g l o b a l m u s i c a l v i l l a g e
NEKEMTENEMMUTOGATOL! / CAN'T MAKE ME! • WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected GLOBAL MUSiC tracks 2002-1992 # WmW 2h 34m: Besh o Drom, Oliver Mtukudzi, Cristina Branco, Ibrahim Ferrer, Dónal Lunny, The Klezmatics, Johnny Clegg & Juluka, Andy Palacio, Sheila Chandra, Transglobal Underground, Ofra Haza
M U S I C / WmW 2h 34m
if you want excitement PRESS SHUFFLE!
Besh o DroM was formed in 1999 in Budapest, Hungary. This Hungarian band combines Hungarian folk elements with Balkan music. The band does not confine itself to the Balkan category, but draws its musical inspiration from Jewish, Afghan, Albanian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Armenian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Greek tunes, using folk and electronic instrumentals.Nekemtenemmutogatol Oro (Besh O Drom / Traditional) 5:30
Csángó Menyhárt (Traditional) 2:38
Manócsávó (Besh O Drom / Traditional) 4:41
Hungary's Besh o Drom is, to put it mildly, all over the map. They're a gypsy band who breaks through many of the normal barriers associated with that style, while still rooted in their heritage... For anyone just coming to gypsy music, this probably isn't the place to start. But if you've already investigated it and you want to hear what a new generation is doing, you won't find better than this.
A musical and cultural icon in his native Zimbabwe, Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi's songs reflected the daily life and struggles of his homeland by blending together a number of South African music traditions including mbira, mbaqanga, jit, and the traditional drumming styles of the Korekore to create a distinctive style that his fans affectionately dubbed "Tuku music."Wasakara (Oliver Mtukudzi) 7:28
Pahukama (Oliver Mtukudzi) 4:47
Wenge Mambo (Oliver Mtukudzi) 5:07
An inventive guitarist and passionate singer, Mtukudzi was also an astonishingly prolific recording artist, releasing 67 albums during his four-decade career. Having established himself in the late '70s, his popularity soared after Zimbabwe won its independence in 1980 and in the years that followed, he released a string of successful albums and branched out into acting as well, starring in his country's first two nationally made films, Jit (1990) and Neria (1992)...
By rights, Cristina Branco shouldn't sing the urban Portuguese song form called fado. The genre, whose name translates as 'fate,' has its history in Lisbon, a enigmatic, poetic, working-class style about accepting the lot life and love has dealt. But Branco, who grew up in rural Almeirim, Portugal, has established herself as one of the country's foremost fadistas, with a growing international reputation. Born in 1972, she grew up listening to blues, jazz, and music from around the globe...Fado Perdicao 2:46
Magoa (Fernando Pessoa) 3:56
Abandono 3:14
Cristina Branco is at the modern forefront of the Portuguese fado genre, a kind of national variation on the blues, although it has more in common with Greek rembetika. The lyrics are poetry, the music soft. But it's all about the signing, putting across the image, and emtion of the song, which is why Branco stands out so much. Her voice has a tenderness that could move easily from the intimate to the sweeping over a single phrase, all the while making the listener she's singing only to him. The scaled-down accompaniment helps that feeling. By its very nature, the form is quite sensual, and Branco accentuates that with her slightly breathy singing. But there's also a clarity to her, almost a translucence, which illuminates the words. By choice she uses modern lyricists, poets really, with the melodies coming from guitarist Custodio Castelo... Beautiful, sometimes almost erotic, this is music for the heart.
With the release of the Grammy-winning album Buena Vista Social Club and an acclaimed documentary of the same name, Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer vaulted from obscurity and poverty to international fame in the twilight of his life. He was born February 20, 1927, when his mother went into labor during a dance in the Cuban village of San Luis...Bruca Maniguá (Arsenio Rodríguez) 4:44
Marieta (Faustino Oramas (5:55)
Mami Me Gustó (Arsenio Rodríguez) 5:04
When the Buena Vista Social Club album was released to great acclaim in 1997, it revived the careers of quite a few incredibly talented aging Cuban musicians. Like Ibrahim Ferrer, most of those musicians (who had been legendary in the '40s through the '70s) hadn't been performing professionally in decades. With the success of the Buena Vista Social Club, everything changed; they toured the globe, and plans for follow-up albums followed. Ibrahim Ferrer's was the second of what became a line of Buena Vista releases, all hoping to cash in on the success of the first. Ferrer's album is pleasant, the kind of album you could put on during brunch on a sunny morning. The album features many classic Cuban compositions. Original arrangers, musicians, and bandleaders were involved whenever possible. One standout is "Mami Me Gusto," a rolling upbeat tune by the legendary Cuban composer/bandleader Arsenio Rodriguez. On that tune Ferrer is lively and loose, and he is joined by Rodriguez's original pianist, the masterful Ruben Gonzales...
