, powerful dynamics and superb playing.  Composed in late 1827 for a friend's engagement and performed early the next year and then publicly in March, the trio is one of the few works the composer heard played during his brief life.

One observer notes that second movement of this piece was used in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and that the auteur noted that the trio "has just the right restrained balance between the tragic and the romantic.  This could be said probably of much of Schubert's music as he bridged the eras of, say, Beethoven and Liszt.

The Nocturne was evidently a discarded draft of the andante second movement that Kubrick used and, even as an outtake of sorts, it is still a gorgeous piece of music.  There is much dramatic interplay, quiet passages of deep emotion, virtuosic flutterings of notes on the piano that are noteworthy, and an overall synchronicity of the three instruments that make this single movement a fascinating complement to the massive and memorable E Flat Major trio.

Ustad Mohammad Omar: Virtuoso From Afghanistan

This 2002 release from the Smithsonian Folkways label was very timely in a political and cultural sense.  The Taliban regime's retreat from Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9-11 and the American-led military mission there allowed for the return of music, which was made illegal by the Taliban.

Reference was made in the liner notes to a conference in Holland at which ethnomusicologists spoke about the effects of this edict on the musicians of that oft-suffering nation.  There are also statements about in Islamic societies, music is a question of controversy, with religious conservatives condemning it as promoting undesirable behavior, while it was also pointed out that some of the most remarkable music from the Muslim world has been very spiritual.

Mohammad Omar (Ustad is a title referring to musical mastery) was the director of the National Orchestra of Afghanistan for many years and a virtuoso on the rabab, considered to be an ancestor of the Indian sarod (Ali Akbar Khan, for example, has been highlighted on this blog).

In November 1974, Omar performed live at the University of Washington and was accompanied by a young and not-well-known tabla player, Zakir Hussain.  The two first met the morning of the concert and though they did not share a spoken language, their fluency in music easily compensated.  They simply rehearsed and then put on a spectacular show.  Omar died in 1980, so this was his sole recorded performance in America.

Fortunately, though it took nearly three decades, this stunning concert was remastered and issued by the storied label and it provides a rare opportunity to listen to classical Afghan music with accompaniment by Hussein, who is now widely recognized as a master of the tabla.  The liner notes, as is typical for a Smithsonian Folkways release, provides helpful information on Afghan music, Omar and his instrument, the concert program, and Hussain.

Macro Dub Infection, Volume One

This is a fascinating two-disc set issued in 1995 on Virgin Records with American distribution by Caroline Records that is an absorbing fusion of dub and electronica.  Among the familiar names to this listener are Automaton (a Bill Laswell project), Coil, Laika, The Golden Palominos (Anton Fier and company), Tricky, Scorn (Mick Harris), and Mad Professor.

Some of this music is far more directly tied to dub, while others are more of an electronica vein, though the use of studio experimentation with the manipulation of sound, so maybe trying to parse out what is "dub" is a pointless exercise.  Moreover, that doesn't make any of these pieces intrinsically better than others or a better work because it has a dub connotation.

Still, the quality of these 23 tracks is uniformly high and intriguing, Also interesting are the liner notes bearing the heading of "Scientist Meets the Ghost Captain," and which are comprised of dated comments, though not in chronological order, from 1955-1995.

Put together by the album's compiler, K. Martin, these notes include quotes from famed reggae and dub figures like Lee "Scratch" Perry and Augustus Pablo, avant-garde literary figures such as William S. Burroughs and Marshall McLuhan, and musical experimenters including George Russell and John Zorn.  Martin's text about dub and other experimental forms of musical experimentation and broad cultural statements are striking, if disjointed.  That, though, might be the point, a la Burroughs' "cut-up" approach.

In any case, Macro Dub Infection, Volume One is a mind-bending and enjoyable excursion into the many intersections of electronic music and dub and well worth the effort to locate.  A second volume, not as strong as the first, was issued in 1996, but is still very enjoyable.