TRIO KRAS

 

TRIO KRAS/LIVE FOLK MUSIC

LJUDSKI PLESI IZ SEVERNE ISTRE
POPULAR MUSIC FROM NORTHERN ISTRIA

Druga Godba, 1989, DG 006

Another rare tape from the folk revival in Istria (see the post on the 15th of July) with the Trio Kras. Ottavio Štokovac Rapatočki plays the fiddle, Dario Marušić plays the acompanying fiddle and Umberto Pucer Berto Macul plays the bass. Istria is now divided between Slovenia and Croatia. The area considered here is in Slovenia around the city of Grožnjan/Grisignana. Istria had been nevertheless  under strong Venetian influence politically and culturally for centuries. Like all border zones the population is quite mixed as the names of the musicians here show. The titles of the tunes are mixed as well. The fiddle is the main instrument in duet with at least one bass like in Val Resia. Dario Marušić is a well known revivalist both in Italy and in Istria. This tape is made of live and studio recordings. The tracks B7 and B8 are one track (16).
Presentation text in Slovenian, Italian and English. 

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CHARANGO CUZQUEÑO

 CHARANGO CUZQUEÑO
JULIO BENAVENTE DIAZ

Pérou L'aventure du monde par les sons
Otros sonidos para descubrir el mundo

GREM, 1985, G1504

CHARANGO FROM CUZCO/JULIO BENAVENTE DIAZ
Peru Different sounds to discover the world

Julio Benavente Diaz was a well-known charango player from Cuzco recorded by Xavier Bellenger in Cuzco. Diaz sings as well in Quechua and is joined by guitar players Raul Borquez and Daniel Dickez and singer Isabel Vargas Diaz. If you are fan of this kind of Peruvian traditional music this album is a must with the great talent displayed by Diaz and his lovely Cuzquean style.
This LP is perhaps less known than the other one issued by Ocora Radio France and available on CD. The charango is well spread now from the center of Peru to Northern Argentina but was originally a creation by  Peuvian people probably as soon as the 17th century. It's a brillant adaptation of the Spanish vihuela brought by the Spanish colonists after the conquest in 1532. The notes in the album give some information about it and the tunes.
X. Bellenger was a very good ethnomusicologist (he died in 2020) who produced several nice CDs on Peruvian musical traditions. This album is part of a series ''Musical Cultures''. The label GREM seems to have disappeared and was a very interesting one focused on extra-european cultures. 

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Dutar melodies

 MELODIES ON DUTAR/DUTAR MELODIES

from the musical  heritage of the Uzbek people

ДУТОР НАВОЛАРИ

Ӯзбек халки музика меросидан

Melodiya, 1983, M30-44639-40

This monophonic LP is a didactic recording the kind of album Melodiya used to produced about certain musical traditions in Central Asia. It's like a lecture with somebody reading a text (here in Uzbek only) illustrated by musical parts. Seven dutar players including one female player are featured here with recordings made previously between 1956 and 1982 hence the bad sound quality of some of these tracks. I had to make 18 tracks myself out of the two sides in order to separate the oral presentation from the music so that you can skip the text unless you understand Uzbek. The text on the cover is in Russian though which I suppose is a sort of summary of what is read.
There are no titles on the cover but they are sometimes mentionned by the reader. The names of the players are listed on each side. I tried to follow the names of each player in order to identify the musical tracks but I'm not sure about what I'm able to hear so if you know better you are welcome !

If you don't know it, the dutar has only two strings (from Persian dotar = 2 strings), one for the melody the other one for the drone which can change at times according to the melody. It might seem dry and difficult to listen to but it is an exciting and highly rich music as is the whole Uzbek-Tajik musical culture. 

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John McKenna

 JOHN McKENNA/HIS ORIGINAL RECORDINGS

The John McKenna Traditional Society, no date

John McKenna (1880-1947) is considered as the first Irish traditional flute player to have established the concert flute in the 20th century. He was as famous as Michael Coleman and he came from a flute-fiddle area ie Co. Leitrim and he emigrated to the USA in 1911.
Here we have 18 sides of 78rpm recorded between 1921 and 1937 made for different labels such as Columbia, Decca or Gennett. These sides were remastered by Harry Bradshaw a man of great importance in the preservation of old recordings. The notes are made up partly of interviews with several people who knew McKenna and partly of biographical information by Jackie Small.
Other musicians played along with him : Michael Gaffney on banjo, James Morrison on fiddle, Barney Conlon on fiddle and Eddie Meehan on flute, all hailing from Co. Sligo, Leitrim or Roscommon. All the sets are backed by a piano as it was the custom at the time.
Needless to say that the repertoire is entirely ''local'' so if you are a fan of that part of Ireland you must know about this tape. Great music by a great player. 

