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Time capsules
Nonesuch reissues its Explorer Series
BY DOUGLAS WOLK

When guests are over late at night, I sometimes pull out The Last LP, an album of the final recordings of lost cultures assembled by Canadian composer Michael Snow in 1987, and put on my favorite track. It’s the women of the East African Bo-sa-so-sho tribe, recorded in 1970, trilling, clapping, and singing a song about love, "Si Nopo Da." After a minute or so, my guests start to look puzzled — there’s something familiar about the melody. Then I point out that the title translates loosely as "By What Signs Will I Come To Understand?" A minute or so later, they get it: what the high-pitched voices (actually just Snow’s own, with altered tape speeds) are singing is a set of nonsense syllables to the tune of Whitney Houston’s "How Will I Know?"

It’s a great little joke, and if it had been made 25 years earlier, it wouldn’t have made nearly as much sense. There were occasional stabs at popular ethnomusicology almost from the beginning of recorded sound, but Nonesuch Records’ Explorer Series, launched in 1967, was one of the first real efforts to sell non-Western field recordings to a general American audience. Clearly recorded and well-annotated, it treated the traditions it documented as classical music, more or less. The entire series of 92 discs is being reissued now, starting with a remarkable 14-volume series of recordings from Africa that were originally released between 1969 and 1983.

The Explorer Series isn’t all field recordings of the "folk tradition." There’s a 1969 album by Saka Acquaye and his African Ensemble, a highlife band from Accra. There’s an exquisite 1971 recording, Escalay (The Water Wheel), of solo pieces by the great oud player Hamza El Din (including a cover of Egyptian singer Um Kalthoum’s "Remind Me"). And there’s the rather odd Animals of Africa documentary recording of the beasts of Kenya and Uganda. The heart of the series, though, is its recordings of folk and ceremonial music — the music made by people as part of their day-to-day lives. It’s exquisite and spare, and it’s easy to romanticize. This is music, it seems, that doesn’t require a rehearsal space or a gig or a contract to make, music that is human beings’ innate right to make, music that — if you’re not paying attention — sounds more innocent than the music we’re used to being bombarded with.

But that’s not really true. Burundi: Music from the Heart of Africa, from 1974, is as double-edged a recording as "Si Nopo Da," and far darker. The unnamed musicians play percussion and flutes, and they sing casually and improvisationally. There’s a song about beekeeping, a song about shepherding, praise for someone who gave a suit as a present. And then there are the songs about the unelected president/dictator of Burundi: "Hail to Micombero," "Praise for Micombero," "Yes, I Love Micombero." After the album was released, Micombero was overthrown, and then there were more bloody revolutions, and a quarter of a million Burundians were killed in the ongoing civil war between the Hutu and the Tutsi — including, probably, a lot of these musicians. The album originally released in 1973 as The Soul of Mbira: Traditions of the Shona People of Rhodesia has had the last two words removed from its title, since Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe. An editorial note indicates that two of the mbira players heard on the album were "executed during the liberation war."

These recordings were mostly made 25 or 30 years ago, and the world they document scarcely exists any more. Other people, perhaps, play mbira songs about discipline, or wedding songs on the bala and the din-din, though it’s not the same — it can’t be. But neither are the songs Bostonians play now like the songs Bostonians played 25 years ago. There are always quiet evolutions, and violent revolutions, and moments of artistic inspiration that make everything after them sound as if that were the way things have always been done. Every record, from Thomas Alva Edison singing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" to Jimmie Rodgers jamming with Louis Armstrong on "Blue Yodel #9" to whatever track Radiohead finished last week, is a document of a time that’s gone.

And so is this: after three and a half years and close to 100 columns, I’m retiring "Smallmouth," at least for now. Thanks for reading. Drop me a line at smallmouth@douglaswolk.com

Issue Date: September 12 - 19, 2002
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