By far, the most popular posts on Excavated Shellac feature African music. In honor of that, I’ve decided to post something from East Africa this week, as a give-the-people-what-they-want goodwill thank you gesture. However, if you’ve come here only looking for African music, please take a look around and try another piece out. You never know what might grab you - perhaps a Bulgarian harmonium track, or a Turkish taxim. One of the main thrusts of this blog is variety of palette, after all.

This week’s sonic diversion comes from Uganda, performed by members of the Nyoro/Haya culture. A group of singers accompanied by drum (ngoma) and the Nyoro/Haya rattle (nyimba). It stems from around the mid-1950s on the beautiful Jambo label.

Jambo’s story is very interesting. It was the first independent East African record label, established in Nairobi, Kenya by two British gentlemen, in 1947, under the umbrella of East African Sound Studios, Ltd. They sent tapes to England and had their records pressed by Decca, which were then shipped by air freight back to Nairobi (a three-day flight distance at that time). By 1950, the company had fallen on hard times and there was a management shake-up, after releasing slightly over 200 records. The studio was closed down. East African Sound Studios, Ltd. was taken over by the African Ground Cotton Company. Otto Larsen, a Dane, was asked to help set up and manage a record pressing plant in a new building in Nairobi, and Jambo resumed in the early 50s, continuing to repress the best selling of their 200 or so records. Thus, the birth of the new East African Records, Ltd.

Amazingly, Larsen and crew continued to repress those same 200 records until 1955, when Larsen took it upon himself start a recording studio in a Nissen hut on the property, which was formerly used to make cardboard pots for planting (a side venture of East African Records, Ltd., as was the sale of jukeboxes). Larsen began to travel in the region (Dar Es Salaam, Kampala), making further recordings for Jambo, and recorded much local talent in Kenya, many of whom traveled to audition in Nairobi. Taarab music was recorded, African acoustic guitar, accordion-based pop, Hawaiian waltzes from the Seychelles, and rural Ugandan music, such as we have here - pressed and packaged by Kenyan hands.

By 1955, other independent labels were active in the region: Capitol Music Stores, Mzuri, AGS, Rubina and Rafiki, and Munange, to name a few. The majors were active as well: HMV, Columbia, and Gallotone and their subsidiary, Trek. Jambo continued pressing 78s (and 45s) until 1961, when it became Equator Sound Studio. They had released a total of about 1,000 records.

Salima Mguzi and Party - Kisongokele, Pt. 1

Much of the information on Jambo came from Flemming Harrev’s informative article “Jambo Records and the Promotion of Popular Music in East Africa: The Story of Otto Larsen and East African Records Ltd. 1952-1963.” In Perspectives on African Music, Bayreuth African Studies Series 9, edited by Wolfgang Bender, 103-137. Bayreuth, Germany: Eckhard Breitinger, 1989.

Born, raised, and trained in Uruguay, Julio Martínez Oyanguren (1901-1973) was one of the great South American classical guitarists. Like some of his contemporaries, Agustín Barrios of Paraguay and Guillermo Gomez of Spain/Mexico for example, Oyanguren played his own arrangements and guitar transcriptions of works by classical composers, as well as his own compositions. When it comes to classical guitarists, the folk idioms inherent in their original compositions are what move me the most.

Oyanguren began recording for Victor in Argentina in the early 1930s, which is when his “Jota” was recorded. His career lasted decades (he also recorded a number of 78s for Columbia records around the same time), he toured internationally, was respected and well-known, and released many LPs. This original piece, however, does not appear to have made it to CD. Numerous other performances by Oyanguren (and many other excellent artists) can be found at Fine Fretted.

Julio Martínez Oyanguren - Jota

This track was a tough one to remaster (I had it sitting on my computer for months), despite the fact that it’s a shiny, beautiful copy. Victor Records in Argentina gave us an exceptionally “low” recording of this song and an iffy pressing - the more quiet the music, the more loud the classic, grainy Victor surface noise. I gave it my best shot. For those interested in hearing a snippet of the untouched recording, click here.

In geeky fashion I’m sure, I’ve waxed rhapsodic about the Columbia label’s green “F” series of the late 1920s in previous posts. While a large amount of the Columbias on this series featured music recorded by immigrants in the United States, they also released some incredible imported recordings, perhaps to test U.S. markets out.

Columbia seems to have preferred this method with at least some of the wonderful music of Bulgaria. They released a mere 39 Bulgarian records in the United States (compared to the 500+ Irish recordings they released during the same period). This is one of them, from ca. 1928.