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TOMMY PEOPLES

 

TOMMY PEOPLES

AN EXCITING SESSION WITH ONE OF IRELAND'S
LEADING TRADITIONAL FIDDLERS

Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, 1976, CL 13

Tommy Peoples (1948-2018) was one of the most respected musicians in Ireland and abroad for his style, his quality of playing and his love for Irish music. All his LP albums have been reissued on CD except for this one that was his first LP recorded in public between October 1974 and January 1976 in Dublin. He was joined on some tracks by the discret guitar player Finian de Brun.
This album is really exciting and we can fully appreciate his style mixing some Donegal fiddling with a personal approach to Irish music.
Another LP (reissued on CD) he made with Matt Molloy and Paul Brady was so outstanding that it is still influential with Irish music lovers in Ireland and beyond. For more information about his career you can see this site https://www.tommypeoples.ie/biography/

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GODCI IZ RESIJE

 GODCI IZ RESIJE

GRUPPO FOLKLORISTICO VAL RESIA

LIVE FOLK MUSIC 

Druga Godba, 1988, DG 005

The Val Resia is a valley in Italy at the Italian/Slovenian border and inhabited by people speaking an old Slovenian dialect. It is part of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.
The fiddle (citira) and the bass (bunkula) are still used by traditional musicians for dance music while the accordion replaced them in other places of that province. This music is rarely recorded and this tape is a good example of the revival in action there.  Silvio Buttolo ''Pala'' plays fiddle and sings as Elio Micelle ''Klit'' while Antonio Buttolo ''Pala'' plays the bunkula a kind of bass the size of a cello with 3 strings. The word ''folkloristico'' could lead us to think of a band with dancers in costume etc... Although the picture on the cover shows that these 3 musicians wore a costume during that concert, their music is as closed to the tradition as can be.
I thank a friend of mine, Yves, a Frenchman who lives in Northern Italy for this tape quite rare I believe.
The brief notes are in English, Italian and Slovenian. Only the English bit is available here.

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TATAVLA

 TATAVLA / ΤΑΤΑΥΛΑ

Olympic, 1969, BL 1026

The  Greek ''sub-title'' on the cover means : dances and music from the famous Constantinopolitan neighborhood with laterna, accordion and folk orchestras. 

Constantinople/Istanbul has kept some of its Greek inhabitants since the fall in 1453 to the Ottomans until now. I don't know how many Sambuliots from Greek extraction still live there, probably a few compared to the numbers estimated in the 19th century (20 000) when this area was known as a Greek-Armenian neighborhood. I believe a good part of the community left the city in the 1950's after pressure and harassment from the Turkish government. Anyway, it was a great place for Greek culture and very important for the Greeks living in the country who came to Constantinople for economical reasons. The Greek text of this album compares Tatavla to the Piraeus near Athens for is role of cultural and economical pole. The Turkish name for the area is Kurtuluş (meaning ''liberation'').

This album is entirely instrumental with a duet accordion and a plucked strings instrument I don't identify (a mandolin or a baglama ?), violin in Oriental style, electrified bouzouki. To me the tracks A5 and B2 are the best with some laterna playing echoing the atmosphere of Tatavlian streets where this mechanical piano was very much appreciated around 1900.  This tradition still exists in Istanbul with Turkish-Greek repertoire and in Athens. Track B6 is a hot tsifteteli with clarinet, violin, qanun solos.
The duet with the chromatic accordion reminds me of Klezmer music at times and the repertoire sounds a bit Romanian. Maybe the influence of Askenazi Jews fleeing the pogroms in Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19th century who choosed to go to Istanbul rather than migrating to Western Europe. 
A bit more information about the composers and musicians on https://www.discogs.com/Various-%CE%A4%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%8D%CE%BB%CE%B1/release/8340364

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MUSIQUES POPULAIRES DU PEROU

 MUSIQUES POPULAIRES DU PEROU CENTRE ET SUD

Documents sonores inédits recueillis et enregistrés au Pérou par David Rothstein

Rothstein, 1974, DR 78 06 01

FOLK MUSIC FROM PERU (CENTRE AND SOUTH)

Unpublished audio documents collected and recorded in Peru by D. Rothstein

David Rothstein was a Frenchman who travelled in Peru  between July and September 1974. He produced this album himself as well as the distribution. This is a recording in the field type of album in order to present the ''real'' music of Peru played by ordinary people young and old. The information are minimal about those people. Some tracks are more interesting like track A3 with a song in quechua and a ''pampa piano'' which is a harmonium with bellows operated by the musician's feet or the tracks with some students  of the university of Ayacucho. The tracks with the peruvian harp are nice too.

My first real instrument was the kena at the end of the 60's and I liked this kind of album as well as those made by famous bands (Los Incas, Los Calchakis ...). So this blog is a bit like a trip to memory lane for me.

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