Tag Archives: folk music

Sichuan Folk Song

Posted by on July 13, 2018 No comments

18-07-13 LISTN Sichuan Folk Song

The huge west­ern Chi­nese province of Sichuan has its own, dis­tinct his­tory. It con­sists of a broad and fer­tile basin around the city of Cheng­du, ringed by a sparse­ly pop­u­lated wilder­ness of moun­tains, forests and swamps. While this was a cen­ter of ancient non-Han civ­i­liza­tion as ear­ly as the sec­ond mil­le­nnium BC, it grad­u­ally became Sini­fied over the cen­turies, and the city and fer­tile regions are inhab­ited by Han Chi­nese speak­ing a south­west­ern dialect of Man­darin. How­ever, most of the province con­sists of rugged moun­tains, and these are the home of many minor­ity groups, eth­ni­cally and lin­guis­ti­cally not at all Chi­nese. Among them are the Yi, relat­ed to the Burmese, the Qiang, and the Naxi (or Nakhi). The west­ern half of the province is cul­tur­al­ly clos­er to Tibet, many of the minori­ties speak­ing dialects of Tibetan, or close­ly relat­ed lan­guages. All these minori­ties have dis­tinc­tive musi­cal tra­di­tions, and the met­ro­pol­i­tan musi­cal main­stream of Chi­na has drawn from them with the same mix­ing and min­ing process that went on in the devel­op­ment of America’s folk music. The album I have, Sichuan Folk Song and Bal­lad, Vol­ume 2 gives a good sam­ple of this vari­ety. Per­son­ally, the more “folky” the songs are, the more they appeal to me. I par­tic­u­larly like the Naxi song “This Hill is Not As High As That One”.

China’s many eth­nic minori­ties, who com­prise tens of mil­lions of peo­ple, have been hid­den from the world’s view by mil­lennia of obses­sive impe­r­i­al cen­tral­ism and racism. In some cas­es, there are cul­tures of a mil­lion or more peo­ple about whom one can­not find a sin­gle book in a large uni­ver­sity library. Can you imag­ine what it would mean if there was not a sin­gle book in a major library devot­ed to Wales, or the Basques, or to Esto­nia? For­tu­nately, the musi­cal wealth of Sichuan can give us a foot-in-the-door to cel­e­brat­ing a diver­sity that has been kept from our view by ide­ol­ogy and intel­lec­tual laziness.

The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara / North African Groove

Posted by on February 5, 2018 No comments

18-02-05 LISTN The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara North African Groove pic 2

These two albums form a fine intro­duc­tion to a world of music which is now famil­iar to Euro­peans, but still hid­den from most lis­ten­ers in North Amer­ica. The Sahara Desert has often been com­pared to a sea ― blend­ing influ­ences and stim­u­lat­ing the dis­parate cul­tures along its shores. The sailors are the tribes of the desert: the Tuareg, the enig­matic Teda, and the var­i­ous “arab” tribes, such as the Ikoku Nema­di, Bithan, and She­wa (these last all speak vari­eties of Ara­bic incom­pre­hen­si­ble to stan­dard Ara­bic speak­ers, and even to the speak­ers of col­lo­quial Maghribi Ara­bic in Moroc­co or Alge­ria. Cul­tur­ally and bio­log­i­cally, they are of the Sahara, like the Tuareg, not mere­ly trans­planted badawī [ بدوي ] from Arabia.).18-02-05 LISTN The Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara North African Groove pic 1

If you have read Frank Herbert’s Dune, you can get some notion of the Tuareg. The Fre­men tribes in that nov­el were pat­terned on them. They speak lan­guages in the Berber fam­ily, dim­ly relat­ed to Ancient Egypt­ian. “Berbers” refers to the seden­tary peo­ple who inhab­it ancient towns and cities of North Africa (St. Augus­tine was the most famous Berber), but the desert Tuareg are relat­ed to them lin­guis­ti­cally. Noth­ing can real­ly con­vey the stark sever­ity, and the poet­ry of life among the “peo­ple of the blue veil”, but you can get a hint of it from the band Tinari­wen, who aban­doned desert war­fare with the cease­fire at Tim­buktu to start a record­ing career in the late 1990’s. Oth­er Tuareg groups, Chet Féw­er, Kel Tin Lok­i­enne, and the Tar­tit Ensem­ble, are also present on the album. They rep­re­sent tribes far dis­tant from each oth­er. Some of the “Arab” tribes are present, as well. The towns on the shore of the sand are rep­re­sented by a vari­ety of groups and singers (Mal­ouma, Com­pag­nie Jel­louli, Sahraoui Bachir), and there is one singer in the Song­hai lan­guage from Tim­buktu, Seck­ou Maï­ga. The remote Teda of the Tibesti are not rep­re­sented ― a sad lack, because their evoca­tive “call and answer” odes, between female singers and male play­ers of the stringed keleli are haunt­ingly beau­ti­ful. But the Teda have not been drawn into the glob­al com­mu­nity in the way that the Tuareg have sud­denly been, and still remain inaccessible.

All this stuff is much more exot­ic than the Raï music and the Egypt­ian pop music on the Puta­mayo World Music col­lec­tion North African Groove. Dis­cos all over Europe have become filled with Raï’s won­der­ful back-beat-heavy com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tional North African musics with Amer­i­can funk, sal­sa, French cabaret, and every­thing else imag­in­able. Super­stars such as Cheb Mami (singing the delight­ful “Viens Habibi”) and Khaled are rep­re­sented on this album, and it is a good intro­duc­tion to the North African pop scene.

If you lis­ten to these two albums one after the oth­er, you will get a sense of the intri­cacy and his­toric depth of this musi­cal land­scape. It would be like play­ing an archa­ic moun­tain dul­cimer bal­lad from West Vir­ginia, “Saint James Infir­mary”, “City of New Orleans”, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”, and a Hen­drix solo, one after another.