Parush Parushev (credited as “P. Parusheff” here) was a street singer from Plovdiv, who accompanies himself on harmonium on this track. Street singers with harmoniums were apparently a common sight in Bulgarian cities until late in the 20th century. I’ve listened to this record many times, and it still delights me.

Parush Parushev - Nazko

For more Parushev and incredible Bulgarian music, check out Song of the Crooked Dance on Yazoo (where I gleaned the existing info on Parushev).

Also, I’m going on a much needed break for two weeks, one that will hopefully be devoid of most electronic media. I will be back, however, on the 22nd with more 78s, more special guest posts, and more of what you’ve come to expect.

Over the next several months, you will see a few guests here at Excavated Shellac. I’ve asked a number of like-minded friends, whose collections are varied and excellent, to drop by and give us an example of a favorite piece of music of theirs that revolves at that fast speed. They have provided the words, image, and music. (I have provided the audio cleanup and mix, unless otherwise noted.)

Today’s guest is Ian Nagoski, the man behind the fine Dust-to-Digital release Black Mirror, and proprietor of the True Vine Record Shop in Baltimore. Enjoy! - JW

Generally regarded as one of the 20th century’s most important Hindustani classical singers, Abdul Karim Khan was born in 1872 into a family of musicians in the village of Kirana in Hayrana state in north-central India. The kirana gharana (school) of singing extends to his ancestors but it is most commonly associated with his style because of his (relatively) prolific teaching, performing and recording in the first part of the 20th century. A notable branch of the school was founded by his cousin, the brilliant, eccentric, hearing-impaired, opium-loving, Sufi-devoted Abdul Wahid Khan who was Pandit Pran Nath’s guru and therefore the originator of the kirana school as it exists in the post-psychedelic United States.

Abdul Karim Khan studied sarangi with his family before leaving his home, never to return, as a teenager, in search of a guru. During this time, he approached Bande Khan (grandfather to been player Zia Mohuiddin Dagar and singer Zia Fariduddin Dagar) in search of been lessons. (Sarangi was primarly an accompanist’s instrument and been was a soloist’s instrument.) Bande Khan told him to study singing. As a singing duo with his brother Abdul Haq, Abdul Karim Khan was appointed as a court musician by the raja of Baroda state in Northwest India, but when Abdul Karim fell in love with one of the prince’s daughters, Sardār Māruti Rāo Māne who was his student at the time, the class difference between the royalty and musician-servants forced the two lovers to abscond in order to stay together. They landed further south, in Bombay, where Abdul Karim taught, sang and, in 1905, recorded about thirty performances for the Gramophone company. That same year, his daughter Hirabai Badodekar (later a renowned singer herself) was born. (YouTube clip here.)

Over the next twenty years, his style was informed by a number of visits to Karnataka state in the South, close contact with singers in the gwalior gharana, and changes in the economics of music caused by the crumbling of the courts under British colonialism. Abdul Karim Khan saw that a musician could no longer simply inhabit a court as a paid servant, and became an innovator in charging admission for classical concerts. His family moved in 1913 to Pune, where he founded another music school. In 1922, his wife left him, also resulting in a split with Abdul Wahid Khan (who was related to Abdul Karim by marriage). The event is said to have marked a shift in his style to slower, more contemplative singing. Meanwhile, during the period of increasing modernization and the anti-colonial struggle lead by Ghandi (and radical politics generally), Abdul Karim Khan refused to record again until the mid-30s, when he accepted offers from the minor Ruby Company and the dominant and British-owned Gramophone company’s primary competitor, German-based Odeon. From 1934 until 1936, just a year before his death, he recorded several dozen pieces. La Monte Young said in the first issue of Halana that Abdul Karim Khan died on tour in a railway station by simply turning to the man next to him and saying “I’m going now,” then pulling down his turban and dying on the spot. For Young, it was an example of utter mastery and control.

