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
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