Giant Donut Discs ® – January 2012
9. 1. 2012 | Rubriky: Articles,Giant Donut Discs
[by Ken Hunt, London] The batch of donuts has a great deal, on one hand, to do with current commissions; and on the other, choosing music that had nothing to do with work. The music is courtesy of Bessie Smith, The Kossoy Sisters with Erik Darling, Damien Barber & Mike Wilson, Rosa Imhof, Ida Schmidig-Imhof and Frieda Imhof-Betschart, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Party, Martin Hrbáč, The Notting Hillbillies, Mobarak and Molabakhsh Nuri, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt & Musicians of Rajasthan and Peter Case.
Frosty Morning Blues – Bessie Smith
This performance from January 1924 has a bare-bones accompaniment. Jimmy Jones (piano) and Harry Reser (guitar) do the honours. E. Brown’s slow blues starts out lyrically as a quite predictable tale, the sort of blues terrain where you can see the rhymes coming. It’s one of those songs where the man that she loves has vamoosed and left her alone. “Did you ever wake up on a frosty morning and discover your good man’s gone?” is the question she asks. Then she starts recalling how he wasn’t handsome and reminiscing. Her fire isn’t burning, for instance. She ends philosophically stating plainly that when you lose a man, he’s as good as dead. A perfect little vignette, packed with detail, with frost (rather than frostiness) as a metaphor. From The Complete Recordings Vol. 1 (Columbia Legacy C2K 47091, 1991)
I’ll Fly Away – The Kossoy Sisters with Erik Darling
This was recorded in August 1956 and released later that year. The New York-based twins Ellen and Irene Kossoy – Irene Saletan and Ellen Christenson, as they became – were three months past 17 years old when they made their debut album for Tradition of southern mountain material, singing close harmonies and accompanying themselves on banjo and guitar. On the album Erik Darling came in to beef up their sound. This most moreish track is a stand-out.
What sets them apart are their harmony vocals on this sacred song. The album notes say they had learned it from the singing of James and Martha Carlson. Listening to the album in 2002, their previous activities were blank pages. They turned out to be yet more of Pete Seeger’s children, having attended a summer camp at which he had, by all account, performed. After Bowling Green, they played the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. There was further festival appearances, marriages, parenthood and minimal recording activity.
But something else did happen and that was it appearing in Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), renewing interest in the sisters and I truly hope the arrival of new pension plan in the form of royalties from that film. From Bowling Green (Tradition TCD 3007/1, 2002)
More information is at http://www.kossoysisters.com/
The Old Songs – Damien Barber & Mike Wilson
The title song of this duo’s album it may be, but it shoots me back to old friendships with its authors, Pete Bellamy and Bob Copper. Bob wrote the words and Pete the tune. According to the album notes, Pete sent it to the Wilson Family and few decades later it popped out in this form – “A twenty to thirty year gestation period for a Wilson Family song, is not unusual.”
It condenses many of Bob’s most heartfelt themes and takes in the longevity of the old songs (and gormlessness of modern ones), good ale and being glad to be alive. Yes, it gets cod in places but both Pete and Bob must have had twinkles in their eyes when they put the song together. Bob liked a spot of Sleepy John Estes and Pete had moments of rapture to the Rolling Stones.
Damien Barber and Mike Wilson net that quality of knowingness and even get a bit of post-Bellamy bleating in, too. From The Old Songs (DBS004, 2011)
Trois Jüüzli – Rosa Imhof, Ida Schmidig-Imhof and Frieda Imhof-Betschart
Rosa Imhof and Ida Schmidig-Imhof are sisters and Frieda Imhof-Betschart is their sister-in-law. This recording was made in Alois Imhof’s alpine pasture hut at Sali in the Muotatal district of the Swiss canton of Schwyz in June 1979. Muotatal historically was remote from mainstream Swiss society. In isolation a form of vocal music called Juuz evolved. Jüüzli is its diminutive form with vowel change and the Swiss-German -li diminutive suffix and refers to a kind of yodelling. It defies expectations of what yodelling sounds like.
The three women weave wordless vocal lines and harmonies in ways that, three decades on, still trounce expectations. The pieces last just over three minutes in total. The first, Dr Nägelibärgler, is named after the ;Nägelibärgler mountain the second, Höch Turä Jüüzli’, another mountain called Höch Turä and the last, Z’Butzener’s (At the Butzener’s), after a surname. Returning to this collection, first released in 1979, came about because of back-researching Switzerland’s roots-based music traditions for R2‘s article about Nørn that appeared in its November/December 2011 issue. From “Jüüzli” – Jodel du Muotatal (Le Chant du Monde LDX 274 716, 1990)
Allah hoo, Allah hoo, Allah hoo – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Party
The Party weaves lead and call-and-response vocal parts on this hamd – a qawwali praise song form directed at God/Allah – set in the light ‘mixed’ (mishra) raga ‘Mishra Khamaj’. Recorded at the Kufa Gallery on 14 December 1989, it is era-defining. It is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before all the bally-hoo. From Traditional Sufi Qawwalis – Live in London – Vol. I (Navras NRCD 0016, 1993)
Suchovské hudecké – Martin Hrbáč
The Moravian folk tradition of the Czech Republic is astonishingly vibrant and the notes to this particular track explain that Martin Hrbáč has been viewed as a successor to the Horňácko ([Moravian] Highlands) bandleader Jožka Kubik. A bandmaster himself, Hrbáč is a superb fiddle player of the ‘first violin chair’ kind, a bass player and vocalist. This instrumental performance is driving melodically with under-melodies glimpsed like petticoats to the dancing main melody. It captures the elemental force of Moravian village band music. The track originally appeared on his 1995 album, Horňácký hudec on the Gnosis label. From the various artists’ compilation Antologie moravské lidové hudby/Traditional Folk Music in Moravia – Horňácko (Indies MAM 486-2, 2011)
Feel Like Going Home – The Notting Hillbillies
The Notting Hillbillies were Brendan Croker, Guy Fletcher, Mark Knopfler and Steve Phillips and they put on a very good show. No idea how much they worked together. My memory was that it was just their Missing … Presumed Having A Good Time album and its supporting tour. But I was wrong. Apparently they continued to do occasional gigs into the late 1990s.
