Arabia

When I was in an area north of Dallas a couple of months ago, I picked up a couple of CDs in the local Arabic café, one of which was Now That's What I Call Arabia (Vol. 9):

So, here's a smattering of tracks from North Africa (the Maghreb), the Middle East, and the Arabian Peninsula. I only grabbed a couple from that compilation.

There are some glaring omissions: Om Kalthoum for instance, the queen of Egyptian vocalists, whose 1975 funeral drew more than 4 million people to the streets of Cairo to mourn her passing, one of the largest funerals in Middle East history.   Each of her "songs" would take up the whole side of an LP back in the day. That alone suggests that this style of music should be listened to in more than 3-minute doses. It's music for romantic, poetic, ecstatic, immersive, and transportive experiences. Originally, this musical tradition was associated with the spiritual and was sometimes derived from the classical music of the courts.   But now it's wildly funky and secularized thanks to the worldwide influence of the music from the African Diaspora over the last 100 years (meaning mainly south and west of the Sahara).

Unlike the European classical tradition, music from the Middle East is not based on the movement of chords and harmonies. Instead, it's rhythmic and intensely melodic, though the melodies are often stretched and embellished by the performers — improvisation and personal expression are highly valued. The accompaniment traditionally echoes the melodies, without the contrapuntal and harmonic movements familiar to western ears. (Those would make the ornamentation and improvisations more difficult, if not impossible.) In more recent years, some Western influence has seeped in, yielding a sound featured on the Arabia compilation above.  

Some thirty years ago, Brian Eno turned me on to the amazing song, Ya Tayr, by Fairuz — it's a classic. At that time, we were also both listening to Farid El Atrache, the late Lebanese singer. At one time, it was said that the best singers were always Lebanese — Fairuz and El Atrache being the prime examples — even though many people thought they were Egyptian. That might not be true these days as the Arabic Diaspora extends around the globe.

The dub trumpet tracks of Messaoudi Kamil were in some ways the instrumental precursor to Raï, the rebellious sound of the Maghreb that became popular in France and elsewhere. Some of Rachid Taha's tracks were produced by Steve Hillage, ex-member of the über-hippy band, Gong. This may seem like a pretty unexpected combination — Taha is more Clash than cozmic — but it works beautifully. His song Habina is a cover of a Farid El Atrache tune — he's paying respect to the Godfathers, but in his own way, as does Youssou N'Dour on his recent CD entitled Egypt.

I have other recordings from Egypt and elsewhere that I love, but sadly some of them were distributed more or less exclusively on cassette, and the transfer process here in NY has been slow.

So wave your handkerchief and wiggle your hips — This is what I call Arabia.

—DB

Popular

Turkish Pop

Turkey straddles Asia and Europe, and the music — at least to my ears — contains elements from both continents: Greek and Balkan melodies from the West, and Iraqi and Kurdish influences from the south and east. (There are popular Kurdish singers in Turkey despite political problems between the Kurds and the Turks.) But of course, in a cosmopolitan city like Istanbul, all of these elements fuse to evoke a funky yet haunting mood that that is entirely unique.

These tunes range from the 70s, with Baris Manco's psychedelic Anatolian funk, to more contemporary recordings by the likes of Sezen Aksu, who has remained one of the most adventurous Turkish artists over many decades. Her albums move from disco-inspired to collaborations with Goran Bregovi?, the Balkan composer. I have selected her more traditional tunes, though even these are pretty avant-sounding.

— DB

Click to launch "Engewal" video (50 MB total)

Jazz

There's almost no overarching reason why I picked the jazz tracks I did here. I left out tons of great stuff. I didn't include some of my favorite Miles Davis pieces from the 70s, for example, because each tune is half an hour long. Another time, perhaps. I kept one on the playlist — the long track from the album Get Up With It , called "He Loved Him Madly" — which I guess is a reference to Duke Ellington, though it sure doesn't sound anything like him.

Nowadays it's hard to imagine that some of these tunes, like the ones by Ellington, were hugely popular. Instrumental music was popular music, and you could dance to most of it. If we think about how marginal most instrumental and jazz music is today, it's hard to conceive that some of these composers were not just respected, but could attract big audiences. At yard sales and flea markets, I've occasionally run across 16mm soundies — the prototype of music videos — that often featured jazz or even Latin artists in the 40s and 50s. (They were played on movie jukeboxes in bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and other hang-out spots.) This implies that it was worth someone's time and effort to market these little films across the country, that there was in fact a demand.

