Musiques classiques & populaires d'Afghanistan

 

MUSIQUES CLASSIQUES & POPULAIRES D'AFGHANISTAN

anthologie de la musique des peuples

CLASSICAL & FOLK MUSICS  OF AFGHANISTAN

 anthology of the peoples' music

AMP, 1981, AMP 2901 

 This excellent album is the work of Bernard Dupaigne who worked for the Musée de l'Homme, Paris. The principal instruments played in Afghanistan are displayed here : tanbur, rebab, ghijak, harmonium, delroba etc... During four successive trips Dupaigne visited different parts of the country but all located in Northern Afghanistan : Sar-i Pul, Mazar-i Sharif, Andkhôy, Herat, Tashqurgan, Aqcha, Saltuk. The ethnic groups are Tajik, Uzbek, Aymaq, Hazara and of course Pashtoon. The recordings were made before the Soviet invasion between 1971 and 1973.
The music here is mostly of the folk kind the classical aspect is in fact in some lyrics as it is explained in the sleeve notes in French and English.

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Korean social and folk music

 

KOREAN SOCIAL AND FOLK MUSIC

recorded by John Levy

Lyrichord,  1969, LLST 7211

John Levy (1910-1976) was a British philosopher as well as a recording engineer; he travelled mainly in Europe and Asia and became a connoisseur of some Asian musical traditions like Korean or Tibetan ones.
His massive personal collection of recordings is now housed at the School of Scottish Studies. All the LPs issued by Levy are well documented with a good deal of explanations. This album is one of them.
We can listen to three instrumental sanjo with komungo, ajaeng and hojok. The other tracks feature one male singer and three female singers. There is a very short extract of p'ansori while the other three songs are complete. All tracks have puk or changgo backing. Track A2 is a fantastic ajaeng solo by Han Ilsup. The whole album is outstanding.
Lyrichord is an American label which started in 1950 dealing with traditional and modern world music along with early and classical music. On the central sticker of the album is written : ''exceptional LP records for the discerning listener''. Truly I was never disappointed by any of that label's productions.

This LP has not been reissued as a CD but is available on Lyrichord site for downloading. So I'd mention this album only as a reminder.

Pakistan

 

This tape was brought back from Pakistan by a friend who like me doesn't read Arabic nor Urdu.

This is a typical case of wondering when absolutely no information is available from the cover or sleeve but local languages. However it was a good pick; the music on this tape is nice: one male singer with dotar and some drumming with a lot of reverberation typical of that kind of local productions. There are 5 tracks altogether.

Thanks to ''qp'' I know now that the singer's name is Rehmat Ali who sings in the language spoken around Chitral which lies near the Afghan border in Northern Pakistan. Difficult to know whether the singer is also the dotar player. According to ''qp'' the tape might have been recorded, produced or sold in Gilgit which is in Kashmir in the zone controled by Pakistan.

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Slovenia-Notranjska

 LJUDSKI PEVCI IN GODCI Z NOTRANJSKE

FOLK SINGERS AND MUSICIANS OF THE
NOTRANJSKA REGION

LIVE FOLK MUSIC

Druga Godba, 1990, DG 009

Another tape from that interesting Slovenian label Druga Godba about folk traditions from the area called Notranjska (that I couldn't place on a map). Singers, story tellers and musicians were invited in Ljubljana in June 1990 to perform on stage. Singing seems to be the main way of expression there with the four persons invited who all sing. Two of them are also musicians. Here the instruments in use show a clear Austrian influence through the practice of the zither mainly to support singing and the accordion called harmonika with a repertoire of polkas and waltzes.
The booklet in English is detailed enough and gives us a picture of the country and its inhabitants. That kind of recording is very important for those who maintained a tradition and for those who want to know about the cultural diversity that is still alive in some parts of the world. 

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Irish Phonograph

 

THE IRISH PHONOGRAPH VOLUME 1

Irish Traditional Music from EMI 78s

RTE EMI, 1986, GAE 1003

This LP was published to mark the 50th anniversary of EMI's in Dublin in 1936. The notes written by Nicholas Carolan head of the Irish Traditional Music Archive are quite detailed about that record company'role in Ireland. The selection here is quite large with some examples of ''popular'' music with the Dublin Metropolitan Garda Ceili Band or the button accordion player Terry Lane but most of the tracks feature traditional musicians like Neil O'Boyle, Leo Rowsome or Sean Maguire. There are also small formations such as the Lough Gill Quartet, the excellent Gardiner's Sligo Traditional Trio and ceili bands like the Tulla C.B. or the Austin Stack C.B.  All the names of the musicians are in the sleeve notes. The recordings were made between 1937 and 1956. It seems that volume 2 never existed as far as I know.

