Ideal worlds
A beginner's guide to world music
BOSAVI
Rainforest music from Papua New Guinea
Smithsonian Folkways
CESARIA EVORA
São
Vicente di LongeLusafrica
ANOUAR BRAHEM
Astrakhan Cafe
ECM
As a descriptive category, "world music" may have serious drawbacks, but these are part of its general appeal. By trashing the musicological taxonomies and nationalist labels beloved of entertainment multinationals and the CRTC, and throwing together mainstream pop, millenium-old classical traditions, field recordings and avant-garde music from every tradition and culture, it encourages us to find our own systems of meaning.
To make sense of it all, it is useful to think not in terms of nations but in terms of historical flows of information – the silk road, the spread of Islam, the rise of the Mongol, European and American empires, each in turn building the skeleton of our global culture. Then, within every local culture, distinguish between field recordings, pop and classical musics, while trying to understand how each of these elements differs from its Western equivalents.
The American intelligentsia seems particularly fond of field recordings – perhaps out of nostalgia for their own past, where they imagine themselves as Rousseau's "noble savages", self-reliant and uncorrupted by power and knowledge. And so they project upon these recordings the strange, quasi-religious notion of "authenticity," as they do upon their own equivalent, the Smithsonian's Harry Smith collection, now consecrated as the foundation of American folk music.
But field recordings are not the equivalent of folk music. In cultures where music is more firmly woven into daily life, they are more like aural documentaries, and what they document is not tradition but practice. They are snapshots – historically and philosophically, what was captured on tape 30 or 50 years ago is no more "authentic" than what is recorded today. There is a well known example of the first recordings of rainforest pygmies, half a century ago: when the researcher asked for a performance of the most ancient song they knew, he got a strangely altered but still recognizable rendition of "My Darling Clementine".
Smithonian Folkways' Bosavi, a three-CD compilation of music from Papua New Guinea, skirts around this issue. On the one hand, the first CD is devoted to "guitar bands of the 1990s," a profoundly "inauthentic" genre spawned by recent American evangelical missionaries. They don't actually start singing "Kumbaya," but it's pretty close and pretty dull.
The other CDs, sounds and songs of everyday life and of ceremonies, are more traditional and more interesting. This is mostly because the extended length of each track (seven to 20 minutes where most collections would have stuck to three-minute samples), which lets us hear not just the song itself, but how it arises from work or play, and then breaks up.
The music itself lacks the intense, otherworldly beauty of the polyphony of the neighbouring Solomon Islands, or the fluttering quality one finds in other rainforest cultures, of light flickering through the tree canopy or of the sudden burst of wings as a startled bird takes flight. A little drab, but that's reality for you, or rather realism, which, as has been pointed out, is not about showing the world as it is, but about persuading the viewer that the world resembles what is being shown.
The French and Germans, by contrast, are more likely to see the classical tradition as the truest expression of a culture, and this, too, is probably a projection of their own mythologies – in this case of genius and authority, respectively.
It would be interesting to hear some field recordings of Cesaria Evora in her early days – her current sound seems to have been tailored for the European (up)market, after ’80s recordings heavy on second-rate synths. What she's doing now isn't folk music, it's more like art-song, a role played by jazz standards in America.
On São Vicente di Longe she dabbles in Cuban forms, providing a bit of a change from her last three releases, but it doesn't do much for me. Instead, I would recommend investigating some of her Lusafrica label-mates, Teofilo Chantre (who wrote some of her best known songs, and who has a pleasant though less powerful voice), or Fantcha (whose music is a little less classical and whose voice is a little less deep, but whose repertoire is a bit more varied).
Though better known for their jazz and contemporary classical recordings, ECM also has a distinguished discography in world and folk music, and Anouar Brahem is one of their stars.
This Tunisian oud (lute) virtuoso's previous recordings have ranged from classical to chamber jazz, but this one is slightly rootsier, recorded with a Turkish clarinetist, and using musical motifs from across the Islamic world (Northern Africa to Turkmenistan). Though Brahem teaches Arab classical music (a form not known for conciseness), the pieces here are relatively short, almost as simple as folk tunes. It's a superb recording – unexpected, immediate – but it's not world music, only the songs of three musicians who have seen the world.
Like Bosavi, Astrakhan Café captures the essence of a culture, but it is still the capturing culture which determines what is considered essential.
BOSAVI 3/5
CESARIA EVORA 3/5
ANOUAR BRAHEM 4/5
TIMOTHY C. HECK
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