Anyways, there's a lot of Thelonious Monk here, whose melodies and playing style are unlike anyone else's — they are borderline herky jerky, hardly smooth and loungey. The late Teo Macero, the producer who recorded some of these Monk tunes, famously created some of the later Davis records by splicing together moments from long improvisations. It was a way of bringing the tape splicing composition methods of Varèse and other classical contemporaries to the world of jazz. And it worked.

I agree with Macero that the recent trend of reissuing the full, unedited jams on box set releases doesn't do the artist any favors. I can't say that they shouldn't be heard — in an academic sense, it is interesting to see what Macero selected — but as a listening experience they mostly suck. Miles made plenty of records in that era — enough to listen to — and his US record company didn't even put some of them out. So it's a bit of too much too late.

— DB

African Popular Music Part 1: South of Sahara

This is an impossible task — to fit half a continent's music onto one radio playlist. Some countries are probably under represented. This is far from a complete or fair selection.

I listened to some of this music incessantly in the 80s when it started becoming more widely available. The first record I heard was a South African LP called 17 Mabone. The cover featured an illustration of an American muscle car with 17 (I counted them) headlights across the front. The tunes, mostly instrumentals, often began with an MC invoking the Indy 500 or something similar, and then the music would come in — accordions, saxes, electric guitars drums and basses. The cooking ingredients were familiar, but the recipe was new and different. I loved hearing familiar sounds and instruments approached in completely unfamiliar (to me) ways. It was incredibly tuneful too.

I loved the wacky cultural borrowings and mish mash, the electric guitars and the references to US car races. The cultural porridge was thick and mind bending. I soon heard a similar process happening in other areas. West Africans had heard classic Afro Cuban bands, so bands like Orchestra Baobab, who resurfaced a few years ago, transposed the keyboard and tres lines of the Cuban tunes to electric guitars. These montunos were given a new lilt and sparkle. The legendary Fela Kuti heard James Brown, Coltrane and the speeches of Angela Davis, and created a whole new groove — highlife — combined with unsparing criticism of local and global politics. Soukous, the style identified with the Congo that spread everywhere at one point, is claimed to be an adaptation of Cuban rumba lines, though I don't hear it — it's come too far for me to easily hear the connection.

Sunny Ade, the incredible bandleader, claimed middle of the road country crooner George Reeves as an influence! The use of Hawaiian lap steel guitar on his extended songs and those of Dr. Sikiru Ayinde Barrister (his track is 28 mins long!!!) was another unexpected pleasant surprise. On some Fuji tracks it is the sole harmonic instrument — the talking drums carry the rest!

Anyway, it was obvious that if Africa gave the world the roots of much of its popular music, the creolized and misegenated Diaspora was equally giving back. The flow of influence went and continues to go both ways.

One of the early South African collections I loved was called Rhythm of Resistance, as much of the music addressed the apartheid government then in existence. (There's a great DVD doc by the same name.) It's still a bit puzzling to me how people so oppressed could respond with such joy — some of the lyrics are pointed, but musically it bounces and explodes with pleasure.

I was crazy about Fela's jams, as were many others, and soon I was able to discern the various styles — and there are a lot of them. Many of the best musicians from the former Francophone colonies ended up in Paris, which by the mid-80s was a hotbed of Afro pop music with high production values. According to some folks, a few artists may have strived a little too hard for mass pop success at that time, but the idea was valid.

— DB

A New Hope

By the end of '08 Bush and his pirate crew will be almost gone — impotent and ineffective at least. Something to look forward to. We will be lucky if we survive the damage this gang has inflicted on the U.S. (the economy, R&D, etc. etc.) but let's be optimistic. It's a new year, and here is a pretty wide range of wonderful stuff I've stumbled across in the last few months. Some tunes might be carried over from the last Eclectic mix, but much of it is new, so new that some are not even available commercially yet! If this material is any indication, '08 is going to be a great year for music.

— DB