Gilbert Akanno, president and CEO of Olympic International Food Market (photography by Rarah)

From the April 1, 2009 Baltimore City Paper:

Notes From Home
A short tour of non-English-language music for sale in Baltimore
by Ian Nagoski

Ask the man on the street how many music stores there are in Baltimore, and he may be able to name a few of the bigger places–Sound Garden, for example. A minority of passionate music-hunters might name funkier holes-in-the-wall selling mostly used stuff. But the truth is that there are dozens of places with new sounds on offer. The trick is that most of the music isn’t in English. The majority of these places locally are targeted to immigrant groups, people whose music is utterly underrepresented in the U.S. media, or even on the web.

The need for music from the motherland is something that has been consistent among each wave of immigrants to the United States for as long as the country has existed. The Prussian, Slavic, Anglo, and Scandinavian newcomers of the 18th and 19th centuries carried their songs with them in their memories and performed them for one another, often keeping traditions alive in the New World long after they’d faded away in their native lands. The African diaspora has retained essential aspects of the music of the lost homeland. And, as we all know, the styles commingled and transmogrified into “American” music–jazz, gospel, blues, country, rock, hip-hop.

The process of holding on to the songs of the Old World changed when recording came along in the first decades of the 20th century. Starting in the 1910s and ’20s, records were marketed to all of the major immigrant groups: German, Irish, Italian, Bulgarian, Serb, Pole, Arab, Jew, Armenian, Greek, Japanese, Philippine, you name it, the record companies were already going after a share of their earnings by selling immigrants something irresistible–a song from home. For a variety of reasons, including the restructuring of the record business caused by the Depression, the advent of radio, the intermarriage of ethnic groups, and the desire to become capital-A American, by the mid-20th century much of that wave’s imported music remained niche “ethnic” material, kept alive in enclaves or simply abandoned by the immigrants’ descendants.

Over the past 50 years, waves of immigrants from Asia, South and Central America, and Africa have traveled a path to cultural citizenship cleared by earlier immigrants consisting of long hours of work, demands from the predominant culture to adapt linguistically, and marginal representation in the main cultural venues. Latinos may produce hip-hop (Beatnuts) and Armenians may play rock (System of a Down), but they conform to the existing standards of the style, otherwise they remain marginal and “ethnic.” Mainstream America might patronize a Vietnamese restaurant for a taste of the exotic, but no American radio station plays Vietnamese music.

There’s really no reason it should be this way, though. Among every cultural subgroup in the United States, there are beloved sad songs; there are amazing peacock-like displays of virtuosity; there are nostalgic stories about the Old Days; there are special songs for important days of the year or moments in life. These are consistencies among us all, despite any differences in language or sound. Why should it be hard to ask the next guy, “What is this song? What does it say? Who is this singing?” The answers could lead to interesting places–maybe to your new favorite music.

Listening to the music of our neighbors is how many of our greatest cultural achievements have been made. Immigrants do it all the time, and if the descendants of immigrants did it half as much, the country would be richer for it. One place to start is immigrants’ shops.

READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE…

Two big events on the East Coast this weekend. In Baltimore, its the Transmodern Festival all weekend long with a gaggle of some of the best tweaker-performers around (Dan Deacon maybe the best-known of them). Here’s a nice chat with the festival’s organizers from the Baltimore City Paper.

In Brooklyn on Saturday night, there’s the Launch Party for WFMU’s FreeMusicArchive.org , a site that will soon be eating many of your evenings in solitude by providing you with tons of free and totally legal downloads by great musicians who you really want to listen to. Before that happens, you can get out and among other people one last time and hear live music by Sightings, Pink Skull, John Dwyer’s new band, Excepter and DJ Brian Turner. Here are deets.

We will expect to see smiling, drunken photos of you at one of these events on Flickr Monday morning.

