Filed under: Mali
I just got to get this off my chest: The Goldmine Rating System is for idiots and liars.
Record collectors are a nefarious bunch. It’s a moniker that I have generally shied away from, preferring music nerd. I am no vinyl purist. The only reason that I have return to the vinyl wonderland is that was the only way to find what I was looking for – which was something that was not available anywhere else. And I will admit that vinyl does sound the better than any of the other options – that is, if the vinyl is in good shape. But since I do not have to resources to travel the world scouring flea markets from Tokyo to Timbuktu, I have to rely on record dealers…
Now don’t get me wrong, there are some honorable dealers out there. In fact, the person who sold me this record has been known to throw an extra record or two in with my orders. But more than a few records have fallen short of their description. This record was listed as Very Good Plus, which is: “Cover suffers from folding, scuffing of edges, spine splits, discoloration… Now the signs of age and handling are starting to show. You can notice some clear wear on the surface, there is some noise (pops and crackles) but no skips or major warps”. Here’s the criteria of what classifies as Bad: “The cover and contents are badly damaged or partly missing. Cover can also be missing. The record does not play properly due to scratches, bad surface noise, etc… Unless it is something very rare it is not worth listing in this condition”. And there’s the catch – this record is rare. And due to the scarcity of the records like this one, I have learned to live with some fairly noisy recordings.
As for Tentemba Jazz du Mali, I do know that the band consisted of members Sékou Kanté – who later joined the Rail Band – Ousmane Diabaté and Amadou Touré. They released two albums in 1977 and one more in 1978. As far as I know, this was the second of only two singles that the band recorded.
If you have any information, please contact me.
Catalog number B B 229 on Badmos Records of Côte d’Ivoire, released 1977.
Filed under: Malaysia
The film songs of Bollywood are the pop music of India. It is only in the last couple of decades that the film industry of India has come to the attention of the Western World, and even more recently – Hollywood. But those films – and the songs contain there in – have influence music around the world for many years. The films have been popular in Africa, Asia and the Middle East dating back to the 1950s. Besides being popular with Indians who have migrated around the world, millions of non-Indians enjoy Bollywood films for many years.
I have seen an Israeli album of filmi songs in Hebrew. Then there is a live album by Usha Uthup that was recorded in Nairobi. I have a Malay pressing of S. Hazarasingh album and a South African pressing of Van Shipley album. As for M. Shariff, I have seen one other single by him performing songs from the film Bobby, on what is apparently his own label.
If you have any further information about M. Shariff, or his Bombay Orchestra, please contact me or leave a comment.
Catalog number MSF 5020 on M. Shariff Scope Trading of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. No release date listed
Filed under: Iran
This week’s post comes to us from Jesse Kaminsky. His weekly radio show – The Intercontinental – can be heard on WMBR in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For those of us who do not live within range, the show is available as a podcast. He also has a rather extensive collection of Iranian singles.
Information on the popular music of pre-revolutionary Iran is hard to come by if you don’t read Farsi. Most reissues of the music are in Farsi and have little to no liner notes, save for Göhkan Aya’s well researched essay for the Raks Raks Raks compilation released last year on Raks Discos. This is perhaps due in part to the political situation surrounding the music and culture, much of what was recorded prior to the 1978 revolution became illegal with the new regime and was destroyed when found by the police. Performers who had substantial careers prior to the revolution had to flee the country or risk persecution as even the simple act of a woman performing as a soloist became illegal, not to mention the performance of westernized Persian music that had become increasingly popular under the last years of the Shah. Records that you find now from that period in Iran have likely survived many hardships and they almost always show it in one way or another.
