Album Review
Dances of the World
Various
Nonesuch
[The CD skips, stutters, comes briefly to a halt and then starts up again with a creak. Compay and Joseito react in a way which suggests that this is not the first time such misfortune has occurred.]
Compay Segundo: Tsssh - !
Joseito Fernandez: Oh - !
Compay: The disc is scratched. I will never borrow anything from that woman again.
Joseito: Look at it this way: at least we have found a fault we can talk about. How dull it would be if everything in the world were perfect!
C: That does not make up for the loss of the Peruvians. The Bulgarians are beyond listening to and the Tibetans leave us only a few bars of themselves before vanishing altogether like soap in the bath. In place of the Himalayan sharni and dhol we have a profound din of clicking and shuddering. Oh, but I am angry! The remainder sounds so good that I feel as if I'm being robbed.
J: Peace. Let's review as much as we can hear and judge the rest from that. Nonesuch Explorer have been putting out field recordings and other kinds of world music for a long time and we can assume that they possess both dedication and clear judgement. We know we're not dealing with the kind of slob who would throw a collection of music together and not care if it was good or bad. The Tibetans and Peruvians may be gone but the Bulgarians are not quite as bad as you say and, after all, the album has thirteen other tracks we can listen to. Three from sixteen is not so bad.
C: I protest: you are too sensible.
J: For my part, I think a compilation such as this is an excellent introduction to field recordings in general. Do you remember that Balinese CD we listened to a few months ago? I am a novice in the matter of the Balinese gamelan, and over an hour of the new sound was too much for me. The five minutes of Bali on Dances of the World proved more satisfying. I felt free to concentrate on little changes and subtleties in the melody, knowing that I would not be expected to extend my ignorant but intrigued attention over the entire seventy minutes of an album. I can also perceive a difference between Bali's gamelan and the playing of the Javanese gamelan on track fourteen. I had read that a difference existed, but until now I had not heard proof of it. The Javanese music moves slowly, like a spider, where the Balinese music leaps and prances.
C: Hm. I heard some Javanese musicians yesterday and they did not sound slow to me at all.
J: Well, I am only telling you what is on this disc. Why must you always contradict me?
C: I am not being contradictory, I am providing further information, that's all. On the matter of this CD, I think you are right when you say it is a good introduction. I can't imagine being pleased by seventy minutes of this Turkish wedding music if I had never heard it before, dominated as it is by the buzzing of an gigantic wasp -
J: That wasp is known as a zurna, a Turkish member of the oboe family.
C: - be that as it may, it goes continuously -
J: The player breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth so that he never has to pause to inhale. You do the same with a didjeridu.
C: - be that as it may, the instrument is noisy and repetitious. Three minutes are exciting to the inexperienced ear. Seventy would be murder. Let an entire album wait until I have savoured the three minutes and learnt to appreciate it.
J: Our ears have been ruined by too many songs in too many four-minute parcels on too many commercial albums: we have lost our attention span.
C: I think we are missing something simply because we are sitting here in our comfortable chairs and not at the dance itself. It doesn't seem right.
J: True, but unless you see us travelling to Japan, Yugoslavia and so on in the near future then it will have to do. Ah, Japan!
C: You've been there, have you?
J: Yes, since my death. Oh Compay, you have no idea, the thrill I felt when I heard the percussive "dank-dank!" and then the long "Whoooooo-up!" sung by Ayako Handa at the beginning of the Japanese kabuki 'long-song' on this CD. I could have cried. The music is predominantly a shamisen duet of sharp string-plucking but it is the percussion I admire. It's so sparse and so far away from the more African drumming I am used to. The drummer strikes on what sounds to me like an off-beat. I don't know the proper way to say it, but he seems to be hitting the drum in the spaces between the notes I usually expect to hear from a drum. The drum-beat lives a firm yet delicate existance in isolated crevices. There must be a technical term, beats-per-bar or some-such thing.
C: I am amused when I hear the Japanese music with all its sparseness followed by the river-like melody of the Paraguayan harp. No crevices there! It's a well-arranged CD, this: you don't get too much of the same thing in a row. They don't put the Turkish zurna straight after the Yugoslavian zurna, or the dance from Ghana next to the dance from Uganda.
J: I recognised the Ugandan dance from African Sanctus. It is a relief to hear it freed from the Christian mass.
C: The liner notes could be longer, but at least they're thoughtfully condensed - in fact, you could use that as an epitaph for the entire compilation. Ghana, Turkey, Peru, Bulgaria, Uganda, Spain, Tibet, Japan, Paraguay, Yugoslavia, Niger, Indonesia and Sweden all on one CD and they complement one another well too. You could do a lot worse.
