Pitchfork

Even though we live in a digital age, there's still no substitute for digging through crates in yard sales, charity shops, and used record stories in order to unearth great, oft-unheard music. (No, really, there is no substitute.) As we've done the past few years, we dig through the crates and round up some of the best recently released but rarely talked-about compilations and reissues, including Yaala Yaala's Daouda Dembele (among others from that Drag City-supported series), LPs from Luv 'n' Haight, Soundway, and Ashphalt Tango, and entries into the Think Global and Rough Guide series.

Eugene Blacknell: We Can't Take Life for Granted [Luv 'n' Haight]
Oakland guitarist Eugene Blacknell was a mover on the East Bay scene before he even graduated high school, but he never managed to make it big despite a generally successful career and immense talent. Luv 'n' Haight's compilation, made with the assistance of Blacknell's son Gino-- himself an accomplished session player-- tells the whole story through music. It includes Eugene's early instrumental r&b singles with his first band, the Savonics, and traces his evolution through a few smoking raw funk tracks to the blues-inflected funky soul sound he finally hit upon in the early 1970s with the New Breed. More than half of the disc is previously unreleased, and it lays his evolution out in plain chronological terms, snagging little pieces of every r&b-descended genre of the 1960s and 70s, including a few excellent disco cuts.

Daouda Dembele [Yaala Yaala]
Pekos/Yoro Diallo [Yaala Yaala]
Bougouni Yaalali [Yaala Yaala]
Yaala Yaala is Drag City's new outlet for ethnographic field recordings and things taken from cassettes sold in the rural countryside. Ali Farka Touré it's not. These first three volumes were recorded in Mali, and the sounds are remarkable. Daouda Dembele is a griot from the region around Segou, and he's presented here telling stories and accompanying himself on the jelingoni, a type of lute. The Pekos/Yoro Diallo volume is of uncertain provenance, but it came to the compiler via a cassette dealer in Bougouni, who claimed it was recorded in a village with no electricity. It's an interesting, if intensely lo-fi tape-- it was probably recorded on a boombox-- featuring percussion, guitar that occasionally distorts naturally on the recording, and some motor-mouthed vocals halfway between griot tradition and modern popular song.

The Bougouni Yaalali disc was recorded in Bougouni as the last century came to a close, and it presents an audio portrait of the town. You get hand percussion and singing at a party, interesting desert guitar and vocals, crazy, distorted thumb piano, snippets of conversation, neat-sounding chimes, and a brutal percussion instrument that sounds like multiple bones being broken at once. Probably not for the casual listener, but hugely interesting recordings nonetheless.

Fanfare Ciocărlia: Queens & Kings [Asphalt Tango]
Toni Iordache: Sounds From a Bygone Age, Volume 4 [Asphalt Tango Records]
Dona Dumitru Siminică: Sounds From a Bygone Age, Volume 3 [Asphalt Tango Records]
In much the same way that the United States' African-descended minority is responsible for a disproportionately sizable influence on American music, Romania's Roma population exerts a huge influence on modern Romanian music-- and indeed on the music of most of Eastern Europe. Asphalt Tango has been trolling the Romanian vaults for the past few years, turning up all sorts of amazing, otherworldly recordings. Fanfare Ciocărlia isn't one of them-- it's a modern recording made by an all-star gypsy band, and it's thrilling all the way through. The music is so rhythmic and tonally distinctive that it immediately opens your ears, and these songs are arranged with an idea of how well Roma music translates to modern rock and pop sensibilities.

The archival recordings are unlike anything else I've heard. Toni Iordache was the greatest virtuoso of the cimbalom-- a massive, piano-sized hammer dulcimer-- and he could play it not only with dizzying speed, but also a refined, subtle touch that gives his music great dynamic range and a lot of emotional impact. I'm not sure what you'd call the style-- Romanian dulcimer speed jazz or something-- but it's exhilarating stuff. Then there's Dona Dumitru Siminică, a café singer whose haunting, freakish falsetto would give most Western cafégoers the willies. There is really nothing to compare him to-- the minimal backing lurches, but it's a refined lurch, and his voice sails around above it as though totally untethered by restraints of any kind. If you want to know more than that, you'll just have to listen to it, because words will never quite capture how bizarre and captivating it is.

El Kinto: El Kinto [Lion Productions]
Lion Productions returns to Uruguay for an excellent retrospective of perhaps Uruguay's greatest rock band. Whereas most of the bands that popped up in Uruguay in the immediate wake of the Beatles, such as Los Mockers and Los Shakers, sounded essentially Anglo, by the late 60s people were ready for something new, and El Kinto provided it. Combining what they had learned from British and American rock with local styles-- especially the candombe rhythm-- the group created something entirely its own. They were innovative in a broader sense, too-- not many rock bands had drummers who played with brushes or their hands at the time. The sound is laid-back, full of harmony vocals, bounding bass lines, and snaking guitar parts. The constantly ascending grandeur of "Jose" alone makes this disc worthwhile. El Kinto never had a chance to develop beyond the innovations of their three years together, partly because of a military dictatorship that swept to power in the early 70s and imposed censorship, but the music they made from 1967-69 is some of the finest of its era, on par with the Tropicália being made a few hundred miles to the north.

