[arsip tahun 2000]
THE world's music has never been more accessible, speeded to new ears by everything from jet travel to the Internet. And the whole world comes to
This is the second annual survey of world-music albums released in the last year. But this weekend is also an unusually strong one for live performances of international music. A gala concert tomorrow night at Town Hall celebrates the 15th anniversary of the World Music Institute, which has combed the globe to produce concerts of worthwhile music rooted in local traditions. The gala concert includes music from
An international lineup also appears tomorrow night at the annual Tibet House Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall, where regulars like
The Center for Traditional Music and Dance is recreating the traditional festivities of Jews from the
Meanwhile, companies of all sizes continue to release world-music albums, in an anarchic jumble of scholarly ethnomusicology, non-Western classical styles, informed compilations, imported pop releases and hodgepodge surveys. And the musicians, who aren't exactly primitives, are also coming up with border-crossing collaborations like Ghazal, Mr. Kayhor's group with the Indian sitar player Shujaat Khan. The group reunites Persian and Indian classical styles, both based on melodic modes and rhythmic cycles.
After the million-selling success of ''Buena Vista Social Club'' (whose headliners Ibrahim Ferrer and Ruben Gonzalez have sold out their concerts this weekend at the Beacon Theater), there has been a flood of releases of music from
Smithsonian Folkways has just finished releasing a 20-CD series of music from
Large stores like Tower, HMV and Virgin now stock good selections of world music. The World Music Institute (www.heartheworld.org) also has an impressive catalog of traditional and traditionalist music, which it sells by mail, at concerts and from its office at
What follows is a selection of rewarding world-music albums from the last year: just a limited sampling from a world of song. (CD's range in price from $15 for a single disc to $25 each for some imports.)
Albania
Tirana is an unaccompanied choir of six men and one woman, dedicated to preserving ancient songs from
For Brazilian musicians there has never been a barrier between the traditional and the modern. They can draw at will on old parade rhythms, new harmonies and newer gadgets. Os Mutantes, pioneers in the surreal late-60's Brazilian hybrid called tropicalia, finally had an American greatest-hits collection released in 1999: ''Everything Is Possible'' (Luaka Bop), including some songs in English.
Mestre Ambrosio, a band from
A songwriter named Otto, on ''Samba pra Burro'' (Trama, Brazilian import), carries tropicalia's experimentation into the realm of electronica, letting samba rhythms warp into throbs and blips provided by D.J. Soul Slinger. Monica Salmaso's ''Trampolim'' (Blue Jackel) is pensive pop as only Brazilians can make it. Her breathy, melting voice is set against just a handful of instruments at a time, making the melodies seem even more cherished.
Congo
Soukous is the perpetual-motion machine of African pop. It carries the Afro-Cuban rumba back to
Hugh Tracey's ethnographic documents of Congolese music, compiled by Sharp Wood Productions and available through Stern's
Another Tracey collection, ''Royal Court Music From Uganda,'' preserves music from courts that were brutally dismantled in the 60's: patterns so quick and complicated that they turn into a frenetic, articulate buzz.
Cuba
Everyone associated with ''Buena Vista Social Club'' put out a follow-up album last year, proving again that the club's members were superbly chosen. Among the best of the spinoffs are Eliades Ochoa's ''Sublime Illusion'' (Higher Octave), stern and propulsive songs driven by acoustic guitar picking, and Ibrahim Ferrer's album of big-band crooning, ''Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer'' (Nonesuch).
They're largely performing music of an older generation, steeped in nostalgia. Another decades-old style, the charanga -- a large ensemble featuring violins and flute -- survives with Orquesta
On ''La Charanga Eterna'' (Lus africa, French import), the group has guest singers, including the torchy Omara Portuondo, from ''Buena Vista Social Club,'' and Papa Wemba from Congo, whose music draws on the Afro-Cuban rumba. Cuba's current dance bands play the omnivorous updated salsa called timba, a hyperactive, quick-changing mixture that can include mambos, funk vamps and plenty of jabbing, angular horn-section parts.
N.G. La Banda, one of the jazziest and most aggressive timba bands, has just released a compilation, ''The Best of N.G. La Banda'' (EMI Hemisphere), with liner notes that also explain some of the lyrics' socially charged double-entendres.
Ethiopia
Poverty, censorship and civil war took a severe toll on Ethiopian music. But in the decade from 1969 to 1978 it produced a homegrown pop: a tense mixture of electric guitars, imported late-60's soul and funk, modal Arab-flavored melodies and voices that veered between the tightly ornamented phrases of Arab music and the exultance of soul singing.
A series of compilation albums called ''Ethiopiques'' (Buda Musique, French import) has resurrected some of this music. On Volume 1, the hybrid is tentative and a little clumsy, though it has some of the period charm of blaxploitation soundtracks. But it comes completely into its own with unleashed voices and horn-section muscle on Volumes 3 and 5, while Volume 7 is a reissue of Mahmoud Ahmed's ''Ere Mela Mela,'' where the muezzin meets the wah-wah pedal.
