World music (and ice dancing) at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics

My head is still spinning from the impressive skating last night at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics in the category of Original Ice Dancing, and to my delight (being not remotely acquainted with the defining parameters of Olympic genres), the four top winners performed to four distinct categories of world music: The winners for the evening (and cumulatively for the two competitions thus far) were: in first place, Canada's Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir in a stunning adaptation of Flamenco dance; in second place, the U.S. duo of Meryl Davis and Charlie White, demonstrating their exceptional skills in a lively adaptation of Indian dancing, and in particular, Bollywood style; in third place, Russia's Oxana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin presented a toned-down version (following earlier controversy) of their presentation, which included (presumably Australian) aboriginal elements both in costume and music; and in fourth place, Tanith Belbin and Benjamin Agosto, also from the U.S., presented a Moldavian folk dance. (Click here for the New York Time's summary of the evening's happenings.)

I'll be holding forth in more detail on world music--and dance--in the Ice Dancing competitions, later in the week, after I've had a chance to watch the entire event on NBC's Web archive. But there are also concerts highlighting world music in the Cultural Olympics, and VOA's David Byrd (who in addition to being one of VOA's sports reporters is himself an accomplished musician) has interviewed three world music performers who participated in the Vancouver events.

In his first report, David interviewed Daniel Bernard Roumain, a Haitian-American (one of dozens of hyphenated American communities--the category now being proudly used by members of same, sometimes with a smile, particularly in academic and journalistic circles) violinist with classical training who, in addition to earning a Ph.D. in composition from the University of Michigan, has been influenced by a wide range of musical styles (as David notes, "growing up in south Florida, [he] was exposed to a variety of musical styles - reggae, Afro-Cuban and Brazilian music, Latin, as well as classical"), and now "Roumain - also known as DBR - blends classical violin, funk, rhythm and blues, and hip hop into a musical stew for everyone to enjoy." Click here to hear the captivating report itself.
















Photo by David Byrd: Roumain rehearsing with Maestro Bramwell Tovey and the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on February 14, 2010.

In his second radio piece, David interviewed Rahim Al Haj, originally from Iraq and now living in New Mexico, a performer on the Arabic oud, and Amir Koushkani, originally from Iran, and now living in Vancouver, performing on the Persian tar. As David observes, "Both Amir Koushkani and Rahim Al Haj say that the Olympic Games offer a unique forum. Both men want fans to experience the uniqueness of their musical traditions and the music's ability transcend ethnic, political, and national boundaries to communicate with the world"--which is indeed the role of music, as I noted last year in my May Day World Music Manifesto on these pages. Click here to listen to David's audio report itself.

















Photo by David Byrd: Al-Haj and Koushkani of Iran join to play together as part of the Cultural Olympiad music program.

For more information on Daniel Bernard Roumain, go to his Website, where you can hear samples of his music, and watch videos on his official YouTube page.

You can hear excerpts from Rahim al-Haj's six CDs on his cdbaby page (look for a forthcoming report on this unique music marketing company), and see him in various YouTube videos. It is also worth noting that he was nominated, for his duet with the Indian sarod master Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, for a 2010 Grammy (see my December posting on this) in the Traditional World Music category.

For more information on Amir Koushkani, go to his Website, and click here to listen to excerpts from his CD, "Quest".

More to come on further examples of world music at the 2010 Vancouver Cultural Olympics. . . .

Songline's main advertisers: A broad glimpse of world music in Britain

In the previous posting I offered an introduction to Songlines, the impressive London-based magazine of world music. And as there mentioned, I'll be posting next week audio clips from an interview with editor-in-chief Simon Broughton.

The ads themselves in the current issue (#66) of Songlines provide a gateway to a broad range of recordings and events in the field of world music, particularly in Britain. Here, by way of resource exploration, is a description of each of the full-page advertisements in this issue:

Real World Records (see their Website), founded in 1989 by superstar Peter Gabriel, is one of the world's leading labels for this musical niche--if indeed the music of the entire planet can be considered a niche. . . .

