Intensely expressive free-verse vocal laments over sliding violins, hammered santouri, guitar, and oud – the hybrid sounds of the Mediterranean in the early 20th century.
“Aman Aman” cry the singers on these recordings, their voices preserved on 78rpm discs cut between 1911-1935. The phrase roughly translates to “mercy,” a call of despair, but also one of joy and admiration. On many of these sides, that full range of emotion is transmitted at once.
Some of these artists are legends, others lost to time. Nearly half are female vocalists, a big part of the Cafe Aman tradition but not as well represented on contemporary releases. All were affected by conflicts leading up to the Asia Minor Catastrophe of 1923, and the forced…
Tag Archive: Mississippi Records
…CD version include 4 bonus tracks. The A Side of the original ‘Church of Kidane Mehret’ LP was comprised of four field recordings of the Mahlet chant. These pieces are not composed or performed by Emahoy. They are included for historical accuracy.
Nearly 20 years since the Éthiopiques series introduced nun, pianist, and composer Emahoy Tsege Maryam Gebru [1923-2023] to our ears with a CD of solo piano works, the storied figure has duly attracted cult status to her uniquely evocative music, and a rich life’s tale interwoven with geopolitics and religion, spanning Italian internment camps to the Royal court of Emperor Haile Selassie, and a monastic life in Jerusalem.
Just over two years since Emahoy passed away,…
Forgotten and supposedly ‘lost’ albums rarely remain forgotten for long in the digital age, as they eventually find their way back into the present through some wormhole in the World Wide Web. Inzovu Y’imirindi by Bizimungu Dieudonne, a Rwandan civil servant with a passion for music, was discovered by musicologist Matthew Lavoie almost by chance during research.
In the late 1980s, Dieudonne self-released the tape, achieving a degree of local popularity. He plays guitar and sings together with his wife Agnes Umbibizi, while friends and family members provide the accompanying instrumentation.
The songs are deeply shaped by traditional African rhythms and melodies, even though the musicians make use of Western instruments.
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio make the kind of music that just makes sense at this moment in history. It’s not zeitgeisty, it doesn’t riff off current fads or aim blows at current examples of political injustices. There is no arch post-modern self-referentiality and no arbitrary attempts at engaging with future technologies.
Instead, the Portland, Oregon trio construct vibrating pathways of sound that lift you clear of those contemporary concerns. Their expansive brand of spiritual jazz arrived fully-formed on last year’s debut All Is Sound, an album that combined meditative structures and supremely detailed micro-passages in a way perfected by the likes of Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane.
The current arc of spiritual and cosmic jazz…
…Known as Zambia’s first pop star – he’s even got a road named after him in the country’s capital of Lusaka – vocalist and guitarist Alick Nkhata cut his teeth playing in the Lusaka Radio Band (later called the Big Gold Six Band), writing wry, socially motivated sing-along songs in mostly Bemba and Nyanja.
Nkhata’s secret weapon was his worldliness and education; he’d traveled outside Africa during World War II when he served in Myanmar, and when he returned home in the 1940s, he connected with British ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey and began to archive the traditional music he’d grown up with. But he was fascinated with everything the world was offering at the time, and began to figure out ways to blend global pop sounds with Zambian folk.
Remastered and reissued for the first time, Piano Studies 337 is a 1962-released private-press from spiritual teacher and chemist Willem Nyland, improvised on a bizarrely tuned baby grand piano after one of his weekly lectures.
In 1924, Nyland and his wife, the Hungarian-American designer, painter and illustrator Ilonka Karasz went to see notorious Greek-Armenian philosopher, mystic and composer George Gurdjieff speak on his first trip across the Atlantic. Impressed by his teachings, the Nylands began to work with Gurdjieff, hosting a group Stateside that disseminated his weekly teachings. In the mid to late ’60s though, long after Gurdjieff had passed away, Nyland broke ties with the Foundation, forming his own independent…
If you’ve heard Arvo Pärt, you’ve probably heard Tabula Rasa. The best-known recording of the 1977 concerto, performed by the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra (with Alfted Schnittke on prepared piano), was released by ECM way back in 1984, and helped bring Pärt’s holy minimalism to a new audience, firmly establishing his status as a living legend. This unreleased 20+ minute long-form version of Silentium, the second movement of Tabula Rasa makes perfect sense. Rendered at almost half the speed of the ECM version by Boston’s Grammy-nominated A Far Cry chamber orchestra, it sounds even more intensely celestial, giving us all the time we need to dwell on each mournful, beautiful note.
‘Fratres’, which was included on ECM’s…