Return of the World Music Thread: 2012

i'm listening to an album on spotify right now - it sounds like my kind of thing. are you a fan of alice bag btw? had that kind of "spazz" thing i think you see in her. i heard a great presentation about her at IASPM that discussed her as mediating performing bodies w/ audience/receptive bodies and then went into crazy lacan territory. def more poppy than a lot of more out-there vocalists (like that tzadik + post-meredith monk style stuff that i really love)

The albums are good. The second one I think is better realized than the first. The vocals on the first are more subdued, the second are a lot tougher and rockier. But the live recordings are where it's at for the most part. I think her vocals live show a lot more range (not octave range but range in feeling and style).

I don't know Alice Bag. (At work now so I can't check anything out.)

(Also the spazz thing is more about her performance. It's changing somewhat anyway. She's taking dance lessons.)

Also, the first album is 2007, and they've toured a ton since then so their sound has changed a lot.

Let's see. Justification for posting this on this thread. . . I saw an interview in which the keyboardist mentioned being influenced by klezmer music (not particularly evident!).

I'm still liking the first Staff Benda Bilili album (Congolese band led by 4 street musicians who had polio as kids) and need to hear the latest. They're coming to my hood soon.

http://www.afropop.org/wp/4562/spirit-of-angola-granular/

1st of some upcoming Ned Sublette posts from his recent trip to Angola

nice

he mentions Mona Star, Angolan kuduro artist

I also want to check this out:

Alma is the new recording collaboration between six-time GRAMMY-nominated Cuban composer and pianist, Omar Sosa, and celebrated Italian trumpet and flugelhorn player, Paolo Fresu. The CD features guest cello contributions on four tracks by the masterful Brazilian conductor, arranger, producer, and cellist, Jaques Morelenbaum.

Ned did not mention that one. No Angolan aspects to it that I know if

DC based afropop band with horns Elikeh, led by a singer from Togo, have a new album out that's not bad.

The vocals at the beginning of the first track on Sa Dingding's The Coming Ones (which corresponds with the first Sa Dingding video I posted in this thread) sounds a lot of a milder timbre version of typical Mauritanian singing. I am pretty curious about where it's coming from. I spent a little time hunting down Mongolian music on youtube, but didn't hear anything close. I wonder if the sound is emerging from any particular ethnic tradition included within China, or if Sa Dingding is going outside that tradition and simply borrowing ideas from elsewhere. Half tempted to start a thread about the album but I've had trouble finding much to say about it.

The Hmong choir with ridiculously heavy electronic beat version of Ode to Joy on the second track is probably the most grating thing on the album.

You probably saw this broad statement on the internets that may not help much re that track:

Sa Dingding's latest album, The Coming Ones, is inspired by her trip to Sichuan
and Yunnan provinces

Yes. I guess I could look for music from Sichuan and Yunnan but I suspect the sound I'm trying to identify the source for is coming via the Islamic world one way or another, so Mongolian traditions seem more likely.

It doesn't sound particularly Buddhist, that's for sure. It could be a "mountain" sort of sound though. It sounds like the sort of vocal style that might have developed to take advantage of big mountain acoustics. I do think there is something to the notion that different geographies tend to produce different sounds.

have any of you guys heard [about] this? http://www.terprecords.nl/as21.html

i only listened to the sample briefly but the little i heard sounded pretty groovy

i gotta listen more but i really liked what i heard (i bought the album) and i think it's def worth checking out. fwiw here's a blurb from the link if you don't feel like clickingthru

Quite unexpectedly, last year, while here in Europe for several summer festivals, Getatchew Mekuria at the age of 76, expressed an urge to make one more recording. With The Ex. Probably the last one in his life. A great responsibility!
We recorded in December, in Wormerveer and Addis Abeba. The result is stunning. Deep, old, classic melodies. Very different from the last one. Instrumental, more sensitive and fragile, deeper. Amazing horn riffs and solos, but also danceable, with up-tempo war-chants. Many things. He called it “Y'Anbessa Tezeta” (In Memory Of The Lion). Memories of 65 years of playing music! But also always new and forward.

yes! i am too tired to write more about it right now, but it is great!

I saw Getatchew with the Ex live a few years ago and they were a lot of fun together. It worked much better than I expected.

i'm pretty sure this isn't "world" music, but since rudipherous is one of the few ppl on ilx i can think of that might have heard it -- do u know anything about this album and if it is worth picking up?

http://www.museumfire.com/azadi.htm

I didn't know about it, can't help you with that.

Those are mostly noisy and avante and artsy American indie bands participating

The new Staff Benda Bilili album doesn't break any new ground, and some might find it too samey, but I love their Congolese rumba guitars and call & response vocals and harmonies

I want to see the movie about them. I missed it at a local film fest. Wonder if its on netflix?