Proper Music Distribution (see their Website), perhaps Britain's leading independent CD distributor, including a wide range of smaller traditional and world music labels.

The Sage Gateshead (see their Website), a visually striking glass and stainless steel performance venue in Britain's northeast with three auditoriums, and the center of a range of musical performances, conferences, and educational activities, similar in its mission to La Cité de La Musique in Paris (see also the Website). I'll be posting later on my recent visit to this impressive institution, with an audio interview with Philippe Bruguière, the curator of the spectacular display of musical instruments in the Cité's Musée de la Musique.)

The release on DVD of "Terra Em Concerto" by Mariza, the hugely popular Portuguese singer in the Fado tradition (see the extended official trailer on YouTube.)

The latest bestselling CDs from Amazon.co.uk.

New releases from Navras Records, the London-based juggernaut (the word itself is of Indian origin--used here only in the positive sense) of CD recordings of traditional Indian Music (on which I'll be doing a posting later in the year.)

World music CDs from Warner Classics and Jazz.

Events sponsored by the BBC Concert Orchestra.

World music performances at London's Momo Kemia Bar: "Be enchanted by the most beautiful live acts from all over the world! 8 PM - Free admission!!!"

New world music releases from Play.com, Britain's second largest online retailer of a wide range of products.

And on the back cover, an ad for the final collaboration between the Malian musical giants Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, on Britain's World Circuit Records, following their Grammy Award-winning "In the Heart of the Moon." (See also the label's Website.)

Songlines: The ultimate world music magazine

Songlines is without question the world's leading magazine devoted to the field of world music. (See my post last year on the hard-copy demise of Global Rhythm, which I am happy to see is still available online--see note below this entry.) In my recent visit to London, I interviewed Simon Broughton, the editor (and also an editor of The Rough Guide to World Music), and audio excerpts from that interview will be included in a separate entry at some point in the future.

In the meantime, here's an introduction to this extraordinary publication:

An exceptionally colorful large-format glossy magazine, Songlines is published in eight issues a year, and has a circulation of some 20,000. It has just released its 66th issue (photo at left, used with permission), with 96 pages devoted to news items, obituaries, features, columns, performance listings, competitions, reviews, and two CDs, as well as advertising content rich in details not only of CD releases but of a range of performance venues in Great Britain.

The CDs accompanying the 66th issue include, as with every issue, one Songlines-released CD of March's ten "Top of the World Albums" plus five bonus tracks from columnist Gilles Peterson's playlist, as well as a second CD, "World Music from Hungary 2010," sponsored by a consortium of Hungarian music exporters.

Songlines subscriptions are available in both hard-copy and digital format. Their Website includes a virtual sample of their March 2008 collector's item issue #50, which is well worth exploring, both for its content-- including a listing of "50 Great Moments in World Music"(pp. 44-56) and "50 Best Top of the World Albums" (pp. 30-31)--and captivating digital format, with user-friendly page-turning and zoom options, which in their effectiveness helped me to take the first step in beginning to acknowledge the advantages for a periodical of a digital print platform. The aforesaid issue has five tabs: Up Front, Features, Regulars, Reviews, and On the Road.

Aside from the print or digital issues, the Songlines Website includes a range of options to access: news; an extremely detailed, day-by-day gig guide ("gig" being a musician's term for a performance) of programs throughout the U.K.; a description of music-related tours and holidays around the world, sponsored by the magazine, in the Songlines Music Travel Series; a listing of the Songlines Music Awards, established in 2009 "to recognize outstanding talent in world music"; and an Interactive section featuring "a free interactive sampler for each issue of the magazine where you can listen to excerpts from many of the featured albums with direct links for purchasing CDs and artist concert tickets." In addition to a podcast downloadable from i-Tunes (which I was somehow unable to access. . .), content from the magazine is available through Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Stumble Upon, RSS, and an iPhone application.

I hope this serves as a useful introduction to a very useful publication, and that my enthusiasm for the energy and breadth of Songlines is not unwarranted. As already mentioned, I'll be posting audio excerpts next week from an interview in London with editor Sim0n Broughton.

