07-05-2020 > WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected ETHNiC FUSiON tracks 1981-1970

g l o b a l  m u s i c a l  v i l l a g e

Richard Horowitz

07-05-2020 > WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected ETHNiC FUSiON tracks 1981-1970 # WmW:   Richard Horowitz, Amara Toure, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Silvio Rodríguez, Hailu Mergia and The Walias, Ornella Vanoni, Toquinho, Vinicius de Moraes, Los Jaivas, Planxty, Fela Kuti, Lafayette Afro Rock Band, Steeleye Span, Jorge Ben and Trio Mocotó

M  U  S  I  C / WmW

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1981-1970

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Richard Horowitz specializes in music from the Middle East. From 1968 to 1979, Horowitz lived in Paris and Morocco, where he studied music, Arabic, French, and Oriental philosophy while performing throughout Europe and Morocco.
Richard Horowitz
Eros Never Stops Dreaming 5:17
Queen of Saba 3:30
from Eros in Arabia 1981
On his 1981 debut album, the composer and percussionist channels the Fourth World spirit of his collaborator Jon Hassell, to spellbinding effect.
...A Moroccan frame drum echoes and distorts on “Eros Never Stops Dreaming.” The processed ney recalls the odd sanza songs that Cameroon musician Francis Bebey was crafting around the same time, while the churning bass figure suggests the cavernous interiors of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo. ..
...From there, the album moves into coarser terrain, taking sandpaper to the magical spells of the opening tracks. The eddying voices and chants of “Queen of Saba” sound like something lifted from a Smithsonian Folkways field recording...
...Fittingly, for an album whose title suggests the Greek god of love crossing the Mediterranean Sea to ancient Arabia, Horowitz’s music seeks a space in between and finds something magical there.

Touré’s 30 year-long career began in the late 1950s in Dakar as part of the Senegalese collective known as Le Star Band de Dakar. Touré and the band enjoyed rapid success and became prominent figures in Senegal’s booming, Cuban-influenced son montuno and pachanga scenes in the 60s. The singer-percussionist later went on to form his own band Black and White based out of Cameroon, where he further refined his unique take on Cuban music by fusing spirited, West African mandingue sounds…
Amara Toure
Amara Touré Et L'Orchestre Black & White
N'Niyo 5:59
Lamento Cubano 5:45
from Amara Toure (1973 - 1980) (Analog Africa No. 18)
The enigmatic Amara Touré from Guinée Conakry finally getting a well deserved compilation showcasing all of the 10 songs ever released between 1973 and 1980. Cuban influenced music of a different kind featuring amazing spaced-out guitar works!!

"Latin music, is it really foreign to us Africans? I don't think so. Listen to the drums, to the rhythm. It all seems very close to us - it feels like it’s our own culture”, declared enigmatic singer Amara Touré... 

Born in Jamaica, based in England, he is a talented reggae singer, writer, and poet; originator of the "dub poetry" style.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
Want Fi Goh Rave 4:21
Sonny's Lettah (Anti-Sus Poem) 3:53
Forces of Viktry 4:53
from Forces of Victory 1979
If Dread Beat An' Blood brought Johnson and initial flush of notoriety, then Forces of Victory was the record that cemented his growing reputation as a major talent. Bovell and the Dub Band swing hard on this set, especially on the album's opening track "Want Fi Goh Rave." This contains some of Johnson's most memorable songs/poems, such as the heartfelt prison saga "Sonny's Lettah" and the confrontational "Fite Dem Back," which he delivers in his trademark sing-song Jamaican patois. Dramatic and intense to the point of claustrophobia, Forces of Victory is not simply one of the most important reggae records of its time, it's one of the most important reggae records ever recorded.
Magnificent, top 10 all-time reggae album, and selected by David Bowie in his top 25 "confessions of a vinyl junkie". Jamaica-born LKJ was a poet, journalist and (political) activist before starting fronting a band in London...

02-04-2020 > WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected ETHNiC FUSiON tracks 1988-1977 # WmW

02-04-2020  > WORLD:MUSiC:MiX # 33 selected ETHNiC FUSiON tracks 1988-1977 # WmW:   Los Lobos, Pata Negra, Issa Juma And Super Wanyika Stars, Dead Can Dance, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Richard Thompson, Lô Borges, Richard Horowitz, Amara Toure, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Silvio Rodríguez, Hailu Mergia and The Walias

M  U  S  I  C / WmW

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LISTEN THE PLAYLIST ON DEEZER.COM

1988-1977

East L.A. barrio band that draws gracefully from rock, Tex-Mex, country, folk, R&B, blues, and traditional Spanish and Mexican music.
Los Lobos
Estoy Sentado Aquí (Cesar Rosas) 2:28
La Pistola y el Corazón (David Hidalgo / Louie Pérez) 3:27
from La pistola y el corazón 1988
Los Lobos used the commercial breakthrough represented by La Bamba to turn to their first love, Mexican folk music, and recorded this excellent collection of norteño songs. If this is a band that seems to do too many things well, in a sense they are at their best when they narrow their focus, and they are certainly masters of their style here.