Rail Band: Belle Epoque, Volume 1: Soundiata [Syllart/Stern's]
Mali's Rail Band was one of West Africa's great bands in the 1970s and 80s, and it's frankly remarkable that it took so long for a thorough retrospective to be made available in the West, but Stern's and Syllart have done an excellent job on this compilation. It opens with the 27-minute title track, featuring vocalist Mory Kante (he and Salif Keita, also featured on this set, are two of Mali's greatest singers), and it's a song that sounds as vast as the country it comes from. Hypnotic, layered guitars (as many as four), repetitive, elemental rhythms, smeared horns, and spectacular vocals add up to an enormous and complex sound that nonetheless captures a simple spirit. This is one of three 2xCD compilations on Stern's/Syllart documenting the band's first thirteen years.

Various Artists: Authenticité: The Syliphone Years [Guinea's Orchestres Nationaux and Federaux 1965-1980] [Stern's/Syllart]
In the 60s and 70s, Guinea's Ahmed Sékou Toure, who had risen to his country's presidency in the wake of France's colonial withdrawal in 1958, was one of several African leaders to establish an official outlet for his nation's musical identity. Syliphone Records went on, perhaps improbably given its government origins, to build one of the great catalogs in recorded music history as it encouraged the development of a distinctive Guinean style through the establishment of regional and national orchestras. In this case, the word orchestra is a stand-in for dance band, and with a few cues from Cuban music, the country's musicians went about forging something new by applying electric instruments and horn sections to ages-old musical traditions. This 2xCD set provides a fantastic selection of 28 tracks from across the label's long and productive run, including four from the iconic Bembeya Jazz National and a host of tracks from other groups that have never appeared on CD before. The cyclical guitar parts, insistent rhythms, richly orchestrated horn sections, darkly atmospheric recording quality, and forceful lead vocals that characterized Guinean music during this era are all on full display, and anyone with even a passing interest in West African music should hear this. If you didn't know you had an interest in West African music, one listen to this might spark one.

Various Artists: Bachata Roja: Acoustic Bachata From the Cabaret Era [IASO Records]
Bachata is a style of music that grew from rural party music in the Dominican Republic in the early 60s and ultimately ascended to massive popularity when it was electrified in the 80s. For much of its history, Bachata was overshadowed by merengue, which had been officially established as the national music of the Dominican Republic during the 31-year reign of Rafael Trujillo, which ended in 1961. These acoustic recordings from some of the genres best-known early artists are uniformly simple, with fluttering acoustic guitars, steady hand percussion beats, and some truly wonderful singing that highlights Bachata's roots in the slow bolero form. The recordings are charmingly unadorned, but not really lo-fi. Rafael Encarnación's sweet tenor alone makes the compilation worth a listen, but this is a disc that takes a musical form you may have never realized existed and makes you feel immediately familiar.

Various Artists: El Barrio: Gangsters, Latin Soul & the Birth of Salsa [Fania]
Johnny Pacheco's Fania label hit the shelves with the motto "the best in Latin music," and oftentimes in the 60s and 70s that was true. The label was the principle documenter of New York's Latin soul explosion, and the evolution of salsa can be traced in the grooves of its LPs and 45s. El Barrio spotlights tracks from some of the music's biggest stars-- including Willie Colón, Tito Puente, Joe Cuba, Joe Bataan, Ray Barretto, Mongo Santamaría, and Charlie Palmieri-- that trace the development of a new Latino American musical lexicon. It ranges from fairly old-school Cuban and Puerto Rican grooves, just a step or two removed from mambo and jibaro, all the way to straight-up hard funk, proto-disco, boogaloo and full-on salsa, the hybrid that finally fused the old and the new. The gangster image of the cover shot of two fedora'd guys smoking cigars on the running boards of a Rolls Royce perfectly telegraphs the badass image cultivated by Barrio boys like Colón and his singer, Héctor Lavoe, and the music was tough enough to match the image.