The ads themselves in the current issue (#66) provide a gateway to a broad range of recordings and events in the field of world music. See the next posting, in which I will describe each of the full-page advertising spreads in this issue.

* * * * * * *
Addendum to introductory paragraph above: Atypically for Wikipedia, at least in my experience, their entry for Global Rhythm has not been updated. . . . But I'll follow up in a future posting on the state of the now exclusively on-line publication.

Another earworm, forgotten lyrics and the Internet, and possibly humming

Despite the fact that I'm currently in Bhopal, India, immersed in the world of Hindustani classical music, I woke up this morning with an old widely known folk song, sung on a recording by Peggy Seeger from my college days in the early 1060's, running in an unstoppable loop through my brain:

I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler
I'm along way from home
And if you don't like me
You can leave me alone

I didn't think too much about it (earworms--see my earlier postings in November and earlier in September on the subject--often function at a level barely above consciousness) until, when we were downstairs in the Dhrupad Sansthan making our morning coffee, my wife Shubha Sankaran commented on the fact that I was humming--something she found very unusual-- and asked me what the tune was.

I proceeded to sing the above lyrics, which I assume are from the first verse to the widely known folk song, but for the life of me, I could remember no more than another line

My horses ain't hungry
They won't eat your hay. . . .

And that was as far as I could go. But I knew that I could return to our room and, assuming the electricity was still on (we have "load shedding"--i.e., deliberate power outages here at least twice a day for several hours), I could fire up my computer, hope that the Internet connection was at something faster than the glacial speed at which it often functions, and check to see what the rest of the song was, undoubtedly in multiple versions, the folk process being what it is.

First, I decided to try Peggy's Website, in hopes there might be some reference to the song there. But the only thing that came up for "I'm a Rambler" was a 45 second MP3 beginning to a song by the late Ewan MacColl, the iconic folklorist and singer, and Peggy's longtime companion and subsequent husband; the introductory lyrics might have been leading up to a chorus of "I'm a rambler . . . . " but then the clip faded out.

When I typed in "My horses ain't hungry", a sound clip of a totally different song by brother Mike Seeger's distinctive voice came up, and still no "I'm a rambler".

In short, nothing on Peggy's Web page.

Next step was a Google advanced search for "I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler" which came up with 11,600 hits!

The first was on a Website called sniff.numachi.com--an odd title, to be sure, but it did provide a set of lyrics, as well as simple staff notation for a related song--though I didn't remember in Peggy Seeger's recording the very frequent mentions of whiskey in the online version.

The third primary link was to a YouTube version by "Jasper Coal at Gabel's Square on St. Patricks Day. Sorry 'bout the lighting"--which accounts for the whiskey dominance in the first set of Web lyrics; the fact that the performance is barely visible, obviously in a dark pub, does not detract from the Irish high spirits of the song itself.

The fourth primary link was to Bob Dylan's Website with his own set of lyrics, which didn't mention whiskey at all, but did retains the general sense of melancholy that I associate with my remembered version.

So I decided next to add Peggy's name to the Google search,

Finally I typed in ["I'm a rambler, I'm a gambler" "Peggy Seeger" lyrics] on Google, which brought up eight links. The first- "Folk Music - An Index to Recorded Resources" has been compiled by uber-librarian Jane Keefer, and was revealed to be an extraordinary resource: an online concordance of recorded performances of thousands of folk songs by hundreds of artists. This link, impressive as it was, was simply a sub-link to the even more comprehensive www.ibiblio.org, an online bibliographic database of mind-boggling scope! However, the citations to the recordings did not include lyrics.

Trying a range of various combined search phrases, some including Peggy or "Peggy Seeger" , some not--sometimes including "my horses ain't hungry, they won't eat your hay"--but the various combination yielded no results. I'll simply have to wait until I get home to Washington to listen to Peggy's recording, and hear the rest of the lyrics that I've now forgotten.

