osafrosambas

Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes – Os Afro Sambas/A Vontade
Él/Cherry Red

Poet, career diplomat and bossa nova lyricist Vinicius de Moraes jokingly referred to himself as the blackest white man in Brazil. In the early 1960s, Moraes and guitarist Baden Powell began exploring the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religious tradition centered around Salvador de Bahia, and the various musical forms that are part of it. The two holed up for months with an endless supply of Haig whisky and a bunch of ethnic recordings, to produce 50 or more of Brazil’s best loved songs, which were called Afro-sambas because of their fusion of Rio samba and bossa nova with Bahian “folk” sounds. Their earliest productions can be heard on Powell’s solo guitar plus percussion A Vontade of 1963. It’s a gorgeous, minimal record – Powell is a more expressive, romantic guitarist than say John Fahey’s favorite, Bola Sete, and some of the flourishes border on kitsch, but there’s also a ferocious percussive funk to his sound that is mesmerizing. This last word applies doubly to 1966’s Os Afro Sambas, which consists of a series of songs devoted to various Orixas (deities) of Candomblé. Reacting against the international slickness of bossa nova, Moraes and Powell took a lo-fi approach, with Afro-Brazilian percussionists, horns, the soon to be famous Quarteto Em Cy and a crew of friends and partners providing an impromptu chorus. The sound is gloriously chaotic. Powell and the percussionists face off against each other like drunken snakes writhing in a pit, with the percussionists winning out almost every time. Moraes is a very low key vocalist, but his phrasing is utterly charming as he intones songs of praise to Iemenja, Xango and the other deities, backed by a choir sound that’s part Brazilian church, part jug band and part Gregorian chant. A key precursor to Tropicalia and in its own quiet way as experimental and spiritualized as other key sounds of 1966 like early Velvets or Coltrane’s Ascension: a sacred noise indeed.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

Orchestre Poly

Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou
The Vodoun Effect: Funk & Sata From Benin’s Obscure Labels 1973-1975
Analog Africa CD

The TP “tout puissant – all powerful” Orchestre Poly-Rythmo were one of the standouts on the excellent recent compilation African Scream Contest: Raw and Psychedelic Music from Benin and Togo 70s. A highly prolific and popular group operating in Cotonou, the nation’s seat of government, Poly-Rythmo’s heyday lasted through the 1970s and early 1980s, when two key members died. The group recorded huge amounts of material, some at the EMI studio in Lagos for the Albarika Store label (from which the recent Kings of Benin Urban Groove 1972-80 on Soundway was compiled, with more to be released on Analog Africa) and some for a local studio in Cotonou, for various local labels such as Echos Sonores du Dahomey, from which this record comes.

The sound is rough, vibrant and supremely funky. As the excellent sleevenotes explain, Poly-Rythmo’s sound was the result of a lot of creative copying, absorbing elements from: various traditional tribal musics including rhythms from West African vodoun, (which were dispersed across the Americas by the slave trade, much of which operated via Benin, then known as Dahomey); Afro-Cuban music, jazz and West African highlife, all of which also owe a debt to Vodoun; Congolese rhumba, a response to Afro-Cuban sounds; Nigerian juju and Fela Kuti’s Afro-beat; James Brown, who visited West Africa in the early 1970s, Ray Barretto style prog Latin and some psych rock jamming. The circulation of vodoun sounds back and forth between Africa and New World continues to this day – dynamic, appropriating whatever it encounters, and in the case of Poly-Rythmo, spitting it back out as modern dance music for weddings, radio and vinyl in response to local conditions. And there’s plenty that doesn’t fit into any tidy categorization of the sound – for example drummer Yehoussi Leopold who unleashes most unfunk-like snare volleys at key moments.