Finland
Members of Hedningarna, a Finnish folk group, decided to visit Karelia, a region on
The final volumes of ''Music of Indonesia'' were released last year by Smithsonian Folkways; like the rest of the series, these have thorough annotation and superb sound. While some will appeal mostly to specialists, others are so atmospheric that they deserve to be in home collections. Volume 20, ''Indonesian Guitars,'' examines local styles as they're transformed by guitars both standard and nonstandard, bringing in hints of everything from raga to Hawaiian slide guitar.
Volume 18, ''
Ireland
Irish traditional music was thriving well before the faddish moment fueled by Riverdance and ''Titanic''; even as that craze passes, there's no shortage of young musicians to learn the subtleties of the old jigs, reels and hornpipes.
They have hard acts to follow, particularly the Chieftains, who released ''The Chieftains Collection: The Very Best of the Claddagh Years'' (Atlantic), from their glory days in the 60's as Ireland's traditionalist standard-bearers, well before they became the comedy act of recent years. Lunasa, an instrumental band named after a Celtic harvest festival, isn't as traditional as the Chieftains; it includes guitar and bass (sometimes electric bass) alongside fiddle and whistle. As fingers fly, smart arrangements create shifting moods: fierce and yearning, lighthearted and melancholy.
Italy
On Alan Lomax's trip to Italy in the mid-50's, he recorded rural music that can sound as close to Eastern Europe or the Middle East as it does to the opera house. ''Folk Music and Song of Italy'' (Rounder) is a countrywide sampler: men, women and children, old and young, raising raw voices backed by tambourines, jaw harps, accordions and even bagpipes. It's vigorous, untutored music. One sea chantey was recorded on a boat, with the fishermen harmonizing as they haul in a squeaking net.
Mr. Lomax's favorite region was
Mali
When Ali Farka Toure's music first came out of
Two albums by Mr. Toure were released in the
In a similar style Habib Koite and his band Bamada ratchet up the tempos and entwine a second guitar in their songs, fingerpicking in modal patterns that sometimes resemble Celtic rock. ''Ma Ya'' (Putumayo World Music), mostly using acoustic guitars, lets its patterns delicately insinuate themselves, but the electrified ''Muso Ko'' (Alula) is even better; its songs build up dizzying cross-rhythms.
Before guitars came to Malian music, griots traditionally played the kora, a 21-stringed harp-guitar. ''New Ancient Strings'' (
Middle East
Across the Arab world, singers have been compressing the impassioned, open-ended improvisations of traditional music into pop songs with terse melodies and instrumental hooks. Cheb Mami, an Algerian who now lives in
Nigeria
Femi Kuti's father, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, was a pivotal figure in African music. He invented Afro-Beat, which couched rebellious manifestos in a re-Africanized funk. Femi Kuti leads a less flamboyant life; unlike his father, he has only one wife and a mien of sobriety. But he has chosen to continue his father's approach with his own Afro-Beat band. On ''Shoki Shoki'' (MCA) Femi holds on to Fela's social concerns and brusque horn charts while using modern production techniques to clarify how precisely he builds the grooves: ticking and wah-wah-ing guitars, terse bass lines, snickering percussion. Some dance-club remixes are tacked on at the end of the American version of the album, including a rap from the Roots, but the strength of the music is in the band's own clockwork intensity.
Pakistan
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, who died in 1997, introduced much of the outside world to
Romania
Three generations of Gypsy musicians sit in on ''Taraf de Haidouks'' (Nonesuch), which translates as ''Band of Brigands.'' Old, grizzled voices take turns with young and fervent ones; fiddles are cantankerous and then sweet. Their music has a cagy sense of timing. Sometimes it bounces easily along, with scratchy fiddle improvisations and voices that quaver and break with their urgency. And sometimes the oom-pah accelerates toward meteoric dance tunes, with accordion, fiddle and panpipes racing through impossibly fast, zigzagging lines. The music is simultaneously raw and virtuosic, implacable and giddy, hinting at history but living in a vivid present tense.
The steady, triple-time plinking of the mbira, or thumb piano, runs through Zimbabwean rock. Two of its masters, Thomas Mapfumo and Oliver Mutukudzi, released albums in 1999. Mr. Mapfumo's band was one of the pioneers in transferring mbira patterns to electric guitars for a style of music called chimurenga.
He returned to using mbiras -- but kept the trap drums and electric bass -- on the 1995 tour that was recorded for ''Live at the El Rey'' (Chimurenga Music Company, www.anonymousweb.com).
His thoughtful, troubled voice comes through the twinkling patterns like a gentle conscience. Oliver Mutukudzi's ''Tuku Music'' (Putumayo World Music) uses chimurenga's needlepoint electric guitars for music that's intricate, never pushy. In the husky baritone of a soul singer, he sings social messages about perseverance for his audience at home. But his music can easily move listeners who live half a world away.
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