Sunday at Bob's #29 - How Do We Get At It First?

Welcome back for yet another magic hour with Sunday at Bob's! I would like to begin by addressing the few additions that I made to the blog last week. I had been talking about it for a while and I finally got on with it, the list of cool blogs I was preparing is here, on the side. I might add some later on but this is already a lot of exciting material to explore. I also added on top of that a link that shall remain permanently towards an discussion I had the honour of having a few weeks back, which I mentioned in the last post. Last but not least, we have ourselves a new banner paying tribute to the beautiful Fanitullen. That being said, let's begin.

I only heard last week about the immense monument of Afro Beat, drummer Tony Allen, leaving us and thought some sort of tribute imposed itself. I won't talk too much about the great career (for lack of a better word) of this amazing musician. Rather I would just like to remember these shifts where his albums played one after the other in the lobby. One time I played the whole masterclass he did with Moses Boyd (who was featured here months ago) and confused the guests who were chilling on the couches. It was worth it. So I thought we would begin with an extract from this master class and a short exchange between two great drummers of their own generation. A bit like Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Un singe en hiver. A bit. It is followed by a song from his album Secret Agent.

Fantastic Man William Onyeabor was only a few years younger than Tony Allen. He left us in 2017. It has been some time I wanted to talk about him on Sunday at Bob's and I think now is the moment. Because he has in common with Tony Allen an impressive and innovative discography, but a life path rather different. Both are from this musically inifitely fertile earth that is Nigeria. Onyeabor is still to this day a mystery to most and I would like to link you to this short film Noisey made about him and the story of his rediscovery instead of trying to sum it up. I just thought it could be an interesting parallel to draw between the two giants.

We go on with Manu "Papagroove" Dibango. Also refered to as Papa Manu, he does us the honour with a song I like to think of as the Cameroonese version of La ville s'endormait from Jacques Brel. A musical transcription of an evening at the village.

I am not sure we heard Bugge Wesseltoft here before, although he released a very cool album with Prins Thomas a couple of years back and was always in the back of my head for the playlist. If I am not mistaken, in the song we have here the trumpet is by my compatriot Erik Truffaz. I started to listen again to Wesseltoft prior to going to Norway, when I asked myself the usual pre-travel question: Do I know any musician from there?

It is followed by one of the good surprises of the past weeks, the album Snoopy by CS + Kreme. I don't know anything about them and so I won't expand but in the past weeks I have been looking into a genre I am very much stranger to and have been enjoying it a lot. These electronic fumes and vapors with little melodic twists that keep you hanging are exquisit and, if it was never my cup of tea, I am starting to fall in love.

For some reason I think Erik Satie just slipping in makes so much sense, I wouldn't know how to explain it but here is a transition dipped in honey. Him and Barbara are two enormous monuments of French music (music I have been researching in the past weeks and prepare yourself for some cool gems to come is all I can say) both in their respective fields. Barbara sings for us the lament of someone witnessing the love of their life take the train to Amsterdam with someone else. It is a song written by Jacques Brel and it is not common to succeed so magnificently an interpretation of a song wirtten by Jacques Brel. But then again, it is Barbara we are talking about.

Beloved of the wandering minstrels of yesterday, the genuine indian violin, Sarangi is one of the most popular instruments in the north Indian musical system. It is a short, stocky instrument whose 3 main strings are of animal gut while 35 metal strings acting as resonators give a vibrant richness to each note. The Sarangi is played with a bow, but the peculiarity of the instrument is in the way different notes are produced. There are no frets and instead of stopping the strings with the fingers as on the violin, the finger nails slide along the strings producing a continuous range of mellifluent notes. (…) The plaintive melody of the Sarangi has a haunting beauty all its own and in the hands of the master it weaves a magic spell that cannot fail to bind anyone. (source)

We close this shift with a magnificent piece by Sariza Cohen. It kills me not to be able to find more music from her. I would like to draw a link between this plainte (lament), and the quote from C.King we saw two weeks ago about Alexis Zoumbas and Blind Willie Johnson.