Abdul Karim Khan’s voice, like his recorded output, is notable for just this sense of mastery, but both are filled with a lightness and sweetness which one does not often associate with the most serious musicians. He chose repeatedly to sing light pieces, bordering on the folksy, making his name as a singer of the relatively modern and fanciful khayal rather than the older and more devotional dhrupad, and he rarely gave in to the kind of heroic and almost macho qualities one hears in Abdul Wahid Khan’s very few recordings or the most ferocious recordings of Abdul Karim’s most renowned spiritual heir, the brilliant Bhimsen Joshi (YouTube clip here.). He was a noted and early classical exponent of romantic thumris. For me, there is something touchingly feminine about his voice. If you’ll forgive a level of psychological speculation, it feels as if within himself he was reconnecting with his lost daughter and wife (or evoking that kind of unifying bond to his listeners) even in the relatively austere classical performance presented here, made for the Ruby Record Company in March of 1934, just three years before his death, with Shankarrao Kapileshwari (harmonium), Shasuddin Khan (tabla) and Balkrishna Kapileshwari and Dashrath Buwa Mule (tambouras).

Ustad Abdul Karim Khan - Bhairavi thumri (adha tal) - Jamuna ke tira kanha

My copy of this record is a post-war (and probably post-Indian independence) repressing. (HMV acquired Ruby in 1946, so despite going with an indie label, the Brits wound up owning his voice anyway. Such is the music biz.) His music, or some part of it, has been reissued every decade or two since his death, but remains woefully under-heard and certainly under-appreciated in the West. A bio-discography, which I have not yet been able to lay hands on, was authored by Michael Kinnear and published a few years ago in Australia. I’m grateful that a summary of it was posted here.

“Ustad Abdul Karim Khan’s recording of the composition ‘Jamuna ke tir’ in Raga Bhairavi stands as one of the great masterpieces of music. When I first heard the recordings of Abdul Karim Khan I thought that perhaps it would be best if I gave up singing, got a cabin up in the mountains, stocked it with a record player and recordings of Abdul Karim Khan, and just listened for the rest of my life.” - La Monte Young
http://www.newmusicbox.org/page.nmbx?id=61hf15

Some time ago, I had thought about posting a track from the legendary Native Brazilian Music 78rpm box sets which Columbia released in the United States (only) in 1942, but I was so sure they had been reissued on CD that I hadn’t even bothered to think twice about doing so. Recently, I woke up to the fact that not only does there not appear to be any plan to reissue these records on CD - one of the most historic sessions in the history of Brazilian music - but less than half of the songs recorded were even released in ‘42. The detailed story of Native Brazilian Music is best told in the Stalking Stokowski article by Daniella Thompson. I will briefly run down the Cliff’s Notes version:

Famed conductor Leopold Stokowski considered himself a Brazilian music aficionado, and had expressed interest to composer Heitor Villa-Lobos that he’d wanted to produce a collection of authentic Brazilian popular music for American audiences. In 1940, Stokowski was to sail (with the All-American Youth Orchestra, whom he founded and conducted) to various ports in Central and South America, including Rio de Janiero, and asked Villa-Lobos to gather the best musicians he could find for a recording session - all expenses paid by Stokowski, of course.

While Stokowski certainly deserves credit for spearheading the session and presumably paying the engineer from Columbia Records who would record nearly 40 tracks in a marathon 24 hour session/party - the real credit goes to Villa-Lobos for gathering a wide variety of top-notch Brazilian musicians. On the two Columbia box sets there are macumbas, sambas, emboladas, corimas, and maracatu music, for example. The sets contained the only vocal recordings by samba pioneer Zé Espinguela, the first recordings by Cartola, Pixinguinha appears on flute, and most of the tracks were accompanied by Donga’s conjunto regional.

There were a few negatives, the most obvious being Stokowski’s insistance that the recordings be made not in Columbia’s local studio in Rio, but onboard the S.S. Uruguay, where Stokowski was staying. According to Thompson’s article, the Columbia engineer was not used to recording in such a place, and as such, I believe the recordings sound more than a little thin. Also, when the box sets came out, they were rife with errors: some performers went uncredited, only 3 had their names spelled correctly, only 6 titles out of 16 were spelled correctly, and the song orders were printed incorrectly on the labels (all of these are corrected in Thompson’s article). Musically, the stiffest moments are the two Amerindian chants sung by four professors at the Orfeão Villa-Lobos - while of historical import, they end the exuberant atmosphere of the previous 14 tracks with a formal austerity.

This track by comedians Jararaca (José Luis Rodrigues Calazans, 1896-1977) and Ratinho (Severino Rangel de Carvalho, 1896-1972) is an example of an embolada, a tongue-twister-like, fast-tempo song from Northeastern Brazil. 

Jararaca e Ratinho - Sapo no Saco

If you’d like to hear both box sets, this generous Brazilian blogger offers them in their entirety. They are straight dubs and not cleaned up, but they still sound nice!