Guitar and bouzouki player Dónal Lunny is one of the pioneers of the Irish folk music revival. His first group, he told me, "was a very close imitation of The Clancy Brothers, [who] used to go to sessions every weekend in a pub called Pat Downing's in Prosperous... I'm sure I was dreadful at the beginning. It improved as time went on, and I got involved in different groups in Dublin." One of those groups, Emmet Spiceland, also included Mick Moloney, now a champion of American-Irish music... Spanish Point (Dónal Lunny / Declan Masterson) 4:08
Glentown: Miss Monaghans/The Man of the House/The Green Fields of Glentown/The Mountain Lark (Tommy Peoples / Traditional) 5:07
The Mouseskin Shoe and Dancing in Allihies (Nollaig Casey) 3:51
Dónal Lunny isn't a legendary figure in Irish music for nothing. He helped revolutionize it with the Bothy Band, in addition to his own work and guesting on other peoples' albums. So when he put a band together, it was bound to be interesting. With people like Nollaig Casey and John McSherry he had the cream of the crop, and a subtle electric rhythm section. Add in guests like Sharon Shannon, Eddi Reader, and the Ní Dhomnaill sisters, and you have a wealth of talent... but there's little doubt that the quality of the musicianship and arrangements marks a standard everyone else now has to measure up to, especially after "The Mouseskin Shoe and Dancing in Allihies."
The Klezmatics take one of the wildest approaches to klezmer, the traditional dance music of the Eastern European Jews. Although their music is heavily influenced by the recordings of Abe Ellstein and Dave Tarras in the 1940s and 1950s, their lyrics comment on a wide variety of political and social issues and have led the group to be labeled "the planet's radical Jewish roots band."...Shprayz Ikh Mir (Traditional) 3:04
Moroccan Game (Frank London) 2:47
Shavarts un Vays (Black and White)
Frank London / Traditional) 4:54
...The Klezmatics' ethos is at once deeply traditional and deeply progressive. Their music is a lively engagement with Jewishness itself, inflecting Eastern European klezmer music with other genres so seamlessly that it seems misleading even to name the other influences (classical, Dixieland, bebop, Middle Eastern folk, modern rock... Their song catalog includes religious traditionals, but it also includes original Hebraic odes to marijuana and homosexuality... While there is plenty of their familiar frenzied spiritual party music, there is also some goregeously evocative minor-key mysticism...
Together with Sipho Mchunu, a Zulu musician who came to Johannesburg in search of work, Johnny Clegg formed South Africa's first multiracial band, Juluka. In the seven years that they were initially together, the band recorded two platinum and five gold albums and became an international success... Kwela Man (Johnny Clegg) 3:47
Work for All 3:58
Two Humans on the Run (Johnny Clegg) 4:42
How wonderful to finally be able to refer to apartheid, South Africa's former policy of brutally enforced racial exclusion and oppression, in the past tense! However, it is important to never forget how it was back then, and this album provides a virtual time capsule of an audacious period during the long, bitter battle for equality. In the '70s, a white, English-born, South Africa-based singer named Johnny Clegg spent several months living among the Zulus, learning their music and dances. When he returned to urban pursuits, he and Sipho Mchuno, a local black musician, had the guts, or inspired insanity, to start an interracial band. They called themselves Juluka (Zulu for "sweat"), and eventually achieved widespread popularity among South African blacks and whites alike. But, even so, their existence was a threat to the status quo and they lived in constant danger of arrest or worse. As their fame grew, they reached audiences throughout the world with their incongruously joyous blend of conscious lyrics, mbaqanga (township jive), traditional Zulu folklore, and hook-laden Western pop. The present compilation of ten infectious tunes gathered from six albums makes it very obvious how this gentle insurrection gained so many adherents. Mchuno eventually left in search of a more traditional sound while Clegg went on to found a later group called Savuka, but together they had fired a well-aimed shot straight into the evil heart of apartheid when it was very dangerous to do so, and lived to tell the tale.