The sleevenotes also tell another remarkable story about the recording and production of the original Poly-Rhythmo disks that offer a reality check to any fantasies about the conditions in which this music was produced. We learn for example that the master tapes for most of these recordings were burned by the engineer’s father, after the engineer was put in jail and tortured, having recently taken a trip to Zaire to learn recording studio techniques. It’s a sobering story, but an important one – and it’s great to see such remarkable sounds being presented with such care and honesty.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

notaro chenaux

Marconi Notaro’s No Sub Reino Dos Metazoários (Time-Lag) follows on the heels of recent reissues of Satwa’s self titled disk and Lula Côrtes and Zé Ramalho’s Paebiru, two remarkable recordings produced by a small group of psychedelically minded free-folkers in Recife in North Eastern Brazil, during the height of the dictatorship years of the early 1970s. Partly recorded at the Rosemblit Studio, which was swept away by an ocean flood in 1975, taking with it master tapes of the group’s recordings, Marconi Notaro’s disk takes up where Satwa left off, in a cloud of cannabis smoke, acoustic guitars and regional folk sounds. Where Satwa was wordless (to avoid censorship) and acoustic, No Sub Reino Dos Metazoários is built around Notaro’s songs and singing, presumably flying beneath the radar of the government. There are drums from the local samba school, free-form freak outs involving matches, water, night birds and music boxes, Satwa’s Lula Côrtes and Paebiru’s Zé Ramalho accompanying on various string instruments, and electric guitars adding some gloriously sludgy rock touches. These recordings should be news to anyone only familiar with the Tropicalia sounds of Veloso, Gil et al which sound highly mannered by comparison. The necessarily lo-fi sound on the disk sounds very contemporary – and Notaro’s voice is a beguiling mixture of rawness, sophistication and honesty. These are Notaro’s only recordings – he later went on to publish seven books of poetry, before dying in 2000, and is given a touching eulogy by Côrtes in the disks sleevenotes. Still to come from this almost forgotten time and place are 1976’s Flaviola e o Bando Do Sol and Côrtes’ Rosa de Sangue (1980), which Time-Lag also plans to reissue: all are both unlikely and essential.

Originally published in The Wire, 2006.

Nimrod Workman

Nimrod Workman — I Want To Go Where Things Are Beautiful
Drag City CD

Nimrod was the Biblical king responsible for building the tower of Babel, that vast labor that caused God to sow confusion among mankind with the result that we now all speak different languages. So Nimrod Workman is a very heavy kind of name, one that suits the singer of these remarkable accapella Appalachian folk songs, originally recorded in 1982 and unreleased until now.
Workman was a coal miner and union activist in West Virginia who was forced to retire after 42 years in the mines due to black lung and a slipped disk, whereupon he started performing on the folk festival circuit and made appearances in a number of films including Harlan County USA and The Coal Miner’s Daughter. He recorded a couple of LPs in the 1970s, but nothing since, and died in 1994 at the age of 99.
This is classic, raw American folk music in the old style, 27 brief songs and monologues, beautifully recorded, the stories explaining where in the vast network of folk song Workman first heard the material. There are Biblical songs, work songs, old British ballads. His voice is powerful although occasionally out of tune, even by the arcane standards of folk tuning. If there’s a precedent it would be Smithsonian Folkways recordings or the recently deceased Alabama country singer Cast King who Locust put out a few years ago. If there’s dignity in labor, this is it, a voice unbroken by even the harshest circumstance – for example, these lines from “Coal Black Mining Blues”: Went to my place and I looked in,/Slate and the water up to my chin.” Brutal.

Originally published in The Wire, 2009.

