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."

The Beatles: Abbey Road

Some thirty years ago, a Beatlemaniac friend asked why I didn't listen to the Fab Four and the reply was that, aside from having moved on to other musical interests (jazz, world and classical, mainly), which was really the main reason, there'd been plenty of exposure to that music in my youth, especially with a neighbor whose father played The Beatles all the time and frequently sat us down (when we were something like 8 and 9 years old) to show us the albums and explain the music in great detail.

Half-jokingly, I said to this friend that I'd probably wind up rediscovering The Beatles in my fifties and, sure enough, last spring is when that happened.  Picking an album to highlight here is definitely not a question of saying it's a favorite or the best, because Revolver is awesome, the eponymous album is the most interesting, and Sgt. Pepper's, with its studio innovations, is also stellar.

On balance, though, Abbey Road is incredible, especially after the Let It Be sessions proved to be a particular challenge (though Peter Jackson's new doc suggests the problems confronting the bad were not as bad as many have argued.)  Whatever the viewpoint on that, this recording wound up being a great finale for a phenomenal band.

There are obvious highlights, starting with the opener "Come Together," and while John Lennon said that he was becoming increasingly "submerged" once "I Am The Walrus" was rejected as a single, and his relationship with Yoko Ono, exploring experiemental music, and getting addicted to heroin, was definitely pulling him away from the band, it's a great, great tune.  He was purportedly embarrassed by such contributions as "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" and didn't much like the collage, but his other main offering, "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" is another classic.

It doesn't appear to have been an accident that both those "heavy" pieces were followed by two of George Harrison's greatest songs in "Something" and "Here Comes The Sun."  He was clearly increasingly frustrated by not having more of his tunes included on albums and was looking very much forward to striking out on his own, whether as part of The Beatles or not.  These two songs are still phenomenal by any standard.

To this listener, Paul McCartney's main contribution seems to have been shepherding the recording with George Martin, especially on the collage of songs on the second side of the LP that ends with great tracks like "Golden Slumbers" and "Carry That Weight," while "The End" is a rare example of where the three guitarists trade solos and Ringo even provided a solo, which he's always said he's resisted, and "Because" has that great three-part harmony.  As far as his songs are concerned, "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" often gets hammered for being yet another McCartney trifle and others may not be essential in the band's canon. It does seem, though, that his discipline, often needed after manager Brian Epstein's suicide, in getting The Beatles to put together a classic recording after the Let It Be fiasco was essential to the success of Abbey Road, which was a stellar way for the group to end its amazing run.