Here is a link to an interesting article about her, from a blog you can find in our new list.

That is all for today, I hope you enjoy and I see you in two weeks!

Check out time is now an idea, but it remains 10h30.

The receptionist

Playlist:

1. Tony Allen & Moses Boyd - Masterclass Boiler Room x Guardian Gateways
2. Tony Allen - Pariwo
3. William Onyeabor - Better Change Your Mind
4. Manu Dibango - Soir Au Village
5. Bugge Wesseltoft - Breed It
6. CS + Kreme - Saint
7. Erik Satie - Pièces Froides (Cold Pieces), 6 Pieces Pour Piano: Airs À Faire Fuir I
8. Barbara - Je ne sais pas
9. Ram Narayan - A Treasure from Solomon's Mines
10. Sariza Cohen - Plainte (Chekoua)

Sunday at Bob’s – an interview with [ ] by Maisa Imamović

Hello everyone!

Today, a special post I should have posted long ago. No music but a few weeks back I had the honour to be interviewed by the great Amsterdam-based writer, designer, and web-developer who likes to draw, Maisa Imamović for the website networkcultures.org

It was a very fruitful experience, a nice chat with a very cool person which lead to trying figuring out what this blog is all about. Here is the link, I strongly suggest to check out other articles on the blog as well.

I add a few illustrations I made in Norway for free, to compensate for the lack of music which will be arriving next week sharp! The first one represents the origin of painting by Kora of Sicyon, daughter of Butades, as described by Pliny the Elder. The second is taken from the Fanitullen I talked about last week, the pattern on the woman's sleeve is inpired by the traditional costumes of the Høyanger region. It represents the mountains around, and is normally underlined with some waves symbolizing the sea that is also around. These costumes are worn for special occasions where can be also heard the Fanitullen. The last one is the souvenir of a Panagiri.

Check out time is 10h30 no matter what.

The receptionist

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Sunday at Bob's #28 - One Year

Well, it's been a year. We were hanging out in the lobby, a bit bored between two check ins. A nice tune was playing and we made a blog. Those were good days. The hostel is now closed due to some virus but is that a reason to stop taking a minute every once in a while and write a bit, listen a bit? I don't know, not for now at least. I hope you guys are all doing good, I hope you're all safe. Let us begin.

We have been used to, now and then, have music from films included in the playlist. In fact if I had a penny for everytime I watched a movie and, posessed by it's soundtrack, I ran to my computer to check who was responsible for it the second it ended, well I would have a few pennies to say the least. It is the second time George Delerue makes an apparition although I am not sure he was mentioned the first time. He composed the music for Bertrand Blier's Préparez vos mouchoirs where was included if I am not mistaken a certain Hungarian melody in B minor but today he opens the playlist with beautiful songs from Garde à vue. I advise you, if you haven't done it before, to go on Wikipedia and check the list of movies he worked on, very impressive.

Miquèla, is amongst the most prominent singers of the Nòva cançon occitana (new Occitan song) in the 1970s. Now I must warn you, I don't know anything about the Nòva cançon occitana, let alone in 1970s. However everytime we had musicians performing in Creole, I recall mentioning how pleasing it was for a French speaker to hear a Patois so close I feel I can understand it, but of course I can't. It is a bit the same feeling as when learning a language we start to notice words we know in songs and, possibly, it adds to them somekind of attraction. This feeling pops up here and there in Miquèla's beautiful eponym album which I strongly recommend.

As I took the habit to say once in a while, I don't know much about Abner Burnett besides the fact his album It Ought to Be Enough is one of my favourites of the past weeks, and that he has been called the music's version of Hunter S. Thompson. As I usually do in such cases I shall let someone who knows better and writes better, tell us:

How country is Abner Burnett? . . . you'd think this was a classical album . . . then you come to gentle acoustic songs . . . sprightly blues . . . late night jazz . . . rugged soul . . . bound together by the quality of Burnett's writing --- intelligent without being self-consciously clever . . .
Country Music People

He is followed by two jazz songs, one rather recent by Wildflower and another earlier from the great Sun Ra. I always find interesting to put in relation the London jazz scene of these past years with what I suspect is music that influences it. In Wildflower 2 I hear vibes that make me think of Portico Quartet and Shabaka Hutchings and I like it.

