Album Review
Music of the World 1998
Various
Mabuhay Records
Compay Segundo: I was surprised by this one.The cover is a miserable, dour thing - no, don't look at me like that; that was not the surprise - and the CD is a compilation of songs from albums put out by an Australian label which releases musicians who live in Australia but who play music in overseas styles. We have "the leading Kurdish musician in this country," we have a Ukrainian ensemble, we have a Mariachi band, Chinese flautists, a South African exile, a Macedonian accordionist and a ... 'Celtic / Pirate' band, whatever that is -
Joseito Fernandez: Wait, say that again.
Compay: Celtic. Pirate.
Joseito: What are they called?
C: Sforzando.
J: I've seen them!
C: Sforzando?
J: I saw them, oh, at a Melbourne Fringe Festival parade years ago. It must have been them. They were dressed as pirates. Do they have a fiddle?
C: Yes, they sound as if they're playing Irish music.
J: It is them! They were great fun! So they have a name as well. I wondered what they were called. Ha, how do you like that? Until you said 'Celtic / Pirate' I had forgotten them entirely, but now I can remember, oh, not everything, but I do remember details, I rememeber the pirate headscarf one of them wore and the colour of the sky behind the band, the smell of the stalls selling corn roasted on the cob and the fact that my feet hurt ...
C: Thank you Marcel Proust.
J: Give them good marks for me. I am excited to hear of them again.
C: My friend, I would do that even without your excitement to guide me. This was the surprise. I expected Music of the World to be wretched. I looked at the uninspiring cover and the obscure label and the sometimes sanctimonious notes and thought, "Oh no, do I have to listen to this? Yes I must," I told myself. "I have to review it." I saw that the first song comes from the Andes. "It will probably be drifty wootling-tootling panpipe music of the worst kind," I thought sadly as I put it on. But no! "Guitarrita' was a vivid, bouncing tune, full of colour, and the panpipe purred at the fun it was having. All of the thirteen tracks were well-played and recorded clearly. The Buddhist chanting track maintains an beautiful crystalline silence under the monk's voice..
J: Is this the Buddhist chant now? I am turning to Sforzando when it finishes.
C: It goes for sixteen minutes.
J: Ai, these Buddhists are too dedicated.
[they wait, listening to the Venerable Thich Phuoc Tan work his way through the Early Morning Great Bell Verse. The bell bongs and a drum sets up an occasional rattle of sound.]
J: Ha, it's over. I'm switching. Mm, listen, energy! Not as much as they had live, I am sure, but galloping and inventive, with moments when the music kicks out at you to keep you awake.
C: The next one underwhelms me, this South African singer, but I think that is because there is so much African music available, and so much of it has more energy and inventiveness than this ... this is gentle ... also, the booklet tries to set him up as a kind of noble martyr which for all I know may be true of him in real life, but it does not do to load that kind of expectation onto a new musician. They play the same trick on the Kurd. "A soundtrack for not just a band, but a whole race of people." Imagine having to be your whole people! Ouch!
J: Mm, the booklet rather pushes this music as an antidote to - to, ah - to the West, I suppose.
C: Yes, I get tired of this sort of thing. These are the notes for the Ukrainians. "The music is a landscape with instruments, painting for us a time we can never, in our Western homes, ever truly understand." Guess what? With my internet connection I can post entertaining and insulting messages to strangers on message boards in ways that the people "at the tail end of the era of the Cossacks" in the Ukraine can never ever truly understand. Do I walk around telling them about it? No. Fuck off. Here in death I can taste ten new flavours in common household tea. Cat hair no longer sticks to my shirt. Orgasms are twice as good. Do I regularly annoy the living with this information? No. I do not need to be told that I will never, ever truly understand what it is like to live in a hut in the Ukraine or climb trees to catch monkeys in the Amazon or survive in the desert near Alice Springs armed with only tribal ingenuity and a pointed stick. I will never ever truly understand what it felt like to have sex with my neighbour's wife either, you know? There are some things I do not need to understand.
J: But did you like the song?
C: Oh yes, the Ukrainian ensemble itself was a sparkling thing, like the background to a fairytale. I like this little sampler. Now that the 1998 is its title is several years behind us, it will hopefully be found by our readers in libraries and at a cheap price on the shelves of second-hand shops.
