WOEBOT

10 African Ethnographic Records.

My usual rejoinder: "I don't know much about this music" is really (really) true this time. I've been collecting choice ethnographic records for ten years and I really couldn't tell you much more than the next man about them. I have to confess too, that often as not I'll pick these artifacts up because their sleeves are beautiful and other-wordly. In a similar spirit I wanted to offer these spectacularly beautiful images up for your perusal, and found myself a little stuck for spiel. Rather than beating my chest and dribbling on interminably about music you aint gonna get to hear I thought I'd keep it short and sweet.

When it comes to Ethnographic Recordings the French have it, and this may (for better or worse) have something to do with their approach to their colonies. The British governed their colonies in a remote calculating fashion, examples might be Cromer's 75 year long "protectorate" of Egypt, in which the British skimmed the cream from the Nile economy, suppressed the Egyptians with the consent of their own ruling classes and showed little interest in the culture. Cromer displayed no inclination in educating the common Egyptians, imparting to them the benefits for instance, of Britain's technological advancement. Cromer believed that any education at all would just generate a class of radical discontents. They (we) did pretty much the same thing with the Raj in India.

The French on the other hand liked to get stuck right in there. You only have to look at Napolean's commission "Description De L'Egypte" with it's fanatical detailing of Egypt's ancient legacy, ream after ream of (actually quite remarkable) etchings and lithographs of the land of the Pharoahs, for proof of their voraciousness. I think I'm right in describing the project and resulting tomes as representing the most typical act of "Orientalism" for Edward Said. Unsure because it was so long since I read that book, which if you haven't come across it, details how one culture subjects another to a psychological tyranny by the act of subjectifying it through study and scholarship. The French took a similar tack in Algeria too, where they undertook to teach French culture, language and values. It's ironic to compare the French's vision of what they were doing (surely some deeply misguided generosity, after all they could have done what the British practised and not bothered!), with that of someone like Frantz Fanon's view of it whereby speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective consciousness of the French.

France was home to the greatest Ethnomusicological labels in the world. I say was because the time window during which the practice of inscribing these sounds was relatively narrow. I have a cut-off date of 1975, after which I treat these documents with a degree of scepticism. The world has shrunk now to the point whereby the cultures which stood in such infinitely stark contrast to the mores of Western Capitalism are now effectively engulfed by it. The original music of the Central African Rain Forests, Tibet, Papua New Guinea and the Amazon has either vanished or been mothballed for tourists. Actually I'm not such an enemy of Globalisation, it's still possible for peoples to forge specific sounds, just that if you go looking for "purity" or "the other" these days you're wasting your time. Thankfully (I guess?) down to the work of the French (and others...) we have plenty of documents from that vanished world. Labels like Musée de l'Homme, Harmonia Mundi, Musiques du monde, BAM, Chant du Monde and (the finest) Ocora all published quite superb recordings made in the field.

Naturally Ocora deserves special mention. You can almost pick up any of their recordings and come away laughing. Probably the greatest Ocora recordings are the holy triumvirate of Musique Gbaya, Musique Aka Pygmees and Musique Burundi. The Aka pygmy set is the one which famously prized open Jon Hassell's skull, though for my money the greatest is the Gbaya set. If you're a fan of Minimalist music or Krautrock or Acid House you have to hear this. I'd be proudly boshing the sleeve up here if I owned the original Ocora edition however I have some early 80s cut of it with inferior artwork. That record, which is freely available on CD too is superior to all of these below.

See what I mean about the covers! What a stunner! Split 50/50 between recordings made in Guinea and those made in the Cote D'Ivoire. You often find the earlier recordings are more generalist and cover a broader terrain.

I've a suspicion this is (slightly) one for the tourists. From the collection of legendary tropical DJ Dave Hucker. (Correction 13th November 2008: Dave says this is/was not from his collection: "I have tended to buy LPs for the musical content rather than the sleeve." - Which means I was ripped off when I bought it!)

There are a whole series of these records on the UNESCO label. I've seen one for Greece! One can ponder the relationship between the United Nations as an organisation and the ethnomusicological drive (as per Said).

Stunning modernist design.

Hugh Tracey recorded some lovely stuff in the fifties and sixties. His Music of Africa series of which I have a number collate stuff not geographically but by their execution. This one is quite superb, and it's interesting to note that Tracey (an amateur British expat who later tarnished his reputation) was a conoisseur of the Mbira. He even devised his own version of it called the Kalimba which (oh dear!) has a traditional western tuning.....

Another beautiful looking Tracey recording.

It's sort of shambolic of me not be able to talk about these recordings in the way one might the latest Garage "joint." I guess the point is with Music like that of the Pygmies, there aren't the same kind of trans cultural conduits plugging them into other musics. They defy this kind of analysis because they're the product of isolated unique societies. One's not really equipped to comment on them because they're so alien and self-contained. Having said that in Colin Turnbull's liner notes (the same Englishman recorded the Rainforest Pygmies singing 'Clementine' which I discussed here) he says the Ituri dwell on the edge of the forest and thus are more open to influence.

One can't avoid discussing sexuality with a cover like this. Sometimes this can be quite brazen in this territory (shearing off into the Lyman/Denny/Baxter territory where it runs rampant). I have a recording of South Sea Creole Pidgin songs which features a semi-clad maiden (Gaugin style) reclining in a stream which I picked up in San Francisco. That IS quite a fruity one, though in general, speaking personally, I don't understand how people could get their kicks off this kind of thing. I've never found the National Geographic that stimulating, though one hear's voices assuring one of the impact these images of bare-breasted, ferocious looking tribeswomen had on the Victorian male psyche.

Posted by Woebot at May 3, 2004 10:15 PM