Lula Côrtes and Zé Ramalho – Paêbirú

Lula Côrtes and Zé Ramalho – Paêbirú
Shadoks Music CD

Satwa – Satwa
Time-Lag CD

Lula Côrtes and Lailson were two freaks from Recife in North Eastern Brazil who met back home in 1972 after various world travels conducted in flight from the dictatorship that had a stranglehold on the country at that time. “Moroccan sitar” in hand, Côrtes jammed with Lailson, and in early 1973 they recorded Satwa (a Sanskrit word for the luminous aspect of consciousness), a mostly acoustic set of compositions and jams, using wordless vocals in order to circumvent the government’s censorship of lyrics. Originally released on “Kif Records” (a Moroccan word for marijuana), Satwa is a stoned but fiery, glorious record – a true ancestor of the current free folk explosion. Sanskrit, Hot Tuna, Moroccan music, Brazilian regional folk music: all fused in a cloud of smoke. The second track, entitled “Can I Be Satwa” i.e. “cannabis sativa” gives the game away, but made it past the censors.
Apparently, the first independent record made in Brazil, the master tapes for Satwa disappeared in a coastal flood in 1975, along with copies of a second disk, Marconi Notaro’s No Sub Reino dos Metzoarios, which Time-Lag is about to reissue, and Paêbirú, made in collaboration with Zé Ramalho, recently reissued by global archivists of the psychedelic, Shadoks.
Paêbirú, ironically, is organized, like Harry Smith’s Smithsonian folk collection, around the four elements, fire, air, earth and water. Paêbirú is recognizably psychedelic rock but saying that hardly does justice to this extraordinary record. While most of the tropicalia music of Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso clearly emerges out of a dialogue with 1960s American pop music, here, as with Os Novos Baianos’ marvellous Acabou Chorare, which also came out of the Brazilian commune scene, or Milagre Dos Peixes period Milton Nascimento, there’s a stranger fusion of traditional Brazilian music with unhinged psychedelic rock and folk jamming. “Paêbirú” was apparently the location of an archeological site near Recife where Côrtes and Ramalho took acid and grokked cave hieroglyphs whose origin still remains a mystery. The range of styles here, from flute driven folk jams to explosive garage rock to various cosmic and psychedelic styles is more evidence that young people all over the world found in psychedelia the license to fuck with and fuse traditions and electronics, gesturing to a hazy but potent universal horizon that is still there, though currently obscured by other, darker clouds.

Originally published in The Wire.

Kath Bloom and Loren Connors – Sing the Children Over

Kath Bloom and Loren Connors – Sing the Children Over/ Sand in My Shoe (Chapter Music 2CD)

Kath Bloom and Loren Connors met in 1976 in New Haven, where Connors worked as a janitor at Yale, while Bloom practiced guitar and on occasion worked at a local cemetery. Both Connecticut natives, over the next eight years, they produced at least ten LPs, singles and cassettes together, released in tiny editions on Connors’ own labels Daggett and St. Joan, four of which are being reissued by Australian label Chapter Music. The sound on these first two reissues is intimate and alive, familiar to anyone already acquainted with Connors’ guitar sound, as it evolves from the scratchy dissonance of his nine volume Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations (1979-1982) to his more recent snaky electrified abstractions. These are songs, blues and folk, complete with Connors’ grunts and moans as he accompanies Bloom, haunted perhaps in the same way Connors and Bloom haunted the abandoned industrial spaces of New Haven that they lived in at the time. This is the blues according to Emily Dickinson, Blind Willie Johnson relocated to a slum in New England, the same cold wind blowing, the broken windows different. Sing the Children Over, featuring a mixture of traditional songs and Bloom originals, was the first LP released by the duo, and sounds transitional, exploratory. 1983’s Sand in My Shoe, is a masterpiece from beginning to end – the songs are all by Bloom and she and Connors have a powerful rapport, coiled around each other, but breaking off at strange moments, like passionate but doomed lovers.
Although Bloom is obviously a predecessor of the current generation of experimental folk singers like Coco Rosie, Joanna Newsom and Josephine Foster, and has a similar mixture of fragility and strength, her singing is emotionally direct, and without affectation. Thankfully there’s little of the regression towards childhood that characterizes the current generation, tho there’s plenty of desperation, madness even, in songs like “My Stupid Little Heart”. At the same time, Bloom also sounds quite different to Connors’ later collaborations with Suzanne Langille (especially the remarkable Haunted House records) which are much more sensuous, langorous and erotically charged. Bloom has continued to perform on and off, and her recent Terror (also on Chapter Music) indicates that her voice is still powerful – but lyrically and musically, the new songs sound like standard folk club fare and in a way they reveal how remarkable the collaborations with Connors are.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

