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There’s the close harmony of So Long, So Long, The Day The Lady Died (with its synths and percussion sounding like Chumba Mark 1) and Waiting For Margaret To Go (definitely Mark 2), the only fully-developed piece on here. But then, perhaps she doesn’t deserve more than this. Many are glad to see her gone, in spite of the wailing and gnashing of teeth at the state funeral (oh wait, it wasn’t, was it?) that cost us all deep in the purse. And so, it turns now, now two tales are fully told. Farewell, Chumbawamba. We’ll miss you.


www.chumba.com Chris Nickson VARIOUS ARTISTS


Indus Raag Tehzeeb Foundation of Pakistan ISBN 978-969-97-46-00-0


Indus Raag is like nothing ever to have crossed my path before it. This twelve-CD exploration of Indus Valley musical culture is a revelatory addition to the musical literature of the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent’s art music. It exceeds everything and is a monolith – the way L Subramaniam’s multi-volume An Anthology Of South Indian Classical Music was and remains. Given that the Tehzeeb Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in Karachi, Indus Raag in the main takes as its territory classical music emanating from Pakistan.


It is a truism that Partition created South Asian music as we know it, more accurately put, as we perceive it. When Partition came in 1947, people along the Punjab’s Wagah bor- der that would soon divide India and West Pakistan – though both names proved subject to change – had stark choices to make. Reli- gion tended to determine the choice of which side of the border that people chose to be on. Much of the classical music associated with Pakistan tends to Muslim-associated light classical forms, most notably qawwali and ghazal. And then more qawwali and ghazal. Indus Raag is primarily classical music yet most of the participants’ names will be unfamiliar even beyond the way that Pak- istani musicians’ names regularly are, given their generic qualities, built, as they are, of Koranic building blocks.


The first CD is entitled Historical Jugal-


bandi. It brings together the talents of Fateh Ali Khan (vocals) and the Rajasthani maestro Vishwa Mohan Bhatt (Mohan veena, an Indi- anised guitar) in a jugalbandi (duet) perfor- mance, recorded in December 2010. They open with khayal renditions of Aiman and Bhairav and conclude with a thumri – a light classical form, especially associated with the


Ulla Pirttijärvi


Punjab, popularised and rendered deliciously more saucy (sprinkle Donald McGill not flaked chilli) by Bade Ghulam Ali Khan – that is set in Mishra Khamaj. But the way they do it is both spectacular and approachable. In terms of empathy in a vocal context, it is the next, nearest thing to a Bhatt vocal collabora- tion on Desert Slide with Rajasthan’s vernacu- lar desi (down-home) musicians – and that is high praise indeed (even though I wrote the notes for Desert Slide). Plus Fateh Ali Khan sings a treat.


The vocalist Ghulam Hassan Shaggan is one of the better-known, though perhaps not necessarily familiar names, though Aki Nawaaz of Fun<Da>Mental brought his name to wider attention as a live performer and recording artist. His exquisite take on Lalit, recorded in March 2007, captures the essence of this earthy senior musician’s vocal artistry.


One of the few musicians to get a CD of his ‘own’ (the sitarist Ashraf Sharif Khan is another) is Rais Khan (of fRoots passim) and his son Farhan Khan from September 2009, with the nigh-omnipresent Bashir Khan on tabla. The sound on this particular recital veers unfavourably to the brittle but the recital – the full-frontal assault of Behag, then Vachaspati and an unspecified dhun or folk-flavoured air – captures Rais Khan, one of the subcontinent’s sitar maestros (from the same lineage as Vilayat Khan and Imrat Khan), doing what he does like nobody else.


Love sitar: love difference. Ashraf Sharif Khan (with Shahbaz Hussain on tabla), record- ed in October 2010, is a different sort of reve- lation. His alap (opening movement) titled in Shyam Kalyan buzzes with a musical electrical energy. His Megh is a marvellous evocation of the monsoon. However, the track called Folk, recorded in May 2011, reveals the unshapely Achilles’ heel of the liner notes. A project of this nature is deserving of greater rigour and disquisition in its notes.


