Katajjaq

Jennie Williams and Nathalie Frost
24" x 12". oil on wood, 2012

Jennie Williams and Nathalie Frost are Inuit girls from somewhere in Canada's sub-arctic region. In the image above they are engaged in a game of throat singing or katajjaq as they call it locally. A katajjaq is always performed by two females, any age, who stand very close together, much closer even than in the painting above.  (I opened up the space between the two singers in the painting only for the sake of the design—it just looked better that way.) They then sing until one of the women skips a beat or starts to laugh. The other is then the winner and she will take on the next singer. The songs they sing are rhythmic throat sounds mimicking sounds of nature or of everyday life, all improvised. Sometimes, but not often, the songs have words in them.

Jennie and Nathalie seem very different from all the other characters that occupy the paintings in the Top 100 series. They're not stars, not exotic, or icons, or historical figures, (they may consider themselves not even musicians—katajjaq is a game, not an art), they're just regular people (hence my use of their first names) and they probably look like someone you know. They could be neighbors who play soccer in High School, who you run into in the mall, the kind of girls who you expect to have great careers when they grow up.

The katajjaq sound recording in the Top 100 list is anonymous, it is much older than the video Jennie and Nathalie posted of themselves on YouTube. Theirs is very nice too, for sure, they all are, the videos of throat singing Inuit pairs, they all could have been it. The tradition defies choosing between one performance or another, the one song is not better than the other. It's like preferring coffee served in blue cup above coffee from a red cup. Ironic it is that it's a competitive style of singing, it's about who wins the song. Ironic too is that I write about it in the context of my music ranking system. But it's really the style, the tradition itself that's in this year's list, a tradition exemplified by this one anonymous sound recording, and a painting of Nathalie Frost and Jennie Williams.

ILAM

Ilunga Patrice (?) from CD 
Jacket Origins of Guitar Music
20" x 16", oil on canvas, 2012

The recordings of Hugh Tracey are the largest source of music in this year's top 100. Between 1920 and 1970 Tracey recorded in South and Central Africa, material that he published on more than 250 LPs. He founded The International Library of African Music (ILAM) that houses his 40.000 or so recordings. My introduction to Hugh Tracey was a CD called Royal Court Music from Uganda that I heard some ten years ago. I've been seeking his recordings out ever since. A few year ago I found in a second hand record store one of the original Music of Africa series 10" LPs. It is the one piece of vinyl I cherish most. On the ILAM website you can browse through this immense body of work. Another site called SAMAP (South African Music Archive Project) has 30 second soundbites available of 11,720 recordings by Hugh Tracey as well as random one at a time full length versions of the music. Last week I promised to discuss the music of the Congolese guitarist Ilunga Patrice. His painting (I'm not sure if the guitar player on the cover of the CD Origins of Guitar Music in in fact Ilunga Patrice) is now done too but there's not much to tell about him. All that's known is that Hugh Tracey recorded him together with Misomba Victor on a date in July of 1957. At least five songs were recorded, probably more but there are four listed on the SAMAP site and two appear on Origins of Guitar Music: Southern Congo, Northern Zambia, one song– the one in my 100–Mama Josephina overlaps.

African guitars

S.E. Rogie (unfinished)
46" x 40"
oil on canvas, 2012

The biggest top 100 canvas of the year so far was supposed to have three musicians on it, all guitarists from Africa. S.E. Rogie (1926–1994) from Sierra Leone, Francis Bebey (1929–2001) from Cameroon, and Ilunga Patrice (rec. 1957) from the Congo. They were all on there, in various sizes, and in various places, laid out with white and pink chalk. S.E. Rogie was the only one that earned a permanent spot in the painting. For the second Francis Bebey song/painting I used a small piece of plywood, while I stretched a medium sized canvas for the Patrice painting to be. The S.E. Rogie song in the list is Please Go Easy With Me from the record Twist with the Morning Stars, the song was in the top 100 before some 25 years ago. It was the first Afro-pop record I ever bought. Francis Bebey's second song this year is called La Condition Masculine from a record with the same title. Next week more on Ilunga Patrice. By not putting the three together in one painting, the projected total number of paintings for the Top 100 2011 is back to one hundred (in stead of 98). Only 60 of them are done and I have just under two months to finish the last 40. Here's the the announcement for the Top 100 2011:

March 26–April 12, 2012, Swing Space Gallery, Columbus, Ohio. Reception and countdown: Monday 3/26/2012.

Francis Bebey
5.5" x 5.25"
oil on wood, 2012

Le Mystère de la Voix Albanaises

Albanian girl
25" x 15"
oil on wood, 2012

The girl in this painting has become an iconic figure. Her image can be seen on the cover of Folk and Popular Music of Albania, and on the cover of The Top 100 2010. A painting of her hangs on my wall and now a new painting has been made. The painting belongs to the strangest I ever made. Objects and colors appeared and disappeared by her side magically. The palm tree, painted from life, remained from the beginning, the girl followed. She is only known with these clothes on, in this particular pose. C'est ne pas une pipe. Like the palm behind her she is grounded in that pose, stuck in that location, forever. She is the axis mundi, the spiritual center of the world. No one knows her name. No one's ever seen her. But she's presiding over the events that make a top 100. Stranger things have happened.

Her image is invariably linked with Albanian folk music but nobody knows if she's a musician. The song illustrated now is an example of an iso-polymorphic song, in this case a song performed by two women. 

