Musique Gouro de Côte d'Ivoire

 

MUSIQUE GOURO de CÔTE D'IVOIRE

Anthologie de la musique populaire

GOURO MUSIC FROM THE IVORY COAST 

International folk music council

Ocora, ?, OCR 48

Here is the 300th post on this blog; I still have time to wish you  the best year 2025 possible and to thank you for following this blog.

This is another LP that is not part of Ocora's catalogue. These field recordings were made in December 1968 and January 1969 by Michel Vuylsteke. The Gouro are located in a region of forest and savannah. As usual the music and the population are  described so I won't say much except that this music is rare enough and of great quality. Like almost everywhere in Africa, every moment of social life is a moment for music-making (encouraging farmers, funeral songs, grinding grain, ...)
Text in English (and French)

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Musiques du Pays Lobi

 

MUSIQUES DU PAYS LOBI

MUSIC FROM THE LOBI COUNTRY 

Disques OCORA/ORTF,  1970, OCR 51

This is another album that didn't make it to the present Ocora catalogue. Charles Duvelle (1937-2017) recorded these musics in the field in 1961 in what was called at the time Upper Volta now Burkina Faso.
Side A focuses on Lobi music with three tracks of elong xylophone and singing plus one track with women singing. Side B presents some Gan, Dagari and Birifor music.
As usual the notes are informative enough to understand what's happening.
A very nice album with some exciting and powerful  music on the xylophone well recorded.
Text in English (and French). 

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Ethiopia II : Cushites

 

 

ETHIOPIA II - CUSHITES

AN ANTHOLOGY OF AFRICAN MUSIC / 5
Edited for the International Music Council by the International Institute for
Comparative Music Studies and Documentation 

Musicaphon Bärenreiter/Unesco Collection, 1970, BM 30 L 2005

 

 This is the second album of the Anthology of African Music dedicated to Ethiopia. These are field recordings also made by Jean Jenkins in 1965. This time she focused on black tribes in South-West Ethiopia near the Kenyan border in the provinces of Gomu-Gofa and Sidamo. This part of Ethiopia is the home of Cushitic-speaking peoples a linguistic family  but whose different variants are sometimes far removed from one another. This and the nature of terrain (no real roads, rivers impossible to cross after rain, mountains...) helped the tribes to preserve specific character especially in music. The people she visited were the Gidole, Konso, Burji, Kaffa, Dorze, Sidamo, Soddu, Kumama and Darassa. Most of the tracks are about singing (in group or individual); the instruments we can hear are horns, flutes ensembles (one man one note), and the indigenous lyre (called krar in Amharic).

Since the sixties other musicologists worked on these populations notably Bernard Lortat-Jacob who spent time with the Dorze and their mighty polyphonic singing. He died last summer in July.  You can listen to some of his unpublished recordings here :
https://archives.crem-cnrs.fr/archives/collections/CNRSMH_I_1975_004/

Texts in English (French and German).
This being the first post in 2025 let me wish you all the best to you.

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