Troubadours des Hauts-Plateaux

 

MUSIQUE AFRICAINE DE BURUNDI
LES TROUBADOURS DES HAUTS-PLATEAUX
enregistrés par Roger Barbaglia
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AFRICAN MUSIC FROM BURUNDI
THE TROUBADOURS OF THE HIGH PLATEAUX
recorded by Roger Barbaglia

 Vogue, 1969, CLVLX 296

The French label Vogue disappeared around 1972. It covered various musical genres including field recordings like this album. In fact this is the soundtrack of a film entitled ''le royaume des 1000 collines'' (the kingdom of 1000 hills) as Burundi is sometime nicknamed. I don't know who Roger Barbaglia was but he was lucky or he knew the country well enough to get the music he wanted.
This album is quite amazing (not the sound quality though) with some examples of rare singing at least at the time of the recordings. One of the highlights of the album is the songs from the kraal a house more or less large where women stay with infants and cows. These women (quite young here) have their own corpus of songs they sing between them, songs that were not supposed to be heard by strangers. Barbaglia talks about the freshness of these songs.
Most of the tracks feature singers young girls and boys as well as men. Tutsis, Hutus and Twas (Pygmies) have several tracks each.
Barbaglia wrote the text in French only with a good introduction to the country and its ethnic groups.
Now there are some discrepancies between what is mentionned on the back cover and what we hear. The first track on side A features a likembe player which is not on the list of tunes. So I named it track A 0.
On B4 the ''2nd harper'' is not the musical arc player mentionned but the same inanga player and singer as on B3. The musical arc player appears on B5.
Then when I copied this album I put tracks B7 and B8 together (I borrowed it from a library).
This LP is a great witness of the diversity and richness of the cultures present in Burundi before the chaos of the 90s. 

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Ethiopia I : Copts

ETHIOPIA I  COPTS

AN ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN MUSIC / 4
Edited for the International Music Council by the International Institute for
Comparative Music Studies and Documentation 

Musicaphon Bärenreiter/Unesco Collection, ?, BM 30 L 2304

 Jean Jenkins (1922-1990) was one of the best ethnomusicologists who worked a lot in the field. Among the countries where she went the most Ethiopia certainly comes first. All her albums are excellent (here recorded in mono) and Ethiopia has a diversity like no other.
Jenkins wrote the text with some historical information and then a description of the liturgy.
 The Ethiopian Church is monophysite like the Armenian Church or the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch.

Set apart from the other Western and  Eastern churches  for centuries (except the Copts in Egypt) the liturgical chant remained close enough (as far as we know) to the original chanting in the Near East with perhaps some traces of the Jewish chant in the Temple and other features kept by the  early Christian church. When I listen to the debtera who is in charge of the chanting I can hear the same approach as in the old Gaelic way of singing (the sean-nós singing) which was also called  ''the singing of the monks from ancient times''. Maybe it is a coincidence we'll probably never know for sure.
An exceptional document recorded around 1963.

Text in English (French and German) 

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Fleadh Ceoil '75

 

FLEADH CEOIL '75

Dolphin Records, 1975, DOL M.5013 

This album features some of the musicians who took part in the 1975 edition of the All-Ireland Fleadh in Buncrana co. Donegal. Some musicians are quite famous like Jackie Daly or Jim McKillop. Michael Flatley (yes the future Lord of the Dance himself) was there too on flute.
Already some foreign musicians came over but maybe  not in huge numbers like it has been the case since the eighties. Among them a Dutch trio was recorded with metal flute, mandolin and guitar. It looks like they were appreciated as they were given three tracks on this album. Their name King's Galliard sounds quite English to me but they probably played other types of music as well. Two Breton musicians were also recorded on bombarde and scottish bagpipe : Daniel Corcuff and Alan Kloatr respectively. Kloatr was already quite famous as an uilleann piper and flute player. He was a member of Alan Stivell's band. He died in 2018. Here they played a ''gavottenn'' which ends abruptely followed by a Breton march.
It is difficult to know how or where all these musicians were recorded; I'd say in studio, not on stage.
Special mention to Joe Harris on A5 who won the lilting competition.
The work on the titles is very poor with lots of mistakes or approximations; for example on B3 McKernes reel is McKenna's reel; on B9 Jackie Daly's Fancy is in fact the four-part jig the Gold Ring. The title itself is wrong for it should be Fleadh Cheoil (na hÉireann).
Nevertheless there are some good moments especially if you like Irish trad music a lot. 

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Vielles et cornemuses en Europe

 

VIELLES A ROUE ET CORNEMUSES EN EUROPE

HURDY GURDIES AND BAGPIPES IN EUROPE

Alpha, 1975, 34 5016-17

When the folk revival started in Western Europe, in Britain in the sixties and in France, Belgium and Italy mainly in the seventies American music was the trigger that launched it. But at the same time young people were interested in their own tradtions if any and hurdy gurdies and bagpipes because they were both exotic in a way and within reach in certain areas attracted more and more players.
This double album is a good example of what was at work in the early seventies. It was recorded on the occasion of the European reunion of hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe players at Nederokkerzeel  in Belgium. It was a good way to understand the richness of these hurdy-gurdy and bagpipe traditions in Europe. Musicians from Sweden, France, Belgium, Czechoslovaquia and Italy (Sicily) took part in the event.
Some of them (if not all) played a very important role in the preservation or the revival of different instruments. The case of Charles Alexandre is interesting : he was from Brittany but worked and lived most of his life in what is called ''la montagne noire'' (the black mountain) between the French departments Aude and Tarn north of Carcassonne. There between 1965 and 1975 he worked as a scholar and collector on the local bagpipe called ''bodega''  or ''craba''. He was in fact the first one to bring the instrument out of oblivion. Here he plays the bodega and the cabrette à bouche from Auvergne. After him associations and individuals started to make bagpipes, collect tunes and teach the local repertoire.
Note that Irish, Scottish or Breton pipers were not part of the event.
Alpha was a label based in Brussels. I suppose it has disappeared since. 

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(disque 1)

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(disque 2)