ALSO: Many thanks to Matt at Matsuli for hosting my guest post of May 20. Over 100 people were able to download the 26 remastered African jive 78s in less than a day, which is completely fantastic.

The last French Canadian folk music I posted was six months ago, so I thought I might feature another this week - especially since I found myself humming this song repeatedly. When that happens, I feel I have to go straight to the shelves, grab that piece of music, and remind myself of the innate qualities therein. This I did, and here it is for you, too.

Joseph Ovila LaMadeleine (1880-1973) was a left-handed fiddler based in Montreal, where he owned a music shop. In the late 1920s, when he was already nearly 50, he began his recording career for Starr Records. For the next 15 years on Starr, he recorded 54 records of wonderfully played reels, quadrilles, and waltzes like this track, which was recorded in the winter of 1937. While this tune is not a fiddle showdown like some of his others, I find it beautifully unpretentious, largely due to the vocal by his daughter Jeannette.

J. O. LaMadeleine (& Jeannette) - Petite Lili Valse

Starr Records got its name from the Starr Piano Company of Richmond, Indiana. The Starr Piano Company also produced a little label called Gennett, only one of the greatest, most sought-after record labels in jazz, country, and blues history. The Compo Company (run by the son of Emile Berliner) began pressing the Starr and Gennett labels in Canada in 1919, and gradually began recording as well. The Starr label continued into the 40s, long after Starr Piano left the record business, with the Starr label reserved strictly for Canadian recordings.

For more LaMadeleine, there is a track on the Rounder collection Raw Fiddle. You can also visit The Virtual Gramophone and hear quite a few LaMadeleine recordings, albeit at 64kbps. Better than nothing!

Lastly, an announcement for 1960s African music fans: very soon I will be writing a guest post over at the fine Matsuli Music blog. There will be LOTS to download, and it will be very limited, so if you don’t want to miss that, keep checking Matsuli.

Here is another relic from Southeast Asia in the days before the widespread use of the electric microphone. Voice and music emerge from a deep layer of surface noise. Such is the case with these early recordings: however tweaked and lessened by me, surface noise is inevitably an integral part of the listening experience.

In particularly hot and humid areas - perhaps Siam for instance, where this recording was made ca. 1926-1927 - recording engineers would often have to pack their wax masters in dry ice to protect them from melting. Working without electricity…sometimes recording entire orchestras who played into a large horn…carting boxes of heavy equipment and hundreds of wax masters from place to place, perhaps country to country, for sometimes months at a time…the odds seemed against these expeditions. Yet many hundreds of thousands of records, perhaps even several million, were recorded all over the world before the microphone started appearing in recording studios in the mid-1920s.

Recording minutiae: originally, this selection was recorded by the Beka record label, and then released by Parlophon. Beka and Parlophon were German companies, owned by the larger entity Carl Lindstrom A.G., which was purchased by the British company Columbia in 1926. The smaller German companies under the Lindstrom banner operated independently of their British owners for several years, until Columbia/Lindstrom eventually fell under the banner of EMI, and Parlophon became known as Parlophone.

This is an example of Thai classical music, featuring a singer (Saylani) and a small “pin-part” ensemble, which consists of several of the traditional Thai xylophone (the rānāt). You can also distinguish at least one Thai flute (the khlui), and in the distance (I think!), the classical Thai reed instrument, the pī nai. Thai classical music was originally developed as court music, and many of the instruments used date back 700+ years. The title of the piece translates to “Golden Star.”

Saylani, with pin-part ensemble - Dao-Thong, Pt. 2

Many thanks to Philip Yampolsky for discographical insight, and to Pluethipol Prachumphol of the Antique Phonograph and Gramophone Thai Society for help with the translation.

In previous posts, I’ve mentioned Robert Crumb’s volume of international 78rpm records titled Hot Women, which features female vocalists. On it, he included Part 2 of an exceptionally wild recording made somewhere in East Africa in the early 1930s. Today’s post is Part 1 of that fascinating record.

Decca Records in the United States began in 1934 (after truly beginning in England in 1929), and kept their maroon label for their international series. A large portion of the music released on that international series was from this hemisphere, but they did release some imported recordings, many of which were taken from German Odeon and Parlophone masters as the label indicates here. Most famously, American Decca found success in repressing Erich von Hornbostel’s influential “Music of the Orient” collection, which contained some recordings from as early as the ‘teens. You can still find a complete set if you’re patient. Much more difficult to track down, however, are examples from Decca’s African series.

