61 f
devices from “tintypes, ambrotypes, cabinet cards, real photo postcards, albumen prints, and turn-of-the-century snapshots”, all so beautifully reproduced in their rich sepias on heavy matt art paper that they make you gasp. Here’s a one-armed one-man-band; here’s a trio playing an orchestra of tuned wine glasses; here’s a man with a stack of canary cages in front of a recording horn; here are black guitarists, white fiddlers, old time bands, accordeonists, a harp guitarist, an impossibly wasp-waisted lady with a par- lour guitar. It’s so full of atmosphere, it pulls you back a century just like that, into a daze of old-time steampunk vaudeville and rural weirdness. And then you put the CDs on and again, they couldn’t be better: 51 tracks of old vernacular American music (1925 – 1955) from more beautifully transferred 78s – early country, traditional songs, blues, gospel, Hawaiian; mostly commercial recordings (though very few familiar) but also some unidentified amateur ones and all inter- spersed with spooky sound effects record- ings –weather, geese, walking on ice, night noises. You play the several hours of sound and you’re still turning the tactile pages, mes- merised. MP3s and PDFs can’t do this…
Against those two, Baby How Can It Be
(subtitled Songs Of Love, Lust And Contempt From The 1920s And 1930s) is relatively cheapskate, comprising as it does a mere quadruple gatefold digipak with a 12-page booklet containing great graphics but hardly any notes. Of course, by any other label’s standards it’s a luxury product, but whereas the previous pair are high-end works of art, this one’s ‘merely’ just about entertainment, corralling 66 vintage vaudeville, jazz, blues and old time band performances into three CD-themed zones. Lots of more familiar names are to be found here – Bo Carter, Fletcher Henderson, Dan Sullivan’s Shamrock Band, Henry Thomas, Uncle Dave Macon, Frank Stokes, Ukulele Ike, Cab Calloway, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lowe Stokes and Fiddlin’ John Carson to mention just a few – you get my drift. The Lust CD peaks – or troughs, depending on your viewpoint and relation- ship to Mary Whitehouse! – with Harry Roy & His Bat Club Boys’ tongue-in-entendre My Girl’s Pussy. Which is, of course, about a cat…
None of these is cheap, nor should they
be. This is stuff to treasure for life, to have and to hold. Only physical records and books can do this and long may Dust-To-Digital do them this well.
www.dust-digital.com with UK distribu-
tion by Cargo. Ian Anderson
La Chiva Gantiva
LA CHIVA CANTIVA Pelao Crammed Discs CRAW 75
BANDA OLIFANTE 10,000 Migrants Felmay fy7034
CHET NUNETA Pangea Le Chant Du Monde 2741699
A grand musical tour of Euro roots globe - trotters, all with a pleasing edge. First stop: Belgium. La
Chiva Gantiva hail from Brussels and are made up of a trio of Colombians, plus French, Wal- loon, Flemish and Vietnamese musicians. A right old cultural melting pot then, but their core sound is Colombian, their open-minded, raw sensibility Belgian (think of Think of One and Jaune Toujours). Producer Richard Blair (the Brit behind the equally Colombia-centric Sidestepper project from a decade or so back) has fashioned their wayward combination of rock, funk, jazz and South American rhythms into a coherent whole, marked out by stabs of brass, Filipe Decker’s choppy guitar lines and the rapid-fire declamatory vocals of Rafael Espinel. Well worth a listen and quite proba- bly even better live – hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 38 album.
www.crammed.be
Next we move on to Italy, the central region of Romagna to be precise, home to the 15-piece Banda Olifante, who take the Italian brass tradition and kick it all over the planet, on this their second album (have to say I missed the first). Jazz, Caribbean, Mexi- can, klezmer, Middle Eastern and West African sounds are all featured at some point. Klezmatics’ saxman Matt Darriau pops up on a couple of tracks. Malian Mamadou Dia- bate’s kora ripples through Le Chemin Du Griot and the massed brass tone things down accordingly. Elsewhere, brassy butt is most definitely kicked. Very much on the jazzy end of the Italian brass band spectrum, with a strong emphasis on social concerns, but the abundance of gutsy playing and catchy melodies mean it never gets close to sound- ing po-faced or noodlesome.
www.felmay.it And finally to
France. Chet Nuneta are a quartet of female singers and a token bloke on percus-
sion, who take songs from all kinds of vocal traditions and go entertainingly nuts with
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