Stuart has already covered much of the cultural history of Iran in his previous posts so I’ll leave that for now and say that this track from the singer Pouran. She began singing in 1951 at the age of 18, using the stage name of “Unknown Lady” or “Lady Anonymous Singer, ” depending on how you translate the Farsi. She married her vocal instructor, violinist Abbas Shapouri, and altered her stage name first to “Lady Shapouri, ” then to the simpler “Pouran, ” collaborating with Shapouri for the duration of their seven-year marriage to produce some of her most popular songs. At the height of her career, she was well regarded as an actress and singer, possibly recording as many as 2000 songs, although that’s really an impossible number to confirm. After her divorce, she continued to perform and record, often appearing on Iranian National Radio, until the late 70’s, when the revolution forced her to stop performing and flee the country. She died in 1991 during a visit to Iran and is buried in the Imamzadeh Taaher cemetery in the city of Karaj.
As an example of the difficulty in finding information on this era of recorded music, this line from the Google translation of her Wikipedia page jumped out at me: “Art said his toe in Salt Lady nephew heartsome other is born of that era” in reference to her musical association with her first husband.
Without much of a discography available, I’d guess that this record is from the later part of her career. It’s released on Ahang Rooz, the first and largest of pre-revolutionary Iranian record labels, and has the analog synthesizer sound that seems to have enjoyed some popularity in the later 70’s. The single includes the two songs: “Shahr-e Paeez” (The City of Autumn) and “Ye Roozam Maa Ra Faramoosh Mikoni” (One Day You Will Forget Me).
Thanks to Hamineh, Kourosh and Ramin for their help on this post as well as for all the other information that they’ve helped me with. Any factual errors or misunderstandings are mine.
Catalog number AR-2519 on Ahang Rooz of Iran. No release date listed.
Filed under: Ethiopia
Tilahoun Gessesse was one of the most popular singers of Ethiopia‘s “Golden Age” in the 1960s – nicknamed “The Voice”. There are four posts (so far) that cover the legendary musician over at the mighty Likembe blog.
Here is Tilahun’s biography from Ethio LA3:
Artist Dr. Tilahun Gessesse was born to Woizero Gete Gurmu and Ato Gessesse Wolde Kidan on Sunday, September 27, 1942, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. When he was fourteen years old, he was taken by his grandfather to Woliso. While he was in Woliso, he began attending Ras Gobena Elementary School. As time went by, his interest in music became so clear that his grandfather urged him to concentrate in his school studies instead of music. On the other hand, the Ras Gobena School Principal Mr. Shedad (Sudanian) who realized Tilahun’s interest in music urged him to go to Sudan to pursue his interest in music. Even though young Tilahun did not go to Sudan to pursue his music career, he took Mr. Shedad’s advice very seriously. When artists form Hager Feker Theater, Woizro Negatwa Kelkai, Ato Eyoel Yohanes and others came to Ras Gobena Elementary School to perform, Tilahun grabbed this opportunity to discuss his interest in music with Ato Eyoel. Young Tialhun was told to go to Addis Ababa if he wanted to pursue his career in music. […]
Once Tilahun arrived in Addis Ababa, he immediately began to show his talent. He was first hired by the Hager Feker Association, which is nowadays known as Hager Feker Theater.
After a few years at the Hager Feker Theater, Tilahun joined the Imperial Body Guard Band where he became a leading star singer. He then moved to the National Theater where he became famous and successful with his wonderful voice. Tilahun was so famous that he appeared three times in front of His Majesty, Emperor Haile Selassie I. During his visit with his Majesty, His Majesty advised Tilahun not to abuse his gifted talent. Tilahun kept his majesty’s advice and has become the king of Ethiopian music and his name has also become a household name among all Ethiopians.
Tilahoun Gessesse passed away on April 19th of 2009. A state funeral was held on three days later in Addis Ababa.
Catalog number PH 7-224 on Philips Records Ethiopia. No release date listed.
Filed under: India
[Note: This is a re-print of a guest post that I wrote for Jonathon Ward’s amazing Excavated Shellac back in September of last year. For that post there is a song from one of Van Shipley’s earliest 78, where as here you have a song from the 70s.]
