Ethiopia - From Church to Folk-music, to Government Orchestras and Independent Bands. A brief history of variation and development in Ethiopian music, recorded in between 1961-1980. 

01 * Orthodox Priests * Music from the Central Highlands / 12'' Tangent, 1970

02 * Nyabole, Hamar (South-Ethiopia) * Playing the Musical Bow /12'', 1970-76 

03 * Derashe Performers (South-Ethiopia) * Flutes, Steps, Meleket & Voice / Field Recording

04 * Axum Performers, Tigray (North-Ethiopia) * Wedding Ceremony / 12'' Tangent, 1970

05 * Gurage Performers, Butajira (Central-Ethiopia) * Dance Performance / 12'' Tangent, 1970

06 * Orchestra Ethiopia * 'Goraw' (War-encouragement song) / Ethiopiques Vol.23, early 70s

07 * Asellefech Mulat * 'Ante Ledj', Hagir Fikir Theater Group / From Reel, 1961

08 * Munaye Menberru * 'Tezeta' / 7'', mid 70s

09 * Menelik Wossenatchu * 'Aderetch Arada' * His Imperial Majesty Theater Band / 7'', early 70s

10 * Bezunesh Bekkele * 'Fikir Kesekesegn' * Imperial Body Guard Band / 7'', early 70s

11 * Hirut Bekkele * 'Zimam Nehwoy' * AA, Police Orchestra / 7'', 1971

12 * Singer & Title Unknown * Eastern Police Orchestra / from Reel, mid 70s

13 * Wegayehu Degennetu * Title Unknown * Harer Police Orchestra / from Reel, late 70s

14 * Zennebech Tesfaye * 'Wendemiye' * HIM Theater Band (Amhara Wedding Song) / from Reel

15 * Essatu Tesemma * 'Tchebo Aymollam' (Amhara Wedding Song) / 7'', 1970

16 * Popular Band Songs Mash-up *

17 * Ali Muhammed Birra * 'Awash' * Adu Birra Band (Oromo) / Ethiopiques Vol.28, 1975

18 * Ayalew Mesfin * 'Wegene' * Black Lion Band / 7'' 1975

19 * Telahun Gessesse * 'Sak' * Orchestra Ethiopia / 7'' 1976

20 * Traditional Group of National Theater * 'Wind of Revolution' (Communist song) / 12'' Russia, 1980

Ethiopian music mix made for Norwegian Radio Nova - Recordings from 1961 - 80

Noura Mint Seymali: Arbina
Release Date: September 16th, 2016
Order now: https://glitterbeat.lnk.to/Arbina

The release of Noura’s debut album “Tzenni”(2014) launched her onto year-end top ten lists and the stages of renowned international festivals. Vice/Noisey hailed ”Tzenni” as "arguably the best psych / blues album of the year” and NPR noted: “the arrival of Mauritanian vocalist Noura Mint Seymali in front of Western audiences feels like the start of a new era.” In 2015, Noura was named at the African Union's first-ever AFRIMA awards as "Best Female Artist from North Africa” and in June of this year, she joined Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians for a high-profile European tour presented by Africa Express.                                             

Noura Mint Seymali now returns with a blistering second album.

Arbina is Noura Mint Seymali’s second international release. Delving deeper into the wellspring of Moorish roots, as is after all the tried and true way of the griot, the album strengthens her core sound, applying a cohesive aesthetic approach to the reinterpretation of Moorish tradition in contemporary context. The band is heard here in full relief; soaring vocals and guitar at the forefront, the mesmerizing sparkle of the ardine, elemental bass lines and propulsive rhythms swirling together to conjure a 360 degree vibe. Arbina refines a sound that the band has gradually intensified over years of touring, aiming to posit a new genre from Mauritania, distinct unto itself; music of the “Azawan.”

Supported by guitarist, husband and fellow griot, Jeiche Ould Chighaly, Seymali’s tempestuous voice is answered with electrified counterpoint, his quarter-tone rich guitar phraseology flashing out lightning bolt ideas.  Heir to the same music culture as Noura, Jeiche intimates the tidinit’s (Moorish lute) leading role under the wedding khaima with the gusto of a rock guitar hero. Bassist Ousmane Touré, who has innovated a singular style of Moorish low-end groove over the course of many years, can be heard on this album with greater force and vigor than ever before. Drummer/producer Matthew Tinari drives the ensemble forward with the agility and precision need to make the beats cut.
 
Lyrically, the Moorish griot tradition is complex and associative. Poetry is held in a continuum between author and audience in which a singer may draw on disparate sources, selecting individual lines here or there for musicality to form a lyrical patchwork expressing larger ideas via association. A griot may relate her own thoughts and poetry, sing poetry written for and about her by a third party, and transmit lines from one party addressing another in the course of a single song. With this ever-fluid narrative voice, stories are told.