After that we have a very powerful song by the legend Blind Willie Johnson. He has been compared in a very interesting book about music from Epirus with Alexis Zoumbas who I have tried many times to include in a playlist but the intensity of his music makes it very difficult to put it in between two songs. Here is a passage:

When Frank Walker, the executive who supervised regional recordings for Columbia Records, met the blind musician at the makeshift studio in Dallas’s North Lamar Street, he had no idea that this session with Willie Johnson would produce one of the most profound pieces of American folk music ever captured. Likewise, Walker would have been stunned to learn that a recording made by Blind Willie Johnson that day was the spiritual twin of the recording made a year earlier in New York by Zoumbas, itself a lament developed thousands of miles across the Atlantic, countless millennia in our past.
Like Zoumbas, Johnson waited till almost the end of his session to play his masterpiece. With his guitar tuned carefully to open D (D–A–D–F#–A–D), Johnson began sliding a glass bottleneck across the strings, playing a piece he called “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” Although the title is based on the first line of a Wesleyan hymn, “Gethsemane”, penned by Thomas Haweis in the nineteenth century, there is very little melodic similarity with the English religious song. Indeed, what Johnson played for exactly three minutes and thirty seconds was a lament barely of this Earth.

Extrait de: Christopher C. King. « Lament from Epirus. »

Maybe it makes more sense now that the song playing right after is a violin solo. Fanitullen is a Norwegian classic folk song I stumbled upon in my stay. Google translates as follows:

The story is linked to a wedding in Hovet in Hol in 1724, when two young boys, Levord Person Haga and Ådne Knutson Sindrol, got into trouble and then in a fight. Levord was killed while Ådne, under threat of death, fled across the mountain to Numedal. The incident is referenced in simultaneous court documents from the thing writer in Ål.

The beat, which is linked to the story, is reportedly written by the master of the guild, who was on his way down the basement to fetch a beer for the one who won the fight. While down there, he saw a man sitting on the beer barrel with a fiddle and playing a beat he hadn't heard before. The man held the fiddle opposite, with his neck to the chest, and hit the barrel with a horse's hoof instead of his left foot. It was obvious that this was the devil. The headmaster jumped up again, and found that one of the fighters was dead in the yard. (source)

We go on with an album I listened to mainly because its description used the term "deep reggaeton" to describe it. I found that most intriguing and I actually quite enjoyed DJ Python's album Mas Amable. It is followed by the very dancable Makiyaj by the Zouk master Jules-Henry Malaki, from Guadeloupe.

The playlist ends with two Greek songs. The first one from a musician I discovered while attemping to translate Greek songs. Manolis Hiotis was a Greek rebetiko and laiko composer, singer, and bouzouki player. He is considered one of the greatest bouzouki soloists of all time, as he demonstrates here, today. The last song, from Kostas Karipis, is the song that made me want to dig more in Rembetiko, around 6 years ago. It is a most dramatic song but when I asked my Greek friends to give me a translation, they told me he was mainly thanking the audience and wishing them good night.

That is all for this week, stay at home but do check out before 10h30!

The receptionist

Playlist:

1. Georges Delerue - Chantal et Camille
2. Georges Delerue - Les dunes
3. Miquèla - Palunaia
4. Abner Burnett - O Catrina
5. Wildflower - Fire
6. Sun Ra - The Golden Lady
7. Blind Willie Johnson - Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground
8. Knut Buen - Fanitullen
9. DJ Python - Pia
10. Jules-Henry Malaki - Makiyaj
11. Manolis Hiotis - Otan Eimai Sta Kefia
12. Kostas Karipis - Minore Manes S'afino Tin Kali Nychtia