Tuesday September 4th --Omara "Bombino" Moctar (Tuareg guitarist from Niger) –for free from 6 to 7 (and streamed online) at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage

Not my fave, but worth seeing again for free I think.

Curious to see Nabay after the buzz now

i'm opening for him in a few weeks, really looking forward to it

I need to watch that video of Janka and his band at the Kennedy Center. When I saw him live, he was just using tracks. I also need to hear his Luaka Bop label album.

Also want to hear the new Lionel Loueke, jazz guitarist from Benin. Robert Glasper produced most of the new one “Heritage” that is supposed to meld afrobeat and funk and more

love loueke

spotify has something called Virgin Forest by him from this year

Virgin Forest is actually a few years old, but it's been reissued & expanded. It's OK - very Putumayo/hip clothing boutique for my taste.

A NY Times reviewer suggested Loueke's new Heritage one is a bit different from his prior offerings

Finally checked out Gangnam Style!

I was hoping for more. It's kinda fun but neither the dancing nor the music wow me in more than a that's a clever novelty way. I am a curmudgeon I guess.

Enjoying the latest cd from Elikeh, a DC afropop/afrobeat band led by a singer/guitarist from Togo

Janka Nabay and The Bubu Gang, Omar Souleyman and DJ Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello
$15 tonight at 6pm at The Well in Bushwick - http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/157753
i will be there and will shake your hand and get you a drink if you call me out as forks
/shill

Bushwick Bill's brother, Forks

i'm taller.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/09/africa-express-finale-concert-london?intcmp=ILCMUSTXT9389

Wish this came to the US

Finally watched some of Janka and the Bubu Gang videostream at the Kennedy Center webpage. Good but different of course from when I saw him solo with tracks.

I see some folks are discovering him now on the ilx favorite albums of 2012 thread.

this is worth checking out: http://zion80.com/uncategorized/zion80-cyro-baptista-yemen-blues/

it's jon madof's new thing. he says: "I was getting ready to take my kids to shul one Shabbat last year, and I started singing a Carlebach tune to myself with an Afrobeat rhythm (probably because I had been listening to Fela a lot the day before). I thought about other familiar Carlebach tunes, and they all seemed to work. As soon as I figured out that nobody had done a similar project already, I went for it!"

Jewish Brazilian Yemeni Afrobeat mashup!

Cyro Baptista and Yemen Blues eh? Sounds fun

Missed Ti-Coca and his band Wanga-Nègès (Haiti) for free at Kennedy Center Millennium Stage last night. Will try to check out the video sometime

Globalquerque here on Friday, but I have too much stuff to do--not that I've ever gone in the past. I'm not that excited about the lineup but I wouldn't mind seeing Ozomatli, and Plena Libre would be a good bonus.

I like Plena Libre. Do you anything about festival participant Ali Akbar Moradi Ensemble (Kurdistan, Iran) ? I do not

I've heard a fair amount of his music. I love the tanbur playing but I find the vocals offputting. It's possible that seeing him live would change my mind about that, however.

I have probably sufficiently talked this up elsewhere, but what the hell:

http://music.cbc.ca/#/play/CBC-Music/playlist/Yamantaka-Sonic-Titan-YTST

I think this stuff is incredible. Might be too prog/avant for your tastes, curmudgeon, but I don't know. There are definitely solid hooks throughout.

Good writeup here:

http://www.nowtoronto.com/music/story.cfm?content=188613

“People are part of a global community, and it’s become harder to have an identity politic discussion without bringing in globalization and understanding what that and hybridity actually mean,” Alaska B explains.

“A lot of identity politic is based on identifying your community and isolating yourself, but there’s a whole generation who can’t put themselves into a community any more – or that community never really existed and was just imagined. If you want to approach these issues of talking about where you belong, but you can’t find any place where you belong, it kind of makes the entire politic bunk.”

The band is playing with assumptions and perceptions of their Asian-ness in a way that would be satiric were there not also a healthy dose of reverence mixed in with the irreverence. For Attwood, the difficult subject of appropriation was part of how she constructed her own identity, and is intrinsically linked to what Yamantaka//Sonic Titan are doing.

“Cultural appropriation was just a way for me to understand what my cultural background actually was. I grew up on a farm in Ontario, and it was all white people and natives around me. As an Asian-looking person, which is how I identified for a long time, it was very difficult to be identified as different but to not really have any contact with Japanese culture.

“It became this process of taking these images and ideas and involving them or ingesting them into my own identity. As an adult, I look back on that as extremely formative in terms of my relationship with aesthetics, because I simultaneously feel entitled to pick and choose cultural representations and modes of communication that I need but also very, very hesitant to step on other people’s toes.”

She describes a global community, in which people are surrounded by incredibly rich material for which we have no context. At the same time, many have direct personal relationships with immigrant families, and so we’re forced to be a little more respectful than we’d be in a monoculture environment.