Unfortunately, without a trip to a vault somewhere in Europe to dig through ancient paperwork (if it exists), and without a vintage catalog which might contain more information, there’s no way to tell where this record was precisely made. It could have been Kenya, it could have been Tanzania, Rwanda/Burundi, or Zanzibar. My best possible guess, considering the strong Arabic influence in the instrumentation (oud, violin, and percussion), is that it is taarab music from Tanzania or Zanzibar, but that is only a guess and nothing more. Or, might the two letter matrix code - BR - stand for Burundi/Rwanda? I’ve a very similar sounding 78 that is definitively from that particular region. But, who knows.

What I do know is that this vocalist will jolt you upright and rightly so. This is a one of a kind performance - just listen to her straining near the end of the piece.

Hadija binti Abdulla - Bina Adamu, Pt. 1

For more vintage taarab music from the region, definitely check out the beautiful CD Poetry and Languid Charm on Topic.

There are approximately 286 different languages spoken in Cameroon. It’s impossible to guess what percentage of those languages have been represented on vintage 78rpm records. Most of the Cameroonian 78s I’ve found have been in Douala dialect. Today’s post features some vintage African pop in the Basaa (or Bassa) dialect, which is actually spoken in greater numbers than Douala.

The label Opika was based in the Belgian Congo, and is equally as important as the Congolese labels Ngoma and Loningisa, and just as rewarding to track down. Amazing African pop, guitar, rumba, and ethnographic recordings from both Congo and Cameroon (as well as high-life in Ghana) were released on Opika. This small label was started ca. 1949 by two brothers from the Greek island of Rhodes, Gabriel Moussa Benetar and Joseph Benetar. The name “Opika” came from “opika pende” in Lingala, a phrase meaning “stand firm.”

It’s not clear from my research how long Opika lasted as a company, but probably not much further than the mid- to late 1950s. However, in a very brief period of time, they and their competitor labels left one of the most amazing musical legacies of Africa. These were small labels run by immigrants who truly enjoyed the region’s music. They wanted to fill a void, they wanted to record the best of a variety of local talent, and they succeeded (although it remains to be seen how much the artists were paid for their work). According to a quote from Rumba on the River, Gary Stewart’s fantastic history of Congolese popular music, 600,000 discs a year were being sold in the region in the early 1950s.

I could find zero information on Njembe Gwet Paulemond (or Gwet Paulemond Njembe, if you westernize the name), but the aforementioned Rumba on the River contains the best history written so far about those early years in Brazzaville/Kinshasha.

Njembe Gwet Paulemond - Paulemond a Ye Nsinga Ndinga

I think unaccompanied choirs are often ignored in non-classical 78rpm record collecting - they lack solo instrumental virtuosity, they tend not to be “raw,” and instead appear to be, at least on the surface, overly influenced by religion and/or western harmonic concepts. Even the choir records I have from Africa are probably less desirable, simply because they display the formality of a choir. Perhaps they are avoided for the same reason one might avoid records of British folk songs sung by a Folk Song Society.

While all these reasons are valid and make me ruminate far more intensely than I should, I actually enjoy a lot of choir music. It’s still folk music, and I just can’t seem to get rid of it, as I find unaccompanied folk singing to be sort of a wonderful act. Recently, a friend graciously gave me a stack of early Lithuanian records. I ended up discarding nearly all of the 30 or so records - except for the folk song choirs! Which were all recorded poorly on Columbia Records in the 19-teens. Totally unsaleable records! He must have pegged me as an easy mark.

I think of Ian Nagoski’s choice of including a recording of a Handel piece on piano smashed between 78s from Vietnam and Greece on his Black Mirror CD. Such seemingly radical sequencing suits me just fine - I believe there should be more of it, but maybe that’s the academic anti-academic taking hold. However, interconnectivity exists wherever you seek to find it. And maybe you’ll find something, as I did, in this Lithuanian Folk Song, recorded acoustically (and distantly) by Columbia in New York City ca. 1917, and performed by Brooklyn’s own Įdainavo Karalienes Aniolu Parapijos Choras. I had some difficulty translating the title, but I believe it’s something to the effect of “Dogs Barking on the Farm.”

Įdainavo Karalienes Aniolu Parapijos Choras – Loja Šunes Ant Kiemo

And if you enjoyed my December post on son huasteco music, Chimatli has a wonderful, media-filled post on the music. Check it out here!