Kasai Allstars

Kasai Allstars – in the 7th moon, the chief turned into a swimming fish
and ate the head of his enemy by magic
Crammed CD

Crammed Discs’ first two Congotronics records reintroduced Kinshasa’s amazing Konono No. 1 amongst others to the world beyond the Congo and ethnomusicology, along with the pleasures of the amplified and distorted likembe or thumb piano. The third volume of the series features Kasai Allstars, 25 musicians from five ethnic groups from the Kasai, a region of the Congo east of Kinshasa. We’re told that they speak different languages, have had intermittent conflicts but decided to pool resources and form a “superband”, at the suggestion of producer Vincent Kenis. Apparently this was a challenge because, aside from language issues, the instruments, repertoire, even the tunings used by the participant groups were different.
The sound here is broadly similar to that of the first two Congotronics records, the latter of which featured recordings by the Allstars, as well as two bands whose members feature in the Allstars, Basokin and Masanka Sanyaki. But compared to the groups recorded on Ocora’s remarkable 1986 compilation, Musiques Urbaines à Kinshasa, or a number of the acts featured on Congotronics 2, things here are more orderly – the whistles, shouting, stop and start movements, not to mention Konono No. 1’s signature distortion have been arranged into something that has a more regular rhythmic pulse closer to house or techno. Flashes of Franco’s OK Jazz and the older traditions of Congolese pop surface in the sound.
It’s often delightful and the groove is tough, but it’s hard not to feel mildly suspicious. Without in any way claiming that the distortions of Konono No. 1 are more authentic or representative of anything, there’s a hint of the creeping sanitization of a sound that befell various west African acts such as Youssou N’dour and Salif Keita in the 1980s in an attempt to package them as “world music”. The title is great of course but isn’t it a little heavy-handed in its packaging of “raw” exoticism and Otherness? There’s a certain tentativeness in the music that is probably the result of the attempt to find commonalities in the musics of the different participants. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Fusion” is often unfairly used as a critical label, given that just about everything in the universe is a fusion of something or other, but it all depends who’s doing the fusing. And who’s listening — this is a beautiful record, but I wish it had a little more chaos in it.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

Josephine Foster

Josephine Foster
A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing
Locust CD

by Marcus Boon

Josephine Foster’s quiet, eccentric, folky masterpiece of last year, Hazel Eyes I Will Lead You, set her up nicely for inclusion in the current pantheon of indie-rock/nu-folk heroes and heroines. Anyone expecting a polite, obliging radio-ready follow-up from A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing is likely to be surprised by this set of seven nineteenth century German art songs, words by Goethe and others, music by Brahms, Schubert and Schumann, sung in German by Foster over a mixture of acoustic and squalling, dissonant electric guitars.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing is the kind of record that one hesitates to say anything about, after only a week of listening to it – and this itself is of course an achievement. These are beautiful songs, sung beautifully, with beautiful accompaniment. But then there’s the gothic grandiosity of the songs, the doomy black and white cover, the electric arrangements that verge on a parody of prog rock noodling, the big prog concept (19th C art song meets free folk), not to mention Foster’s famously wayward reverb-soaked vocal intensity. Yet, it all works, gloriously so. Foster’s fabulous earnestness is always leavened by an element of self-parody, an over-the-topness which embraces and simultaneously laughs at the cheesiness of the idea of Sonic Youth-Meets-Brahms! while at the same time developing out of that conceptual kitsch something genuinely moving and intense.