Pata Negra (literally, Black Leg, which is the best cut of ham in Spain) was formed in the 1980s by brothers Raimundo and Rafael Amador. Combining flamenco with amplified blues guitar, they scored their first hit with the EP Guitarras Callajeras and then again with Blues de la Frontera. The band has broken up and regrouped several times following musical differences between Raimundo and Rafael.
Pata Negra
Bodas de Sangre (Rafael Amador / Federico García Lorca) 3:04
Pasa la Vida (Romero San Juan / Garrido Lopez) 3:51
Blues de la Frontera (Rafael Amador / Raimundo Amador) 4:13
from Blues de la frontera 1987
Flamenco is both a romantic, alluring music and a dynamic, aggressive one, particularly when played and sung by masters of the idiom. Rafael and Raimundo Amador are contemporary players who understand this dualism, and illuminated it through all nine selections. Raimundo Amador provided punch on electric and flamenco guitar and bass, while Rafael sang with both lightness and spark and answered his brother's flashy chords and passages with equally hot, sensual lines and phrases.

Adamu and Abbu are the guitarists featured on most of the tracks on World Defeats the Grandfathers, a compilation of recordings made between 1982 and 1986 by Issa Juma, a Tanzania-born vocalist and bandleader who became a star in Kenya. Juma, a key figure in the creation of Kenyan Swahili rumba, scored numerous hits with the band Les Wanyika. After leaving the band in the early 80s, he led a number of successful ensembles, all with some variation of Wanyika in their names - Wanyika Stars, Super Wanyika Stars, Waanyika, Wanyika Super Les Les.
Whatever the band name, Issa Juma stretched the boundaries of Swahili rumba, adding Congolese flavor and elements of Kenyan benga to the mix. Still, the tracks collected on this delightfully, if puzzlingly titled collection, don't vary greatly in format or style, despite having been recorded in five different sessions with varying personnel. The sound is rhythmically supple, guitar-driven, and relaxed; every track runs eight to nine minutes, giving the players generous (and sometimes excessive) space to stretch out.
Issa Juma And Super Wanyika Stars
Barua [The Letter] 8:34
Mwanaidi 8:51
from World Defeats the Grandfathers / Swinging Swahili Rumba 1982 - 1986
2010 release. Wanyika is Swahili for "wild ones," and it's a fitting moniker for the various related Wanyika bands that dominated the nightclubs, recording studios and radio waves of Nairobi, Kenya, from the early 1970s into the 90s. The Wanyika bands defined Swahili rumba, the dance music popular throughout East Africa: swinging rhythms, ringing electric guitars and strong, earthy vocals. Issa Juma was one of the founders of the Wanyika dynasty and, with his powerful baritone and rhythmic phrasing, the most distinctive of its singers. (His voice has been likened to that of the Jamaican reggae singer Toots Hibbert of Toots & the Maytals.) A prominent member of Simba Wanyika and then Les Wanyika, Juma formed his own Super Wanyika Stars in the early '80s and produced hit after hit until an untimely stroke ended his career in 1988. World Defeats the Grandfathers collects the biggest and best of these hits in one rollicking CD that brings the sound of "the wild ones" to America for the first time.

Dead Can Dance combine elements of European folk music, particularly music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with ambient pop and worldbeat flourishes.
Dead Can Dance
De Profundis (Out of the Depths of Sorrow) (Dead Can Dance) 3:58
Mesmerism (Dead Can Dance) 3:52
Circumradiant Dawn (Dead Can Dance) 3:17
from Spleen And Ideal 1985
With this amazing album, Dead Can Dance fully took the plunge into the heady mix of musical traditions that would come to define its sound and style for the remainder of its career. The straightforward goth affectations are exchanged for a sonic palette and range of imagination. Calling it "haunting" and "atmospheric" barely scratches even the initial surface of the album's power. The common identification of the duo with a consciously medieval European sound starts here -- quite understandable, when one considers the mystic titles of songs, references to Latin, choirs, and other touches that make the album sound like it was recorded in an immense cathedral.