The earliest known report of anyone playing slide guitar was Gabriel Davion, a native of India who had been kidnapped by Portuguese sailors and was brought to Hawaii in 1876. Of course, Indian string instruments, like the gottuvadhyam and the vichitra veena, use a slide are known to have existed since the 11th century. But it was not until Ernest Ka’ai and his Royal Hawaiian Troubadours’ toured in 1919 that the slide guitar was introduced to India.
Most people agree that Van Shipley was the first electric guitarist in India and the first to record instrumental versions of film songs beginning sometime in the early 1950s. Van was born in the city of Lucknow in Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. When most people hear his name, they say “But that’s not an Indian name!”. Well, that’s because not everyone in India is Hindu. Shipley was Methodist.
Inspired by his mother, who played the sitar, Shipley took to music at a young age. His first instrument was the violin. He attended Saharanpur to study Indian Classical music. There, he studied under Ustad Bande Hassan Khan and his son Ustad Zinda Hassan Khan, who were both famous Khyal singers from Northern India. At the same time, he took lessons in western music from an American identified as Dr. Wizer.
Shipley then returned to Lucknow to attend college, where he became involved with All India Radio. After college, we went to the city of Pune to work for the Prabhat Film Company before moving to the center of India’s film industry, Bombay (Mumbai). It was there that he caught the attention of producer and director Raj Kapoor, who spotted him performing on stage. Kapoor enlisted Shipley to play violin on the soundtrack for Barsaat (Rain) in 1949. The following year, Shipley added his electric guitar to a dream sequence in Awaara (The Tramp), which brought him to the attention of The Gramophone Co. of India. In 1955, Shipley teamed up with accordionist Enoch Daniels, who he had met while working for the Prabhat Film Company in Pune. This musical partnership ultimately lasted for many years.
Shipley set off the steel guitar craze in India. Other steel guitar players from the 78 era include Batuk Nandy, Brij Bhushan Kabra, Kazi Aniruddha, Mohon Bhattacharya, Nalin Mazumdar, Robin Paul, S. Hazarasingh, Sujit Nath and Sunil Ganguly. But most of these guitarists only recorded Tagore songs, with only a few (Kazi Aniruddha and S. Hazarasingh) recording Filmi tunes (Sunil Ganguly and Batuk Nandy would start doing film songs in the 60s and the 70s, respectively).
One of the most distinct things that set Shipley apart was that he played an eight string guitar, which he had designed and built to give him the drone sound that was more common in Indian Classical music than in the Film songs. Almost all of the other Indian steel guitarists played a National Dual Six Console guitar. Shipley also designed his own electric violin as well, which he dubbed the ‘Gypsy Violin’ and used on many of his later records.
Shipley’s first album, The Man with The Golden Guitar, a title that stuck with him the rest of his career, was released in 1962. He would go on to release an album every year until 1982, as well as a dozen or so EPs. He also tour the world, playing shows in Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean Islands, Suriname, Guyana and the U.S., including the cities of New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo and Detroit. Besides recording, Shipley acted in a few films as well, including 1964s Cha Cha Cha.
Shipley died on March 8, 2008 of a heart attack at his home in Mumbia. His daughter Ingrid is an artist and musician who lives in New York, and his nephew Valentine is a singer/songwriter in India.
Thanks to Derek Taylor at Bagatellen for the information.
Catalog number TAEC. 1648 on Odeon / EMI for The Gramophone Co. of India, released 1970.
Filed under: Cambodia
As I have mentioned before, I sometimes regret having omitted Latin Music from the scope of this site. At the time I decided to start doing this, I thought that I was pretty sure I knew all that I needed to know about the subject. And I have since been proven wrong. There’s a vast amount of amazing material out there. But I really do not need an excuse to buy more records than I already do. Maybe one of these days when I feel that I’ve got the rest of the world taken care of, I will turn my attention to that region.