This is not a difficult record to listen to, but I am unsettled and awed by the way in which Foster draws us deeper, track by track, into her own particular kind of darkness. This reaches its heaviest, blackest shade on track six’s 11’ 45” skronk meets Minnie Ripperton epic rendition of Schumann and Eichendorff’s “Auf einer Burg”. Just when you think you can’t take it any more, the noise dissipates, leaving us with three minutes of acoustic bitter-sweetness in “Nähe des Geliebten”.

Perhaps Foster is the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” here – except of course that Foster knows that under the sheep’s clothing, the wolf outfit remains merely another disguise. Like so many of the greatest pop talents of the last 50 years, Foster plays in a hall of mirrors, not because she enjoys playing games, but because out of this unlikely set of refracted surfaces, something new and true emerges.

Originally published in The Wire, 2006.

Josephine Foster – Hazel

Josephine Foster
Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You
Locust (L 68)
Chicago-based Josephine Foster’s Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You has a lot in common with various shining stars of the current new folk scene, such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Coco Rosie. At first the singing sounds affected, and one is distracted by the mannerisms and deliberate archaisms. Then one notices how beautiful Foster’s voice is and how gorgeous the songwriting here is, and all the isms start to disappear. A classically trained singer, who’s also been part of two other Locust acts, Born Heller and The Supposed, Foster accompanies herself here on acoustic guitar, the vocals sometimes multitracked into delicate lovely tonal spirals. The sound is warm and intimate, displaced in charming ways by the addition of a variety of string instruments, castanets, bells, kazoos and other sonic incidentals. There’s a nostalgia at work here in these songs, that feels like a very far off radio station broadcasting old songs. But the person singing these songs is in fact very close by, and this makes hearing her sing all the more heart-breaking.

originally published in Signal to Noise, 2005.

jongibson

Jon Gibson – Visitations I & II + Thirties (New Tone, NT 6747)
Jon Gibson – Two Solo Pieces (New Tone, NT 6756)

The archeology of the 1970s downtown New York minimalist music continues apace with the reissue of two LPs by one of the unsung heroes of the epoch, Jon Gibson. Gibson, composer, keyboard and woodwind player was a key figure in this scene, playing with La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley in various groups, and as a founding member of the Philip Glass ensemble. Both of these disks are the equal of anything being done by Gibson’s better known collaborators – which is to say that they are remarkable.

Visitations I – II collects two “16 Multi Track-Textured Environmental Soundscapes” from 1973, mixing percussion and flutes with a variety of field-recordings of water, wind and so on. These are lovely sprawling pieces, gently pulsating sound fields, and among the most effective recordings that integrate water sound that I’ve heard. Even better is Thirties, a previously unissued sprawling keyboard driven piece that was a key part of Gibson’s oeuvre in the 1970s. With strong connections to Glass, Reich and Riley’s keyboard works, and showing the influence of Indonesian gamelan, African polyrhythms and Indian raga rhythm cycles that marks many of the key minimalist works of the time, Thirties is a delightfully laconic piece of minimal electric funk, featuring Gibson on keyboard, and a great ensemble including Gavin Bryars on percussion and David Rosenboom on electronic violin. Perhaps the closest comparison is mid-1970s Miles, without the trumpet, guitar and drums.

Two Solo Pieces collects two tracks from a 1977 LP, Cycles, a beautiful 22 minute solo pipe organ drone with a warm, drifting tone, and an untitled raga-like solo flute of great charm. Three previously unissued pieces of great interest follow. Melody IV Part I from 1975 is a David Behrmann-like systems piece of interweaved harmonic clusters performed by the SEM Ensemble in 1975. Melody III from the same year features Gibson’s solo organ in a Glass/Reich systems mode. Song 1 from 1972 is a gorgeous, looping melodic minimal piece that features a young Arthur Russell on cello and Barbara Benary on violin. Truly a treasure trove.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006.