For it seems that the broad folk idiom, without the benefit of copyright, and with its myriad substitutions and permutations of stock phrases, lacks the consistency and specificity of lyrics in current popular and rock music. I've found that when I hear a captivating fragment of a current pop or rock song on the radio, or as background to a television drama, I can usually trace the song and the artist (again, my obsession with taxonomy, or identification and classification--see my earlier post) by typing in a sequence of the words that I remember. For example, some time ago I heard a song with the phrase--"ate a slice of wonder bread", which in a Google advanced search took me to 94,000 links, mostly for the memorable song by Regina Spektor, a young Russia-born singer currently enjoying great success.

As for the humming, while we were making our coffee this morning, one of the Sansthan students came down, and he too was humming. As we exchanged humming references, I recalled that when I was a child I often used to hum when I was eating--an idiosyncrasy upon which my family often commented, saying that I certainly appeared to be happy. I realized that I very rarely hum now, and I wonder why. I'll reflect on that question for some time, and will leave to a later post a discussion of when and why people hum, and for that matter, why they whistle.

Probably time to leave this line of inquiry for the moment--load shedding coming up at any time now--but back soon with another fascinating Google lyric search that I conducted as part of celebrating the song traditions of my family . . . .

Remembering Elvis - 2

As noted in the previous post, VOA music reports in the first two weeks of 2010 focused on what would have been Elvis Presley's 75th birthday, as well as the deaths of Sandro, known as the Argentinian Elvis, and the hugely popular Teddy Pendergrass.

Doug Levine produced an extensive radio feature on two major celebrations conducted in observance of Elvis' birth, which took place on 8 January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi. The first was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, where two days of special ceremonies, "75 Years of Elvis", will honor the legendary singer. Graceland, Elvis' longtime home in Memphis, Tennessee, and a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of thousands of admirers ever year, mounted a special commemoration entitled "From Tupelo to Memphis."

VOA also carried a news report on Presley's grandchildren, Riley Keough (left), and her brother, Benjamin (right), cutting an enormous birthday cake in a special ceremony presided over by Presley's widow, Priscilla.

And Phil Mercer reports on the annual Elvis Festival in Parkes, New South Wales, Australia, with an expected attendance of 10,000 or more, with many dressing as Elvis or Priscilla. Mercer says that "the Parkes festival began in a small restaurant more than 15 years ago . . . [and] has grown into a five-day event that includes dozens of concerts and look-a-like competitions as well as an Elvis-themed gospel church service and a street parade."

On an oddly related note, a VOA news item reports that "the Argentinian Elvis", the singer and film star born as Roberto Sánchez but popularly known as "Sandro", died on 4 January at the age of 64 in the city of Mendoza, Argentina, from complications following surgery. Further details may be found in obituaries in The Christian Science Monitor, which observes whimsically in its headline that "Argentina's 'Elvis' Sandro has left the casa", referring to the popular catch phrase, Elvis has left the building", that originated at Elvis concerts to prevent overenthusiastic fans from remaining in the concert hall in hopes of an encore; The Independent, which mentions that Sandro "was the first Latin singer to play Madison Square Garden and one of the first rock-and-roll singers to be greeted on stage with a barrage of flying underwear"; and The New York Times, which reports that as lead guitarist for the popular band Los de Fuego, during one performance in the early 1960's, "when the group’s lead singer lost his voice. . . . Sánchez relinquished his guitar, took over singing duties and began dancing to the rock rhythm. The crowd went wild." The superstar's passing was mourned by tens of thousands of admirers as he lay in state for 24 hours, and as his hearse passed through the city of Buenos Aires. Several videos of his performance of "Rosa, Rosa" (among other songs), in full Elvisian garb, confirms the comparison, and can be seen on YouTube.

Finally, Doug Levine produced an obituary on Teddy Pendergrass, one of the leading singers of Soul Music, who died in Philadelphia on 14 January at the age of 59. Pendergrass' career was noteworthy for the fact that, despite a near-fatal automobile accident in 1982 in which he was paralyzed from the waist down, Pendergrass returned to perform in a wheelchair in a continuation of his previous success. In addition to his dozens of recordings, he released his autobiography, entitled Truly Blessed, in 1998.