They weren’t a spin-off of Dire Straits, as some suggested. They were, if memory serves me well, a gathering of three old friends – Brendan Croker, Mark Knopfler and Steve Phillips – augmented by Guy Fletcher on keyboards, who co-produced the album with Knopfler. They started out in Holbeck – an area of Leeds I got to know some later that decade when my son was living there. The street he lived on is now gone – well, Runswick Place is probably still there but his place certainly isn’t. It was bulldozed.
Clearly, as far as Knopfler was concerned, there was no financial imperative to play. He was sitting pretty. The story I recall hearing was that he had done it out of the kindness of his heart, friendship and the chance to play and record with some mates. The consequent trip had put Croker and Phillips on a secure footing financially. Anyway, that was the story I remember.
At one of their gigs supporting the album, they signed the CD artwork – hence the defaced cover. Before the gig I interviewed Guy Fletcher for an article in the El Cerrito-based Keyboard. The concert review – for another magazine – was grossly manhandled. One subbed change replaced ‘claque’ with ‘clique’ but worse was to occur. It was the infant days of computer spell-checking and jettisoning dictionaries.
Feel Like Going Home was a Charlie Rich credit and typical of the kind of repertoire that Brendan Croker was plying outside the Hillbillies with the 5 O’Clock Shadows – one of the most entertaining and illuminating rock bands on the pub-rock circuit during the 1980s. This song freeze-frames several periods in my life. What most affects me about this track is the tastefulness of the arrangement, the power of Brendan’s voice and the sentiments of the song. Feel Like Going Home was a parting glass on the album – and in concert. From Missing … Presumed Having A Good Time (Phonogram/Vertigo 842 671-2, 1990)
Qalandari Tune – Mobarak and Molabakhsh Nuri
This untitled, rhythmically driving instrumental is from Baluchistan and the Sufi Qalandar tradition. Those of this tradition tread a profoundly Sufi path and pursue (if that’s quite the word) a way of life that often clashes with the orthodoxies of mainstream society. Mobarak plays the benju, a stringed instrument that cannibalises typewriter parts, though the times are a-changing and there is no knowing how the supply of manual typewriters will stand up. This tune sways rhythmically like shifting sands. The double-CD from which it comes is a complete joy and essential listening for anyone interested in the wider extent of Sufi music, beyond qawwali in other words, in South Asia. From the various artists’ anthology Troubadours of Allah – Sufi Music from the Indus Valley (Wergo SM 1617 2, 1999)
Helo mharo suno – Vishwa Mohan Bhatt & Musicians of Rajasthan
The Rajasthani “Helo mharo suno” translates as ‘Hear me calling you’ or ‘Hear my entreaty’. It is a praise song to the medieval holy man Baba Ramdev, one of the region’s most revered Hindu deities and Islamic pirs (saints). His modern-day is concentrated in today’s Rajasthan and Gujarat but stretches to Madhya Pradesh and Sind in Pakistan. He is a great unifying figure, famed for bringing together people of different religions, sects and castes.
The Rajasthani classical maestro, Vishwa Mohan Bhatt plays the classical guitar hybrid, Mohan vina on this album and his instrumental lines weave together marvellously well with the folksier regional instruments and vocals. I wrote the notes for Desert Slide and it remains one of my favourite recording projects of his. I have never stopped playing it. In fact it is the album of Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s that I have played the most, even more than his and Ry Cooder’s Meeting By The River for which they earned a Grammy. It came back into steady rotation whilst working on an article about Sufi music. From Desert Slide (Sense World Music 085, 2006)
More Than Curious – Peter Case
Got to interview Peter Case a couple of times down the years. This particular track on his eponymous solo debut was one of the tracks produced by T-Bone Burnett and Mitchell Froom. The production has a real presence – notably the drum and the electric guitar sound. It stands out.
But it is the song itself that does it for me. “I’m the kind/That’s always takin’ things apart…” the song begins (and concludes). “If I could tonight/I’d take a look in your heart.” Ordinarily I couldn’t have afforded a Japanese import at the time of this album’s CD release but I was the London correspondent for Tower Records’ Pulse! magazine and got staff discount for this one. From Peter Case (Geffen (Japan) 32XD 812, 1986)
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