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U Ba Than

 

U BA THAN

This is a tape that a friend of mine brought back from Burma maybe in the early nineties. The only thing I know is the musician's name a major saung player or Burmese harp. It seems that he recorded mostly in the sixties and seventies and was a leading artist who influenced all the saung players of the younger generation. He tried to gather all the corpus of the traditional music in Burma and then hand it down.
The saung is an old instrument which would go back to the eighth century.
There are four tracks per side : on side A tunes are put together by two (hence two tracks) while on side B the four tunes are on one track. I found on line another tape with the same cover but a different content. So this might be part of a series.
U Ba Than is dead now but I don't know when.

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Muhammad Sabsabi

 

CITHARE CLASSIQUE / MUHAMMAD SABSABI

LIBAN / QANUN

Arabesques 2

Emi-Pathé,  1974, 2C066-95158

This LP is part of a collection  called ''Arabesques'' of five albums at the time of publication : three were dedicated to the lute ud, one to the flute ney and this one (number 2) dedicated to the zither qanun. More were issued afterwards (https://www.discogs.com/de/label/237516-Arabesques). The man behind this wonderful series was the doctor Jean-Claude Chabrier who was a doctor of medicine but also lecturer in Arabic and Islamic musics at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris III. He speaks different languages and travelled extensively in the Near and Middle East during the sixties and seventies. He had a programme on the French national radio around 1977-1981. The programme was called ''extraeuropean music'' and other people like Jacques Brunet presented these musics from Indonesia, Turkey or Burma for 30 minutes every week. Chabrier used his LPs in that programme as well as recordings that weren't published. The man had a great way of talking about global history mixed with personal anecdotes. His knowledge about Oriental music and cutlure and his will to  share this culture with non-connoisseurs are very valuable.

He recorded Muhammad Sabsabi (his name is mispelled on the cover) in the studios of the Lebanese Radio-Television in September 1972 and September 1973. The important aspect of this series is that there are information about the musical Arabic traditions in general, the modes and the art of taqsim, the instrument (here the qanun), the artist and finally the place of Lebanon in Arabic music. All in French though. The five tracks were analyzed by Muhammad Khemakhem a teacher of ud at the Conservatory of Sfax (Tunisia) who worked also at Paris-Sorbonne. 
M. Sabsabi, a brillant musician, was known for having female students and his respect for tradition. 

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Korean folk dance songs 1,2,3

 

KOREAN  FOLK DANCE SONGS

Shinsegye Sound Ind. Co. Ltd, no date, sc 064/65/66

Another series of three tapes I got thanks to a friend of mine around 1985. This is instrumental music with  the usual instruments played in Korea : gayageum, geomungo, haegum, daegum, piri, and all sorts of percussions; we can also hear the yanggeum rarely in use which derives from the Chinese cymbalum yangqin. There are plenty of albums like that on CDs but maybe the connoisseurs might discover some new tunes ?

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Aki dudás akar lenni …

AKI DUDÁS AKAR LENNI …

HE WHO WANTS TO BE A PIPER ....

Hungarian Folk Music

Hungaroton, 1982, SLPX 18070

The great label Hungaroton issued a lot of LPs about traditional and revival music in Hungary up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then other record companies appeared but Hungaroton is still on the run.
Here we have a compilation of some of the Hungarian bands of the time. Gereben has 5 tracks and Unikum has 2 tracks. We can listen also to Éva Fábián at the beginning of her career as well as the ensemble Kapos. ''Gypsies'' are also part of the programme with the singer Mihály Váradi who founded the well known group Kali Jag in 1978 and the tambura ensemble Rom Som.
The title of this LP is the beginning of a Hungarian proverb which served as a name for a Hungarian Television programme broadcasted in 1979. The proverb goes as ''aki dudás akar lenni pokolra kell annak menni'' ''he who wants to be a piper should go to hell'' something that was said about pipers and their music in many places in Europe.
Short presentation of the artists in Hungarian and English

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