To understand Andy Palacio and his place in the world music community, one must first understand the precarious position of his oft-forgotten Garifuna people. Two slave ships loaded to the gills with captive West Africans sank off the coast of St. Vincent Island in 1635, and when the survivors swam to shore, they were taken in and given refuge by the indigenous Carib peoples who lived there. The displaced Africans and hospitable Caribs lived and worked together, intermarried, and ultimately created a hybrid culture -- the Garifuna...Jammin' 3:35
Nabi 4:33
Roots 4:22
Through work in a Nicaraguan literacy program in the '80s, Palacio became aware of the threat his people's culture faced. As his artistic career developed, Palacio became part of a community of young Garifuna artists and intellectuals, producing modern artistic works that honored their native past. Palacio became the leading voice of the punta rock genre, a style based on Garifuna rhythms that intermingled with other Caribbean dance styles. Over the course of several years Palacio became Belize's most famous living artist, gaining recognition throughout the Caribbean and Europe...
One of the most unusual and successful singers of the '80s and '90s that has attempted to fuse the music of non-Western cultures with Western pop, Sheila Chandra began recording as a teenager in Monsoon. Of Indian ancestry but born and raised in Britain, Chandra took lead vocals in the band, which pursued a sort of new wave-tinged raga rock along the lines of George Harrison's explorations on Beatles tracks like "Love You To."...La Sagesse (Woman, I'm Calling You) (Sheila Chandra / Steve Coe) 4:29
Love, It Is a Killing Thing (Sheila Chandra / Steve Coe) 4:48
Kafi Noir (Sheila Chandra / Steve Coe) 6:45
This is pretty much of a piece with her previous album (Weaving My Ancestors' Voices), continuing her eclectic forays into the forms and feelings of various Western and non-Western genres, and resuming her most avant-garde projects with the a cappella clucking/chanting of "Speaking in Tongues" (parts three and four). It's not a redundant repetition of the territory laid out on Weaving My Ancestor's Voices. It's more an extension of the mood, Chandra delving more deeply into June Tabor-styled British folk vocals in particular.
TransGlobal Underground is a U.K.-based collective fusing as many different kinds of world music as its members can get their hands on. The group's core is composed of vocalist Natacha Atlas (who has recorded with Jah Wobble, Apache Indian, and her own band, Atlas Project), keyboardist Alex Kasiek, drum programmer Man Tu, and founder, bassist, and sampler Count Dubulah. The project grew out of a mutual love for dance, avant-garde, Arabic, and world music and draws on each member's listening tastes and cultural backgrounds...Slowfinger 5:17
La Voix du Sang 6:13
El Hedudd (Alex Kasiek) 7:17
In the aftermath of Transglobal Underground's pioneering blend of electronic dance music and worldbeat, seemingly hundreds of imitators have bled this fusion dry. This doesn't take away from the brilliance of their debut, Dream of 100 Nations, a sometimes dizzying and often exciting melding of hot-footed dance beats, trippy dub, block-rocking hip-hop, and, most importantly, an intelligent and nuanced integration of this Western pop with various Asian and African musical forms. The exotic instrumentation is incorporated carefully into the beats; as often as not, the tablas, ouds, and other unique instruments are used strictly as rhythm... The focus throughout is on
Natacha Atlas' muscular vocals; Atlas has one of the most powerful voices in '90s dance rock, making Dream of 100 Nations a compelling listen even without the worldbeat influences.
Long one of Israel's most popular singers, Ofra Haza broke through to international recognition during the mid-'80s when her traditional music found favor on the U.K. club circuit, its success leading to a series of unlikely pop projects...Kirya (Bezalel Aloni / Ofra Haza / Traditional) 6:11
Innocent (Bezalel Aloni / Ofra Haza) 4:43
Daw da Hiya (Bezalel Aloni / Ofra Haza) 4:55
Kirya heralds a return to the style of her 50 Gates of Wisdom album (and her return to the Shanachie label). Guided by producer Don Was (the B-52's, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan), the album offers a unique contemporary groove and Haza's striking vocals (here in Aramaic, Hebrew, and English). Guests include Lou Reed....
...For 1992's Grammy-nominated Kirya, she teamed with producer Don Was and welcomed guests Iggy Pop and Lou Reed; that same year, Haza also recorded the single "Temple of Love" with British goth rockers the Sisters of Mercy. Despite her success, however, she was silent throughout the middle of the decade, finally resurfacing in 1997 with a self-titled LP issued on her new label, BMG Ariola. Haza died unexpectedly of AIDS-related complications on February 23, 2000.