The story of Harry Smith’s mid-50s recordings of Rabbi Naftali Zvi Margolies Abulafia, a Kabbalist involved with word-permutations, made between the release of the Anthology of American Folk Music and the beginng of work on the Mirror Animations and Heaven and Earth Magic has been told and retold, but it’s nice to see these newly-posted clips, filmed a dozen years ago of Abulafia’s grandson, poet Lionel Ziprin explaining the story of an extraordinary recording, which the larger world has yet to hear. It’ll happen eventually. Maybe we’ll get a decent reissue of Smith’s Kiowa peyote song recordings, too…

Here’s the first of a gaggle of posts we’ll be doing of images from newsprint hippie publications from Baltimore, 1968-71.

These are from Harry, which to quote Joe Vaccarino’s Baltimore Sounds: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Baltimore Area Pop Musicians, Bands & Recordings 1950-1980, “was founded in 1969 by Michael Carliner… After a rocky start, when the original staff revolted and walked out on the eve of the first issue’s press run, Harry became the choice alternative free [sic] paper of the Baltimore political and musical communities. Early contributors included Art Levine, P.J. O’Rourke, Tom D’Antoni, Alan Rose and Jack Heyrman. Harry survived many raids, takeovers and other traumatic events to provide alternative and community news at the height of the Vietnam, hippie, yippie era.”

Yemeni oudist and singer Ahmed Fathi is playing the Millennium Stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. for FREE at 6PM this Friday Mach 13 as part of the Center’s Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World series, running for another week.

If this improvisation in someone’s living room is anything to go by, the concert should be a hot one.

Baltimore’s 6th Annual Transmodern Festival promises “four days of avant performance, installation, sound, film, mayhem, ecstacy and radical culture” from April 2-5, and you can believe it. Some of this year’s performers includ Dan Deacon, Jenny Graf (of Metalux & Harrius), veteran songster Liz Downing, performance poet Lauren Bender, filmmaker Anne McGuire’s musical duo with Wobbly and bonvivant Rahne Alexander. Hot stuff indeed.

For anyone without plane fare to Baltimore to catch the proceedings, do yourself a solid and check out these amazing texts by unclassifiable performer Theresa Columbus (and their accompanying intro by Catherine Pancake). Here are a couple teaser excerpts to whet your clicking finger:

“Do the things, seek the people, that give you the drive. Give togetherness ridiculous amounts of time and planning, also encourage each other to work like crazy. Align with forces of change and optimism.”

“Joy in politics, I can’t state it overtly, but we know who needs to be heard more, intuitively. Help those people be heard more and improve their communication; the good work needs to be heard and it is a sin to not hear the good work that is unmade when it just needs the slightest push and desire. We need to fill our ears and eyes with it, so we need to see that it exists.”

“It’s not tacky to be a feminist! It can be the most sexy, fun luscious thing in the world. Being on tour and eating breakfast in a diner… yum. Feed each other, pour for each other, juice each other up.”

The open sentence of John Philip Sousa’s panicky and prescient 1906 essay on the business of recorded sound “The Menace of Mechanical Music” begins 34-year-old article titled “Record Industry and Egyptian Traditional Music: 1904-1932″ in the journal Ethnomusicology, written by composer, performer, author and musicologist Ali Jihad Racy:
“Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.”
Fun, chuckly stuff, cause we all know records won and Sousa died so fooey on him. But what is it doing at the beginning of a scholarly article on Egyptian music?
Two answers:
1) Racy’s article concerns itself with the circumstances through which some monumentally great and almost supernaturally refined singers like Abd-l Hai Hilmi (who fits the phrase invented by Will Schofield for people like Kevin Ayers, “Toxic Dandy”), Ahmad Idris, Zaki Mourad and Yusuf Al-manyalawi, had their performances etched in stone during the first three decades of the twentieth century so that they can still sweep the hearts of human beings into the clouds. This would have been impossible without the “mechanized menace.”
and 2) The music that these singers performed at then end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century went extinct in the 30s, partially because of the radical world-wide economic changes of the 30s and the accompanying proliferation of entertainment media which were both higher-tech and cheaper, namely radio and movies. Racy concludes his study in 1932: “The choice of this date is prompted by several historical and musical factors that had crucially challenged the efficacy of the disc in Egyptian musical life. For example, April 14, 1932 marked the premiere of the first Egyptian musical film … In Egypt the musical film functioned as the most popular and effective medium of musical dissemination that drove the disc to a second position.” So, in the 30s, Where people once sat by the the speaker and reveled in the sound for a few minutes, they now sat in a dark room and stared at a shadowplay which served as context for songs.
When Racy writes that “in a sense, the early 30s may thus be regarded as the beginning of a new post-phonograph era in Egypt,” it doesn’t mean that Egyptians stopped buying or listening to records. He implies that what it once meant to be a musician and what it once meant to listen with one’s ears to music changed. Naturally, the music in the films was different than that on the earlier records, both sonically grander and formally simpler, and the records which were made after the ascent of film music reflected that shift. The most important case-study of this transition in Egypt is also the most important musician of the past century for the entire Arab World and one of the greatest singers ever to record, Oum Kalthoum, who began recording as a classical singer in the old style in 1924 and changed with the times, transitioning to film stardom in the 40s. But she is another story for another day.