Various Artists: Bokoor Beats: Vintage Afro-beat, Afro-rock & Electric Highlife from Ghana [Otrabanda]
Bokoor Studios was one of only two recording studios in Ghana from 1983 to 1985, the other was Ghana Films, and it documented most of the best bands in the country during that period, which was marked by economic disaster and curfews. This compilation includes recordings made at Bokoor in the 80s and a couple from the early 90s. Bokoor operator John Collins also led the Bokoor Band, and most of the compilation is devoted to them, with a few tracks by others. In spite of the years in which these songs were recorded, they sound very much of a piece with the classic Afrobeat and Afrofunk groups of the 70s-- the sound is earthy, partly owing to the open-air design of the studio, and has a lot of low-end bite, without any of the weak-toned synthesizers and clunky drum machines that invaded African music in the 80s. The presentation is a little disheveled, but the music is fantastic.

Various Artists: Bulawayo Jazz 1950, '51, '52 Zimbabwe [Sharp Wood Productions]
Bulawayo is a city in southern Zimbabwe that in the late 40s and early 50s became home to its own form of jazz, a distinct subgenre that pounded ragtime jazz and swing into an African mold. The alto sax led the group while the other horns backed it up, and the rhythms were held down with banjo, guitar, drums, and a bass instrument-- sometimes a double bass, other times a tuba or trombone. At the time of these recordings, Bulawayo was prospering as the railroad center of southern Africa, and this unique music positively explodes with joy. This disc is part of an ongoing effort to make the recordings of Hugh Tracey, who criss-crossed Africa throughout the mid-20th century recording all kinds of local music, available to the public. His catalog is massive, and he was an expert at capturing music in less-than-favorable conditions-- most of this was recorded outdoors with one microphone, but it sounds incredibly crisp.

Various Artists: Columbia! The Golden Age of Disco Fuentes, the Powerhouse of Columbian Music, 1960-1976 [Soundway]
Soundway continues chronicling tropical funk on its latest compilation, this time focusing on Columbia's greatest record label, Disco Fuentes. Founded in 1934 by Antonio José Fuentes, the imprint captured the long evolution of the music from the country's Caribbean coast, including the especially fertile period of cross-pollination reflected on this disc. Traditional cumbias, forrós, and fandangos were invaded by funk, blues, soul, salsa, West African highlife and rock in the 1960s, and the result was some seriously unpredictable and often wildly psychedelic music. Wganda Kenya's "Tifit Hayed"-- a crazed Afro-Latin blow-up that sounds almost avant-garde for the way its rhythm is built and dominates the arrangement-- is a good example of the rhytmic power of some these tracks. Every song features armloads of auxiliary percussion and hard-hitting horns, and Soundway has done a fantastic job of telling the story and restoring the music, as usual. This is a great companion to last year's excellent Panama! compilation.

Various Artists: Gilles Peterson Digs America 2 [Luv 'n' Haight]
This is a second volume of British DJ Gilles Peterson's finds from his expeditions into American vinyl depositories. The first track, Lorez Alexandria's "I'm Wishin'", blows me away-- it's a haunting jazz/soul burner with dramatic orchestration that turns midnight depression into pure sound waves and includes a rather shocking swerve into swing on the bridge. It's almost a shame it's sequenced first, because nothing else on the disc can live up to it, though there are plenty of great finds in the mix. Ray Camacho's "Movin' On" is cranking, pre-disco funk with a piercing horn arrangement, Bethlehem Progressive Ensemble's "Make Way (Call to Worship)" is great, vibraphone-led soul jazz, and Dee Edwards' "Why Can't There Be Love?" is a funked-up soul song cut through with crazy fuzz guitar. Generally speaking, Peterson focuses on the nexus between jazz, soul and funk, beginning with soul and moving through funk to jazz, which unifies the material in spite of its diversity.

Various Artists: Golden Afrique, Volume 3 [Network]
Volume One of Network's Golden Afrique series of double-disc retrospectives focused on West Africa, Volume Two hit Central Africa, and now Volume Three heads to southern Africa for a trip through the townships and a forays into Zimbabwe and Zambia. The music collected here covers a period from 1938 to 1998, so there's a huge amount of variety, and it spans the whole of the apartheid era, as well as the struggles for independence in Zimbabwe and Zambia. It includes Solomon Linda's "Mbube" (aka "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"), which was originally recorded in 1939. You also get Zulu choral music, gumboot jazz, funk, fusion, ska, kwela, synth-pop, parlor blues, rock, thumping township jive and mbaqanga, vintage harmony pop, rumba, hard soul, Zimbabwean chimurenga, and a whole range of amazing folk styles played on everything from wood flutes, ocarina, and hand drums to acoustic guitars, thumb pianos, and accordions. The most common thread is that it's all built on infectious rhythm. Apart from the fact that it avoids Mozambique and Angola and stops just short of hip-hop's South African emergence, this is about as panoramic an introduction to southern African musical styles as you could possibly get.

