f112
resolve because the technology of the time limited the duration of the recordings; fluid rhythms and tempi; fluid playing from all the musicians, where improvisation is how the music is played.
There’s much more that could be said about this music, which seems to celebrate all that’s good about humanity, but really I can only advise buying the record and hearing for yourself.
thirdmanrecords.com Nick Hobbs VARIOUS ARTISTS
David Attenborough: My Field Record- ings From Across The PlanetWrasse 358
Leveret
LEVERET Diversions RootBeat RBRCD42
It must be great being in Leveret. You know, to be so instinctively brilliant that you don’t have to do all that tiresome planning and arranging… you just turn up, sit in a little semi-circle, give each other a knowing nod and off you go… just
play. And play in the full knowledge that the blokes sitting next to you will, with nary a glance, coax and cajole you to encourage the music forward in ever more natural and beauteous paths and patterns.
Somebody extraordinarily clever – proba-
bly Chris Wood or Jim Moray – said that what makes Leveret so unequivocally wonderful is that they listen. To each other. And they react to what they hear from their mates. Sounds ridiculous, but seemingly few bands do that. Maybe few bands have the ability or perhaps the blind confidence and unquestioning faith in one another to do that.
For the uninitiated, Leveret are Sam Sweeney on fiddle, Andy Cutting on melodeon and Rob Harbron on concertina; and this is their fourth album of tunes in the fifth year since they first broke bread togeth- er. Last time out they delivered an album, Inventions, exclusively of their own composi- tions. This time they’ve gone the other way, with an all-traditional collection of ancient tunes gleaned from dusty manuscripts and ancient tune books. There some Playford Dancing Master tunes; there’s one – The Wounded Huzzar – from the writing of John Clare; the splendid Hessian Camp was origi- nally to be found in something deliciously titled 24 Country Dances for the Year 1758; and there’s an especially jaunty effort called Drunken Barnaby from James Winder.
You can almost touch the sense of history in these tunes and the glistening wonder in the eyes of Messieurs Sweeney, Cutting and Harbron as, with great respect and loving care, they remove them from their silent exile and breathe new life into them with the guile and freshness that only master musicians can. No grandstanding here. No racing for the fin- ishing post. No big climaxes. No duelling com- petition between them. They just play. And they play for the service of a collection of unerringly gorgeous tunes; and for the service of one another. It is more than enough.
leveretband.com Colin Irwin KITSOS HARISIADIS
Lament In A Deep Style 1929-1931 Third Man TMR 479
Last year, I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing Lament From Epirus by Christopher C. King, a book which extolls the pre-war vil- lage music of Epirus in the highest possible terms. Lament In A Deep Style is one of the companion albums to the book.
Clarinetist extraordinaire Kitsos
Harisiadis (1889-1968) spent most of his life in the village of Klimatia, not far from Ioannina, the capital of Epirus, a mountainous region in the north-west of Greece (and partly in southern Albania). Between 1929 and 1931 he travelled to Athens to record twenty-four instrumentals for three different record labels, of which fourteen are collected on this album (two more sides have turned up since the album was mastered; the other eight are either different versions of the same tunes or only extant on 78s in very bad condition). No post-1931 recordings have been discovered so far, though Harisiadis continued playing locally until the end of his days (King is putting together an archive and would be very happy to learn about any recordings that do exist). The package is the kind which justi- fies having physical albums rather than tran- sient streams. The cover painting of Harisiadis by R. Crumb brings the man to life, while the photo on which it’s based would have left him locked in the past.
And then there’s the music… There are other musicians (unknown it seems) on the recordings but the clarinet is strongly to the fore. Harisiadis seems to have been remark- able not only for his generous musicianship but also for how he perceived his music – as a means of healing. King’s book and the sleeve notes go into this aspect in depth, but suffice to say that the music is remarkable. Firstly, the recordings sound wonderful – though remastered from 78s from which much of the hiss and just about all the clicks have been removed, the clarinet sounds like it’s in the room; more than an excavation from the past, it sounds like a resurrection. Clearly, Harisiadis is wholly in the Epirusian tradition of which he is a master. So there’s both the perfect embodiment of the tradition togeth- er with the astounding technique of the musician – one who seems to have had no interest whatsoever in showing off. His soul, together with the soul of the tradition, are integral to his playing, and though no doubt he heard music from elsewhere, he seems uncontaminated by it. Everything epitomises fluidity – fluid melodies which only seem to
Few would disagree that the unassuming David Attenborough is a national treasure, and this deluxe 2-CD set creates for us a trea- sure chest of his field recordings from the Zoo Quest days. We now know that while he was filming the series around the world he was also recording the traditional music he came across: ‘While I was in Bali theoretically look- ing for pythons – in the evenings I was recording all these different kinds of orches- tral groups’.
The recordings have been unearthed by BBC producer Julian May and stretch from a trip to Sierra Leone in 1954 through to Abo- riginal Australia in 1963. Whereupon Atten- borough gave up field work and became a BBC administrator in charge of BBC2. The recordings were made on the technology available at the time, heavy equipment to be carried by porters (whose singing Attenbor- ough occasionally recorded). Pictures of the normally urbane Attenborough make him look like a demobbed punk after weeks in the jungle. Considering the limitations, these recordings have an enthralling cohesive qual- ity from start to finish. The enthusiasm which Attenborough must have devoted to the pro- ject is remarkable. Perhaps more ethnogra- pher than musicologist in this instance, he recorded what he found interesting and in the breadth of these recordings showed him- self to be much more open to different tradi- tional sounds than many of today’s experts.
Attenborough regrets that more detailed note-taking about the performers was not applied, but his sleeve notes are still illuminating and some of the anecdotes, such as the recording of the Dyak funeral music, will pass into legend. It wouldn’t do to rec- ommend individual tracks from such a won- derful set, although his Paraguayan record- ings became influential and his Balinese recordings still stand up very well indeed, as do his examples from northern Australia.
wrasserecords.com Phil Wilson
TARTIT Amankor Riverboat TUGCD 1120
KEL ASSOUF Black Tenere Glitterbeat GBCD 068
The return of the Tuareg group Tartit is a time- ly reminder that Saharan music is much more than just ‘desert blues’. Their career has been disrupted by the wars in north Mali when many of their members went into exile. Amankor (the exile) is their first album in twelve years after the group re-gathered in a Bamako studio. They’re the most traditional of the many Tuareg groups doing the rounds and insist, quite correctly, that theirs is the only group with all the elements of Tuareg music. Men and women are equal in Tuareg society, but there is a strong matrilineal tradition and the group is led by four female singers. Their
Photo: © Judith Burrows
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