Arbina is a musical act of devotion, calling upon the creator to channel grace through us and uplift our actions.

Arbina

Noura Mint Seymali - Arbina

Noura Mint Seymali: Arbina
Release Date: September 16th, 2016
Order now: glitterbeat.lnk.to/Arbina

The release of Noura’s debut album “Tzenni”(2014) launched her onto year-end top ten lists and the stages of renowned international festivals. Vice/Noisey hailed ”Tzenni” as "arguably the best psych / blues album of the year” and NPR noted: “the arrival of Mauritanian vocalist Noura Mint Seymali in front of Western audiences feels like the start of a new era.” In 2015, Noura was named at the African Union's first-ever AFRIMA awards as "Best Female Artist from North Africa” and in June of this year, she joined Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and The Orchestra of Syrian Musicians for a high-profile European tour presented by Africa Express.

Noura Mint Seymali now returns with a blistering second album.

Arbina is Noura Mint Seymali’s second international release. Delving deeper into the wellspring of Moorish roots, as is after all the tried and true way of the griot, the album strengthens her core sound, applying a cohesive aesthetic approach to the reinterpretation of Moorish tradition in contemporary context. The band is heard here in full relief; soaring vocals and guitar at the forefront, the mesmerizing sparkle of the ardine, elemental bass lines and propulsive rhythms swirling together to conjure a 360 degree vibe. Arbina refines a sound that the band has gradually intensified over years of touring, aiming to posit a new genre from Mauritania, distinct unto itself; music of the “Azawan.”

Supported by guitarist, husband and fellow griot, Jeiche Ould Chighaly, Seymali’s tempestuous voice is answered with electrified counterpoint, his quarter-tone rich guitar phraseology flashing out lightning bolt ideas. Heir to the same music culture as Noura, Jeiche intimates the tidinit’s (Moorish lute) leading role under the wedding khaima with the gusto of a rock guitar hero. Bassist Ousmane Touré, who has innovated a singular style of Moorish low-end groove over the course of many years, can be heard on this album with greater force and vigor than ever before. Drummer/producer Matthew Tinari drives the ensemble forward with the agility and precision need to make the beats cut.

Lyrically, the Moorish griot tradition is complex and associative. Poetry is held in a continuum between author and audience in which a singer may draw on disparate sources, selecting individual lines here or there for musicality to form a lyrical patchwork expressing larger ideas via association. A griot may relate her own thoughts and poetry, sing poetry written for and about her by a third party, and transmit lines from one party addressing another in the course of a single song. With this ever-fluid narrative voice, stories are told.

Arbina is a musical act of devotion, calling upon the creator to channel grace through us and uplift our actions.

http://www.nouramintseymali.com/
https://www.facebook.com/nouramintseymali.music
https://twitter.com/NMSeymali


Noura Mint Seymali - Ghlana

from unrelease record :solo como loco malo. me all instruments.

Favela master

culebra

This rare recording from 1975 of Mounnina (Manning), one of the greatest Mauritanian Moorish griot of the second half of the 20th century, is available for Flac and MP3 download on my blog:
https://music-republic-world-traditional.blogspot.com/2019/02/mauritania-mauritanie-ahmed-well.html

Mauritanie - Musique Traditionnelle des Griots Maures – Selaf Orstom – CETO 752-3

Mauritania Mounnina (Hardin harp) & tidinit lute White Way – Le-Btayt

The late pianist Geri Allen, recorded on November 19th, 1988, at Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland. She performed solo, in what was her West Coast debut performance. Special thanks to Art Sato for making this recording possible. This performance was recently digitally transferred and mastered from the analog recording. It was recorded for KPFA in Berkeley, in our remote van on reel to reel tape. Pianist Ethan Iverson, spoke of Geri on her 60th birthday, in his blog, shortly before her passing:

"Allen has had a long career of triumphs and remains one of the key musicians in jazz, but she may not always get enough credit for the degree of influential innovation on display from about 1984 to 1989.

Kenny Kirkland took the virtuosic McCoy Tyner/Herbie Hancock/Chick Corea axis to its logical endpoint. Around the time of Kirkland’s greatest prominence, Geri Allen broke something open by offering a radically different approach, bringing back the surrealism of Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy.

Allen’s solution would go on to be vastly influential. There were other avatars from the late 80s and early 90s, perhaps most notably Marcus Roberts and Brad Mehldau. Many of the celebrated younger pianists of the current moment — a recent poll has names like Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, David Virelles, Kris Davis, Matt Mitchell, Aruán Ortiz — don’t play like Kirkland, Roberts, or Mehldau. They play like Allen."