The definition of old Indus Valley civilisa- tion gets stretched here at times. Delightfully so. Mumtaz Ali Sabzai – with Bashir Khan accompanying on tabla – re-imagines banjo, but head-spinningly different from, say, Baul musicians using banjo as a souped-up dotara (Bengali long-necked lute). His biog in the album notes states he “is a banjo player who represents the fourth generation of artists who redefined the Japanese instrument ‘Taishogo- to’ into what is known as Banjo and made the instrument excel in classical music.” (It supplies fresh contextual comparisons for Martin Simp- son and Arieb Azhar’s limited use of banjo in their April 2013 forays into Anglo-American- Pakistani cross-over.) Recorded in May 2010, Sabzai performs Behag and Besant and a dhun, again untitled and again of unspecified region-


ality (something that gets one’s goat) on good- ness know what species of banjo.


Not said lightly, if fRoots gave star rat- ings and were I dishing them out, Indus Raag would rate constellation status. This is one of those before-and-after releases. Nothing will ever be the same again, leastways once peo- ple have listened to it. Listening to this release, I was ashamed of my ignorance of Pakistan’s deeper contribution to the subcon- tinent’s art music traditions.


http://tehzeebfoundation.org Ken Hunt


ULLA PIRTTIJÄRVI & ULDA Ulda Tuupa TREC-024


Since, way back, she left the trio Angelit, Finnish Sámi joiker Pirttijärvi has made several fine albums in


company with keyboardist Frode Fjellheim and other Transjoik members. This time the band is acoustic: Marko Jouste on oud, man- dolin and kemençe, Mikko Vanhasalo on bass clarinet, clarinet, ney and harmonium and Janne Tuomo on frame-drums and other hand percussion. They come up with a wide range of tone colours and textures to blend sympathetically with her self-composed joik- ing, which has some words but they’re just short phrases interpolated between joiku’s ‘hey-lo, lo-le’ vocables.


Ulla has a distinctive, somehow shell-like, back-of-the-throat vocal sound, projecting a sense of observation and wonder in joiking the wind, the northern lights, time, a butter- fly, Vulle Mihkku crashing his reindeer- sledge, in an intimate, quiet dark evening sort of way that can pick up pace to a happy jog in joiking a deer, turn tough and gutteral- ly snarly in the traditional joik of a reindeer- eating, howling, valley-running wolf, be serene in joiking the moon and glittering snow, or build to a suppressed passion in the joik of Uhca-Niilas returning from the war.


www.tuuparecords.fi Andrew Cronshaw


VARIOUS ARTISTS


The Liberty To Choose: A Selection Of Songs From The New Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs Fellside FECD257


The subtitle of this collection is as unprepos- sessing as the title of the book from which the texts are taken. And this is a deliberate parallel between this latest project and its direct antecedent – A L Lloyd’s 1960 recording of an LP and EP which together comprised a selection of songs from The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs, published the previous year, which Fellside combined onto one single CD for reissue a couple of years ago.


So, as a logical counterpart gambit to follow the publication last year of The New Penguin Book…, Fellside’s Paul Adams com- missioned Brian Peters to mastermind the recording of a fresh selection from the new publication, as musical director for a team of young people who were currently making their mark on the folk scene. Brian chose well, all three – James Findlay, Bella Hardy and Lucy Ward – being award-winners with strong individual musical personalities.


Of the sixteen selections here, just four


(The Baffled Knight, The Hungry Fox, The Female Highwayman and The Moon Shines Bright) feature the entire quartet; there’s one trio arrangement (Faithful Sailor Boy) and two duets (Brian and James’ Van Diemen’s Land, Bella and Lucy’s a capella The Trees They Do Grow High). The remaining nine are entirely solo renditions, not quite evenly


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