Music of Bolivia

Cover image from Instruments and Music of Bolivia
18" x 24", oil on canvas, 2012

Precisely a year ago I documented in an article called Peters and Pans, the first time I ever painted a pan flute. There must be something about the holiday season that makes me listen to pan flute music because Bolivian pan flutes are back in, 14 pan flutes strong, accompanied by 5 large drums in a tune called Quenita. It's all found on this gorgeous piece of vinyl called Instruments and Music of Bolivia recorded by Bernard Keller for the Ethnic Folkways Library in 1962. As a standard feature of Folkways' records you get a booklet with it containing all the data, information, and photos concerning the music on the record. The photo credits in the booklet of the Bolivian issue go to Foto Linaris. The image I painted from is not in the booklet but found on the front cover of the record. I do not know the ethnic group of the musicians in the painting but the record contains musical examples of the Aymara, Quechua, and Mestizo Indians. Quenita is played by the Aymara. The Aymara call their pan flutes sicus and the pan pipers are known as sicuris. The musicians are displaced, as it has become this year's standard, from the Bolivian sky on the record cover to the trees in my backyard.

György Ligeti

Classical music is so far removed from the level of how I interact with music that I feel inadequate discussing it. Like art criticism words on classical music are intellectually so advanced that for me to add any meaningful content to what already has been written is simply ludicrous. I can't joke about it either, it's too reverent for that. But every year there's some classical music in the Top 100 and always I attempt to say something without making an ass of myself. This year's classical focus falls on the Hungarian/Romanian/Austrian composer György Ligeti. The music of Ligeti is known by a large audience because of the inclusion of some of his work in a number of movies, most famously in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Kyrie, the second part of Ligeti's choral piece Requiem, is one of four pieces featured in the Kubrick film. It's an amazing piece. I heard it recently because a friend posted a version recorded by the Choeur de Radio France on her facebook page. When I heard it again after so many years since seeing the movie, I associated it with the sound of women keening, and in particular with that group of keening women protesting nuclear weapons on Parliament Square in London that I wrote about a month ago. Since I heard the Kyrie again I've been listening to a lot more of Ligeti and there are so many that I like. Equally beautiful to Kyrie, and also used in A Space Odyssey, is the piece Atmosphere. Kyrie and Atmosphere topped two subsequent weekly lists and therefore are likely to be displayed side by side in the –date and location soon to be announced– yearly display of the 100 paintings. It so happened that I simultaneously started two oil sketches of the same Ligeti photo on small boards, not knowing I would need two paintings and with the intention that the best sketch of the two I would use for the Kyrie illustration. (That still happened but the other one I finished too for the sake of Atmosphere.)

The Be Good Tanyas

The Be Good Tanyas
16" x 20", oil on canvas, 2011-2

I did a little painting experiment: Instead of my usual process of painting figures on an already established landscape painting, I painted the landscape behind an already finished figure painting. It's a quite a different approach, especially on the way how I approached painting my backyard. I made a few innovations in the process. I ended up painting a whole new layer on the figures too, and the face of Samantha Parton, the figure on the left, is painted anew altogether. I'm not so sure if this version of the Be Good Tanyas painting is better than the one I did a year ago (compare with last year's Be Good Tanyas) but it is what it is, I can't revert back to the old one. And... an experiment is always good for something. Besides... I needed another Be Good Tanyas painting.

It's not about me remember, it's about them. It's about the Be Good Tanyas, about Samantha Parton, Trish Klein, and Frazey Ford. It's about their version of the Townes Van Zandt song Waiting Around to Die. It's music first, painting second. So I needed another painting to illustrate that song and I pulled out last year's but it wasn't the shortcut I had intended it to be. It took me a long time to get this painting to where I could live with it. 

Per request from one of my followers, I will occasionally include a link to a video of the music discussed, whenever this is appropriate. And this is certainly the case with Waiting around to Die as I know it from a video on YouTube.

Reet Hendrikson

Reet Hendrikson
24" x 18", oil on canvas, 2012

 Blogs I follow include toys and techniques and सølγ שаябlɛş. These two sites account for a lot of the music I find during the year, and therefore have a big impact on my Top 100 list. The Toys and Techniques site I stumbled upon when Holy Warbles posted music from Reet Hendrikson's LP Reet on their site linking it to the Toy's page. Toys and Techniques was who posted on Reet Hendrikson first. Reet Hendrikson's presence on the web is pretty much limited to these two sites and I'm happy that ,with the posting of the first Reet Hendrikson painting that can be found on line, I can add to that presence. The painting is based on the photo used for the album cover for Reet, it may well be the only photo of hers that can be found on line (other images come up when typing her name into Google Image but I'm not sure if these are of the same Reet Hendrikson). Reet is an Estonian record from 1969 issued on a label called Reindeer, and Reet Hendrikson then was an Estonian teenager who played guitar, sang, and wrote all those lullabies, folk songs, and work songs that can be heard on that album. 

I'm intersted to learn about that record label Reindeer as Estonia obviously was part of the Soviet Union in 1969. I wonder if Reindeer operated from the former Soviet Union or if it's a Western label. I even wonder if Reet Hendrikson lived in Soviet Estonia.

Another Reindeer label exists, established in Maine in 1987 as Reindeer Records Inc. It is not at all related to the label Reet appeared on.