Thursday, November 4, 2021

Afghanistan

 

AFGHANISTAN

Enregistrements de Michel et Gérard MONTESINOS

Recordings  by M. and G. Montesinos

Disques Alvarès, no date, LD 491

Afghanistan has been very attractive to globe-trotters and sound hunters since the 50s and a certain number of LPs like this one were produced in France. Here two brothers went to record folk musicians mostly Uzbek with some Hazara and Pashtoon examples. Due to the important part of music in traditonal Afghani life it was possible and maybe easy to find good performers among adults but also among teenagers. There are no information about the Montesinos brothers but they certainly loved what they found and this LP is quite nice. Nevertheless, we miss the names of the songs and their content as well as information about the performers. This is the limit of such an album; fortunately there are very good albums (mostly on CD) made by musicologists and the present album is complementary to those scientific works. The notes are in French only.  


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3 comments:

  1. Thank you for the share! :-)
    This might be a somewhat nebulous/doubtful assertment to make, but I'm pretty confident to say that this LP was released in 1974, as a few lower cat. nº LPs and a higher one were all (semi-)confirmed to have been released that year. https://www.discogs.com/label/125221-Disques-Alvarès?sort=year&sort_order=asc

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  2. Hi, I do check Discogs when I can't get some information from an LP but I couldn't get a year for this one. So thanks for your search and clever way of investigation !
    To me the important thing to remember is that Afghanistan was relatively peaceful before 1979 where people could sing and play freely in their diversity. All records issued before 1979 are precious testimonies of a great culture.

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  3. this is a very good one !!! much appreaciated Herve!! and totally agree with you - Afghanistan was relatively peaceful before 1979 where people could sing and play freely in their diversity. All records issued before 1979 are precious testimonies of a great culture.-

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