WHAT’S MOST REMARKABLE about Jonathan Ward’s Excavated Shellac collection – a project he began on his website and which now has been issued as a four-CD, 100-track collection by Dust-to-Digital – is the familiarity of the music. Mind you, this is typically lo-fi material, recorded and pressed in countries untroubled by pop-market best-seller lists. Which means that the familiarity is scant to nil. Yet these songs were somebody’s favorites, and they’ll soon be yours.
From there we travel to central Mexico for Huasteco music, thence to Okinawa for a 1957 harvest song. Most of the songs have translated lyrics; all bear study for the internationally appropriate poetry and passions. Mozambique was still a Portuguese colony in 1953, when “O Ta Nikona” (“Come, I’m Available”) was recorded, a courtship song celebrating the accompanying music.
Although a great deal of this music was and remains isolated in a particular area, in many cases we can trace the evolution of styles that would cross geographical boundaries. Take the history of fado, for example. Portugal’s best-known musical style evolved in 19th-century Lisbon, and recordings were made as the century turned. It’s a music of melancholy, usually vocal, although instrumental practitioners like Júlio Silva have gained fame. Silva’s “Fado Melancólico,” recorded in 1927, is a virtuoso exercise as compelling as any of the more formally branded music of Tárrega and Sor. But Silva’s story turned as heartbreaking as his music: sidelined by injury, he finished his life in poverty.
Similarly, Haiti offers the earliest recordings of méringue, in its early years considered an upper-class or “salon” dance before it began its worldwide spread. The island “has had, among other complexities, a complicated racial history,” writes Ward. “The country has hosted a steady stream of immigrants from around the world who married into black Haitian society, which itself had stemmed from the thousands of slaves imported to the island by the French.” By 1930, when “Prend Yo” was recorded (in New York) by the Orchestre Franco-Creole, the country had been occupied by the U.S. for fifteen years.
Our present concern with Russia’s deplorable invasion of Ukraine is stunningly echoed in the story behind a recording of “On the Ukrainian Steppe” by Vassyl Yemetz, recorded and issued in the U.S. in 1930. Yemetz played a 62-string bandura, a lute-like instrument, in the tradition of the itinerant kobzari, who wandered the region in the 19th century, eventually achieving favored status among the Russian and Ukrainian elite. Then the Soviet era kicked in and “kobzari were actually lured to Kharkhiv under the guise of attending an ethnographic music conference, and were executed en masse. What active bandura players left in the Soviet Union were compelled to play a Russian version of the bandura, known as the Kyiv bandura.” Yemetz, fortunately, had left for Berlin in 1920, eventually reaching the United States.
What else do we find in this set? They’re all gems, and include a Turkish “blues,” so to speak, played on a three-stringed fiddle called a kemenche. A 1928 Panamanian anti-American song deploring the proposed canal. A Bulgarian folkdance recording that survived the terrible pressing conditions that doomed the survival of many discs.
There’s a Koto trio with a 1927 recording of variations on the famous Japanese song “Sakura, Sakura.” A church choir in Uganda recorded in 1930. Swing guitar from Ghana. Galician bagpipes.
You’ll find a rare early example of Mongolian throat-singing in “The Venerable Genghis Khan,” recorded in 1938. Rare both in terms of the performance itself, which is haunting, and the fact that it was difficult to haul recording gear into Mongolia.
And the instrumentation throughout this set is as fascinating as it’s varied, even including surprise appearances by such (somewhat) familiar items lie the cajón, a boxlike percussion instrument that has re-invaded the concert stage of late, making one of its earliest appearances on record in the 1928 Peruvian song “Pregonero.”
Ward skillfully contextualizes the music both in the programming and in his liner notes. Regarding the song “Khaya–l Dilbar,” performed by an all-but-unknown artist named Paykān, he writes, “The music of Afghanistan offers a bridge between India and Iran. One of the first sounds heard in this piece is the sound of the tabla, which is also a mainstay in Afghan music. The next to appear are the string instruments known as the sarinda, a bowed fiddle played upright with close similarities to the Indian sarangi, and the rubab, the national instrument of Afghanistan. The rubab is shaped like a slender seed, held on the lap, and plucked hard, for a resonating sound. It, too, has a connection with India, and although fretless, its design is considered to be directly connected to the sarode. In the background is the chang, the Afghan mouth harp.”
This collection exuberantly emphasizes the parochialism of our 21st-century listening habits, dictated as they are by profit-driven populist trends and the fear of anything different. Well, here are a hundred different tracks to poke you out of that comfort zone. And show you an unexpectedly enjoyable time.
Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music (1907-1967)
Dust-to-Digital
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