But the influence of Latin Music on the rest of the world is very evident. You can hear it in the Middle East in the music of Egypt‘s Salah Ragab and Iran‘s Manouchehr to South East Asia with Phoem Khlaibanleng & His International Mixed Mahori Orchestra of Thailand and the Non-Stop Dancing bands of Singapore with their cowbells and timbales… And of course, it can be heard in certain passages of Bollywood film songs (Really, what musical style has Bollywood not incorporated? Maybe Black Metal… But I’m not 100% sure on that.). But the biggest influence can be heard in Africa.
Congolese Rumba – or Soukous – was the most popular music for he majority of Sub-Saharan Africa. But you can hear elements of Latin Music in Nigerian Highlife, Guinean and Malian Manding Jazz, Ethiopian jazz…
And would be remiss in not mentioning Santana… I think I’ve heard versions of either Black Magic Woman, Evil Woman or Oye Como Va from just about every corner of the globe.
There are two sites (That I know of – I’m willing to bet there’s a few more out there.) that cover the Latin Music that this site would cover – Garage Latino and Super Sonido.
You can find information on Sinn Sisamouth here.
Catalog number 45-5012 on Wat Phnom Disques of Cambodia. No release date listed.
Filed under: Madagascar
Our latest guest post is by Gwynne Margaret Bruck, who is a fan of the site. She recently traveled to Madagascar to attend a Famadihana ceremony, but was unsuccessful. So, instead she came back with a stack of Malagasy singles. If you have any interesting records or cassettes that you wish to share from some of the countries that we have yet to hear from – say like Bangladesh, Central African Republic, Kazakhstan, Libya, Somalia or Tanzania – or countries that we need to hear more from – like Laos, Sudan or Syria – please get in touch.
Inspired by the collections of this site and Sublime Frequencies I decided on my recent trip to Madagascar to do a little record hunting. A co-worker from Ghana had suggested I bring a record with me to show people in case I should run into any language barriers. I followed his advice and it worked far better than I expected. Outside my hotel in Antanarivo were people selling local crafts and one day I showed the valiha (Malagasy bamboo zither) salesman a 45 and asked if he knew where I could find a Malagasy version. He didn’t have any but he took me to the tin can toy car salesman who asked me to wait twenty minutes and he’d be right back. He literally ran down the street and the valiha salesman explained he had some records at home. Twenty minutes later he returned with a stack of about ten of the filthiest cracked and scratched 45s I’d ever seen. He told me they were all Malagasy but as I looked through them I found a few Boney M‘s. I told him I would buy the Malagsy stuff only and he tried to persuade me on the greatness of Boney M even though I told him I could get those back home. I bought all the local stuff for around $5 each although I suspected they would be impossible to play. The price seemed steep and I actually did talk him down a little but in the end I figured he needed the money more than me. For the next couple of days until I left Antanarivo I could not leave the hotel without men chasing me down to sell me their records. We would go behind this gate in a kind of a shady back alley sort of spot for the transactions as though it was drug deal. As I would shuffle through their records to sift out the Boney M’s they would look at the disc, sing a bit of the song it contained and show me the corresponding dance. In the end they threw in the Boney M’s for free and I ended up with around forty Malagasy 45s.
The two main record labels I found were Discomad and Kaiamba. I could be wrong but I suspect the Kaiamba Orchestra might have been made up of various popular musicians on the label. I found some of the Orchestra members’ names on other records I had obtained, most notably Jean Kely. Here is a link to a video of a Jean Kely and Basth performance from 1999.
Catalog number K.77 ER 3 on Kaiamba Records of Madagascar. No release date listed.
Filed under: Algeria
Every now and then, I stumble upon a record that’s a complete mystery. Anyone out there ever heard Arabic Zouk before? I know I sure have not.
The single was released on a French label called Antilles Musique Diffusion. The liner notes – which according to the Google translator read “Mr. Mallek young composer, still unknown to you, has 45 cm in this attractive entry you” – were written by Tinou Lavital. But Lavital was a well known manager, musician and producer from Guadeloupe… I am assuming that Mallek and Lavital must have crossed paths in France, since Algeria had been and Guadeloupe still is part of the French colonial empire. But beyond that, I got nothing.