All of this, in fact, is prologue to this short and beautiful clip from an Egyptian film of the 40s – I don’t know its name – depicting the magic of listening to records, the projection of wishes into the sound, the drawing of the listener’s inner life into communion with the sound through memories – the ever-changing memories of the listener and the fixed memory on the disc. In the 40s, it was depicted through the film medium which undermined the record. And now you’ll see it on your computer screen as it similarly undermines film. Even so, the human need for that moment of communion is completely transparent. Some say that half of the world’s languages will go extinct in the next hundred years and with them, countless concepts and modes of thought. No one has tried to quantify the impending changes in music, but in a hundred years, someone will dream into sound. What dreams?

Iran isn’t going anywhere. We know the Iranians bring us thousands of years of cultural history and nearly daily news headlines, but what else do we know about them? After reading Kapuscinski’s book on the Iranian Revolution Shah of Shahs, there are the decidedly more vernacular travel journals of Kevan Harris, Sociology PhD, ‘Merican of demi-quasi-Persian extraction and wayward prog DJ, who has spent the past three summers studying in the belly of a country where the goverment is, well, let’s just say NOT allies of the U.S. and its allies.

In his writings you’ll “meet” strongmen, magicians, the Iranian Frank Zappa, globo-talking blowhard Swiss academics and leftist philosophers as well as tender, juicy and very chewable lessons on the ins and outs of global economics, the problem of fat babies and the inside dirt on whether or not Freddy Mercury can truly be thought of as part of the Axis of Baddies.

Click on the five spot for the site (hosted by hot Chicago rockers No Doctors).

Philadelphian Will Schofield’s monumentally great A Journey Round My Skull blog (named for the first-person Hungarian account of early 20th century brain surgery) of “Unhealthy Book Fetishism” has long relished in the intensity of the gaze, a combination of fascination and repugnance which is almost psychedelic in its insistence.

His most recent posts have artfully combined lustfully sought-after images with utterly maniacal texts, so that the image here is given with with a longer section of this text called “The Process of Slow Digestion” by Mileton Barba.

“Dr. Spasmodeus Smugglington shrank back, his skin shriveled and every hair on his body bristled, his nerves contracted, his guts drew taut, when he saw the little red eyes, brilliant as rubies, and the shiny, bifurcated tongue, its movements accelerated by excitement, darting, zig-zagging wildly in a bold, vertiginous arc”

Dig through the archives and be jealous, amazed, confused and sickened in turns or simultaneously by Schofield’s research. But watch for whatever he does next.

Proud Flesh is a 30-minute Western shot mainly in the Dakota badlands by Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando and starring their mothers. It’s a remarkable film, even if it hasn’t been seen much outside of Baltimore.

Until it’s more widely released, there is this trailer: 

And last month, Baltimore’s Ehse Records released the entirety of the soundtrack as an LP in an edition of 300 copies.

It’s a beautiful thing, made from a private, internal symbolic system and some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself.

(Disclosure: although this writer made small contributions to the film and soundtrack, my hand is neither in the till nor on the tiller.)