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New Sounds

Wednesday, November 30, 2005
  • John Schaefer

    Must Haves: Traditional Music

    It's the middle of WNYC's Must Have Festival and for this edition of New Sounds, John Schaefer offers a guide to traditional music. Listen to recommended recordings of music from Sunda, Zimbabwe, Turkey, Tibet, Chile, India, and more.

PROGRAM # 2480, New Sounds Essentials: Traditional Music (First aired on Wednesday, 11-29-05)

ARTIST(S)

RECORDING

CUT(S)

SOURCE

 

Anthology of African Music: Ba-Benzele Pygmies

"Song of Rejoicing" {4:00}

Barenreiter BM30L 2303. German import. Out of print. A similar collection, with a song of rejoicing was issued on Rounder Records in 1998, ROUN5107 www.rounder.com

Inti-Illimani

Flight of the Condor

Papel de Plata [2:30]

BBC #22440 Out of print, but there's info at www.gamisim.com/index_illimani, complete discography at www.nuevacancion.net/inti

E. Koestryara

Sangkala!

Reumbeuy [5:00]

Ikon #5502 Out of print.

Zimbabwe: The Soul of Mbira

Traditions of the Shona People

Taireva [4:00]

Nonesuch Explorer #79704** www.nonesuch.com *

Martin Swan & Mouth Music

Live, WNYC, 1991

S’Muladach [5:00]

This performance not commercially available, but Mouth Music’s CDs were released by Rykodisc, www.rykodisc.com AND some are available on www.emusic.com

Ravi Shankar

The Genius of Pandit Ravi Shankar

Dhun-Keharwa [5:30]

Oriental #108 orientalrecords.com

Les Mystere des Voix Bulgares

(Vol. 1)

Kalimankou Denkou [5:00]

Nonesuch Explorer #79165** www.nonesuch.com*

The Music of Islam

Vol. 9 – Mawlawiyah Music of the Whirling Dervishes

Prayer for Permission for Whirling [6:00]

Celestial Harmonies #13149 www.harmonies.com*

Tibetan Buddhism

Tantras of Gyuto

Mahakala, excerpt [3:30]

Nonesuch Explorer #79198** www.nonesuch.com*


*, ** - Find the recordings you've heard - go to the New Sounds Recordings Information page

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Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.