If you have any further information on the band, please contact me or leave a comment.
Note: The song title Rohi Ya Hafida is listed as Rouhi Rouhi Ya Hafida on the label of the actual record.
Thanks to Anis Bousbia for helping me at least figure out where Mallek Mohamed was from…
Catalog number AMD 008 on Antilles Musique Diffusion of France. No other information available.
Filed under: Hong Kong
♬ 小拜年
♬ 大拜年
There were two different music scenes in Hong Kong in the late Sixties. First were the garage bands like Teddy Robin & The Playboys, The Mystics, Joe Jr. & The Side Effects, Menace, Lotus, and the like. These bands generally sung in English and covered the latest songs from the UK or the US. And then there were recording artists from the Shaw Brothers film studio, like Nancy Sit and Chan Po Chu (a. k. a. Connie Chan) who recorded Chinese versions of international hits. At the same time, there were also a handful of studio musicians churning out instrumental versions of not only Western songs, but Westernized Chinese songs as well.
Much like their label mates The New Wave, The Apollo Guitar Band were apparently one of these studio bands. I have seen a few other releases by the band, but none of them feature any pictures or credits of musicians. The band’s name may have been taken from the Teisco / Kawai manufactured Apollo model guitar from that time period.
If you have any further information on the band, please contact me or leave a comment.
Thanks to Mack Hagood for translating the titles for me.
Catalog number NWLP 8035 on New Wave Record of Hong Kong, manufactured in Malaysia by Life Records. No release date listed.
Filed under: Taiwan
This week, we have a guest post by my good friend Mack Hagood. Mack and I go way back – all the way to high school (which was a very long time ago). Every few years or so, we’ll lose touch, and then somehow our paths cross again. Besides his Far East Audio Review and managing the mysterious masked Asian A Go Go band Red Chamber, as well as occasionally touring with Pine Top Seven, he is working on his doctorate for Ethnomusicology at Indiana University.
Here’s a Christmas gift to Radiodiffusion listeners: two yuletide tracks from the Taiwanese 60s instro album X’mas A GO GO. I found this LP on a Taipei vinyl hunting trip I that chronicled on my now-defunct website, the Far Eastern Audio Review.
There are several outstanding features of this record, the first being the cover, which has become an integral part of my annual holiday decorations. Damn, these cats look sharp. The back cover features a cross emerging from a jolly wreath of holly and silver bells—nothing like celebrating a kid’s birthday with a foreshadowing of his eventual execution. Also interesting is the name of this band, the Blue Star Chorus–quite an odd name for a Ventures-inspired instrumental rock band. (I am certain that my translation of lan xing he chang tuan is at least literally correct, though the album doesn’t provide its own English translation of the band name.)
As for the Christmas music, we’ve got one standard and one curveball. First off is a sassy chug-a-chug take on “Silent Night, ” complete with slide guitar and vibraphone. Nothing silent or holy about this one.
Next, we’ve got “I Love to Whistle.” What is a 1930s show tune made famous by the likes of Fats Waller and Deanna Durbin doing on a Christmas album? Well, listen to the first four bars—sounds a lot like “Frosty the Snowman, ” right? Methinks we’re hearing the result of a little cross-cultural confusion. Perhaps one of the boys briefly heard “Frosty” in a Christmas context and assumed it was actually the older tune. Can’t say for sure, but really, who cares? Blue Star lays down some cool dueling guitar action, with one of the guitarists making a “stinger” sound that seems to be a Blue Star trademark.
This album was released in November of the 56th year of the Minguo calendar— better-known to Gregorian calendar fans as 1967–on Union Record (sic), a label probably best known in the West for its counterfeit Ronnie James Dio records.
Catalog number CMX-8015 on Union Record of Taiwan, released 1967.