Geri Allen Koncepts Cultural Gallery 11 - 19 - 88

Written by Luisa Bastidas and Rodney "Okai" Fleurimont .
all rights reserved Strings N Skins LLC

Strings N Skins - Star Power

Phalanges, for Harp solo (1995) - program notes
The title "Phalanges" refers to the fingers' bones, the very skeleton of the player, the subcutaneous motor skills that underlie the act of playing/touching the strings. Compositionally, there are three main ideas that intersperse in this piece:
1) The ergonomic or motoric one, referring to the way the hands accommodate the technical demands of the instrument; 
2)The Rhythmic ‘sculpting,’ referring to the interaction of complex rhythms and the use of my system of Micro-Metric Modulation, a mathematical way to link very complex rhythms/ratios through common denominators speeds; 
3)The use of extended-techniques dividing the harp into three different sonic regions in which the middle one employs a cloth/paper that mutes the pitches subsequently creating a kind of timbral asymmetry in the sonic presentation of the instrument.
First, the ergonomic aspect: the creation of motives and themes in this piece are a direct result of the very patterns of the player's hands/fingers. New sonic material emerges as a result of the dislocation of the hands throughout the harp. This is accomplished in two ways: a) When the harpist stretches hands widening or contracting the gaps between fingers while maintaining similar fingerings’ patterns - thus, creating small melodic distortions; b) Through the mere pedal- retuning of the strings providing a diverse melodic or harmonic contour for similar hands' patterns; Even if the fingers’ patterns are not “thematically audible,” (since they only refer to the techniques that propel the sounds) they acquire, nevertheless, the status of "articulatory themes" being as important as the audible ones.
Second, using a mathematical way to mediate between two adjacent rhythms through a system I developed called Micro-Metric Modulation. Although complex rhythms can be very demanding to execute it is possible to imagine an effective rhythmic bridge that is common to two adjacent and differing rhythms or ratio configurations. This approach is based on commutative and associative properties and is derived from Elliott Carter’s polyrhythmic ideas, but in a “compressed” way. It is fully developed on my Doctoral Thesis from 1997-8 (Micro Metric Modulation: New Directions in the Theory of Complex Rhythms), although uses of it on my own music are anterior to the thesis itself).
Third, employing a series of devices (paper between strings, tuning fork, constant pedal glissandi, half-pedal “buzz” sounds, etc.) I managed to destabilize the typical way of playing the instrument and the way it is commonly heard. More than seeking mere effects, I was “seeing” the instrument as a sonic (found-)object that could be “subjected” to different types of timbristic and ergonomic demands. Finally, studying the way the instrument behaves under certain rhythmic constraints it was possible to manipulate with similar flexibility pitch and noise (extended-techniques) zones. The theatrical aspect of Phalanges conveys its deep meaning: Navigating between the fingers' technical demands and its almost magic output (the music itself) the harpist questions the public with a bleak and distancing (‘Brechtnian’) look, as if saying, - “...where does music begin? And where it ends...?”
© Arthur Kampela 2014

Phallanges For Harp Solo (Performed live by Anne Bassande Zurich, 1995)

CHAMAMÉ FEDERAL

An Ait Hadiddu song at threshing time, recorded at I'hawdi'in in Morocco in August 1961. 
The song text addresses god and invokes protection against evil spirits.

Six reel to reel tapes of Berber music and soundscapes from the Moroccan High Atlas Mountains, recorded in August 1961 among the Ait Hadiddu people, were purchased by the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1963. The recordist and PRM source is currently unknown, but a related document gives some context and song translations.

Ait Hadiddu threshing song (Morocco, 1961) [1963 1 B2 1 2]

<a href='http://gigs.gigatools.com/u/LeoGenovese' target='_new'>Leo Genovese's Upcoming Gigs </a>Monday 09 September, 2013 <a href='http://gigs.gigatools.com/u/LeoGenovese' target='_new'>Leni Stern trio/ Dan Blake Leo Genovese ., the shapeshifter, brooklyn, United States</a> <a href='http://www.gigatools.com' target='_new'>Powered by GigaTools</a> 
Leo Genovese was born in Venado Tuerto, Argentina in the 1970s, amid the psychedelic sound and language of his generation. After studying classical and contemporary music in his homeland, he moved to Boston to do the jazz thing.

He currently leads a band called The Chromatic Gauchos, a powerful avant-garde ensemble, and is a co-founder of the group The Sewer Ratz, a band that chases the non-playing music practice. These days, Leo tours with the Esperanza Spalding´s band.Long time cohort of Esperanza Spalding has Leo globe-trotting playing all kinds of venues, from Carnegie Hall to under a tree at a side of a non-existent road.

Leo bakes bread, directs amateur films, owns cassettes, loves the sun and is currently teaching himself how to play the saxophone.

culebra

nardisleo