Various Artists: The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru [Barbes Records]
Just seeing the phrase "Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru" was enough to make me anticipate this compilation, and it did not let me down. It kicks off with an instrumental called "Sonido Amazonico" ("Amazon Sound"), a funky, dark, sweaty tune that psychedelicizes a surf guitar lead and generates a burning, humid atmosphere. Most of these tracks use the Colombian cumbia form as a loose basis, but this music-- hailing mostly from deep inland Peru-- is its own thing, mixing elements from all over the Americas and Africa. Lots of fiddles and hand percussion balance out the electric elements, and everything grooves. The genre tag "Chicha" comes from a word that refers to fermented beverages-- appropriately, the word's etymology is native, as is the vast majority of the population of Andean and Amazonian Peru. Anyone who digs other South American funk and rock forms, or even 60s and 70s West African pop, funk and rock, is likely to find something to love here.

Various Artists: Rough Guide to Bollywood Gold [World Music Network]
Various Artists: Rough Guide to African Blues [World Music Network]
Various Artists: Rough Guide to Latin Funk [World Music Network]
World Music Network's Rough Guides series typically drops more than one title a month. These are three of the best volumes from the past year. Bollywood Gold compiler DJ Ritu has done a good job of steering away from tracks that have been heavily comped in the past to provide a decently expansive overview of the range of Indian film music in the late 60s and early 70s. Most of the big composers and composer teams-- including RD Burman, Kalyanji Anandji, Laxmikant Pyarelal, and Shankar Jaikishan-- are here, but their importance is downplayed in the notes in favor of the playback singers. The styles cover everything from rather traditional fare to crazy spy-movie funk and gypsy surf rock, and there's even an exceedingly rare vocal turn from RD Burman. Bollywood can be daunting to approach, so as many of these kinds of compilations as possible is a good thing.

The African blues guide criss-crosses the Sahara-- ranging from Ethiopia and Sudan to Mali and Senegal and presenting a mix of traditional music, African music influenced by American blues and American visitors to Africa-- searching for the connections in an attempt to reveal how the music has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic. The acoustic songs of Nuru Kane and Boubacar Traore show the ancient roots, while Niger's Etran Finatawa updates them with electric crunch. It all has the thrum of sadness that defines the blues-- that feeling that escapes description but everyone can hear instantly.

The Rough Guide to Latin Funk focuses entirely on contemporary sounds, but the roots can be clearly heard: vintage salsa, James Brown, Columbian cumbia, Cuban rumba, old descargas and Afro-Cuban fusions. Salsa vet Joe Bataan even shows up with a recent track. Time has added a lot of elements to the original Latin funk pioneered on the Fania and SalSoul labels in the 60s and 70s, but the spikes of electro, hip hop cut-ups and DJ scratching that have worked their way into the music have only served to make it even funkier. Rough Guides intentionally scrape just the surface of genres and movements they document, which means there's plenty more out there where this came from. Good news.

Various Artists: Super Cool California Soul 2: Raw & Rare Soul from the West Coast, 1966-1982 [Luv 'n' Haight]
Ubiquity/Luv 'n' Haight's campaign to unearth as much great forgotten Left Coast funk and soul as possible continues with the second volume in this series. At this point, I wonder if the old soul well will ever go dry, because there's a ton of, um, cool stuff here. Mokie J.J. & R.O.B. check in with "Beverly", a great slice of psychedelicized soul with trippy female backing vocals; Carmelita's "Isn't it Lonely" is a nice bit of breezy, Motown-tinged smooth soul with great backing harmonies; and Spanky Wilson's version of "Fancy" puts an interesting racial spin on the song's class narrative. They've also truly dug deep: the funky, jazz-inflected soul of Gow Dow Experience came off a private press LP and some unreleased tapes, and it was worth redeeming.

Various Artists: Think Global: Tango [World Music Network]
Various Artists: Think Global: West Africa Unwired [World Music Network]
World Music Network's Think Global series debuted last year and is, in terms of each disc's content, somewhat similar to the label's Rough Guides series in that it typically chooses a genre or a region and focuses on providing a general picture of it. The main difference is that each volume benefits an international charity-- Tango benefits Oxfam and West Africa Unwired benefits Amnesty International-- and the packaging materials are pointedly environmentally friendly. Musically, these are the two most intriguing early volumes. Tango shines a light on a genre most people outside of Argentina and Uruguay think of only in relation to the risqué dance it accompanies. It's a versatile genre, and this disc shows us everything from traditional bandoneón-and-violin dance music to modern electronic deconstructions of the rhythms and currents of the music. It's missing two giants (Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel have writing credits but don't appear), but this doesn't harm the informative nature of the compilation much. West Africa Unwired is a simply excellent compilation of modern recordings of traditionally based music from Mali, Senegal, Niger, and Guinea. The textures range widely, from simple acoustic guitar-and-voice songs to full choral arrangements and traditional instruments such as the harp-like kora, the marimba-like balafon, the stringed ngoni, and a huge variety of percussion instruments.