Bunun Music

 Bunun Men

Taiwan was in the news headlines just this morning for their success in tackling COVID-19. Yesterday marked 200 days without a new infection reported. The country is seen as a model to follow in how to deal with a pandemic. The Bunun (Vunun on the record) are one of the largest groups of indigenous peoples on the island and are known for their polyphonic music. The are two examples of such music on The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. 11: Japan, The Ryukyus, Formosa and Korea. The two songs Marisitomal and Pisila-Railas are hard to distinguish on the record as a whole bunch of songs are grouped together. In history the Bunun are known as fierce warriors and head hunters. (Without knowing I seem to select music from such tribes for this year's Top 100.)

Willem Breuker

 Willem Breuker

And here's one from the home country. It doesn't happen too often that my Top 100 list features Dutch music. It's been a while! Willem Breuker (1944-2010) used the traditional Dutch "draaiorgel" (barrel organ) for his Psalm 64. The recording appears on Lunchconcert for Three Barrel Organs on the Instant Composers Pool (ICP) label that he founded in the mid-sixties together with Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg. The LP is from 1966 and it's the first one he recorded under his own name. The 64 in the title does not relate to the year 1964 but is a psalm number (he may have composed the music in 1964 though.) The drawing is done with just pencil, an accumulation of several frantic hours of mark making. Like all of the Top 100 2020, the work is on 11x14 inch paper. 

Maybe Mental

Batak krijgers met speren Tropen Museum

The title of this post suggests I'd be illustrating a song by a band with that name from Phoenix, Arizona. They're really great, I love that band,  (I'm listening to their LP Music for Dreaming as I write this) but no, they didn't make it into the Top 100 2020. The title above, rather, signifies my own bouts with mental illness. During a random web browsing session (on Reddit, of all places) I came across an image, a portrait, created by a patient of a psychiatric institute. Immediately I could empathize and identify with the maker of this portrait. I thought this portrait was the best I've seen if it comes to current activities within the medium of drawing. Looking at this drawing caused me to self-reflect, to wonder why I was so attracted to this drawing, why this drawing, of all of the hundreds of drawings I've seen in the past weeks, stood out to me as being real. The drawing reminded me of drawings I had done in the past during states of utterly despair, utter drunkenness, or utter whatever, drawings that in retrospect belong to my drawings I cherish most. The drawing made me realize I was one of them too. How I've worked so hard to be considered normal, fitting in into the world of contemporary art, how I rationalized works I've made, how I pretended, over the years, to be a voice of academic endeavors that came to define my identity. But I ignored those aspects that were off in this picture, that didn't fit my manufactured existence, aspects that really make me the person I am. Looking back at some works from my past, I recognize things I was ashamed of, embarressed, but some of these things represented me as I am, no matter how I rejected them. A few days ago, when I wrote about the Sakalava spear thrower, I derided myself for the image I selected to draw. What happened next was that I again selected an image of a spear thrower, again somewhat too exotic, out of context (from a different time) than the music I was representing. There are two sides to one's identity: what you think of what's right, and what you feel. What one feels is really not in accordance to how one perceives themselves. Experience doesn't accord to knowledge very well. You experience the world to be flat but you know for a fact it's round. 

The song, btw, I'm illustrating here is called Ile Ile, performed by Ropaoen Batoebare, recorded by Raden Suwanto in 1950 on the Island of Sumatra. Rapaoen Batoebare belongs to the Batak people. The album the song appeared on is Music from Indonesia on Folkways.

Madagascar

 Kanusiky-Sakalava of Morondova (after Dr. A. Voltzkow)

Photographs from the 1939 Clerisse expedition to Madagascar shows most people wearing regular Western style clothing (introduced by French colonists I presume). The photograph of a Kanusiky-Sakalava tribesman I used was taken in 1901, thirty-eight years before the expedition that yielded Homage to the King featured in the Top 100 2020. While usually I'm very conscientious about this sort of thing I must admit I've fallen for an inappropriate form of exoticism. Not only should I have settled for an image from the Clerisse Expedition, I also managed to search for an image by the wrong tribe. The track Homage to the King is coupled (on the record The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. 2: French Africa) with a recording of the Sakalava people but the former is actually recorded by the Ambilube [sic]. On the other hand Homage to the King references a time from before the French colonization in 1883, when the island was the Kingdom of Madagascar. Today, searching for these ethnic groups (Ambilube and Sakalava and others), the names don't even show up because the people of Madagascar are pretty much homogeneous and referred to as Malagasy. There are different ethnic identities among the Malagasy but there's hardly any tribalism. The ancestry of the Malagasy is curiously enough closer related to the people of Indonesia than to those of the African continent. 

Worried Shoes

Daniel Johnston

"I took my lucky break and I broke it in two" is how Daniel Johnston started his 1983 recording Worried Shoes. The line is just one of many unforgettable one-liners in the oeuvre of the late Daniel Johnston. Worried Shoes, the highest of ten of his songs in my all-time list of 500, reappears as a sort of tribute in this year's Top 100. Daniel Johnston died on September 11th 2019, a month into the Top 100 2020 year. I remain a big fan.

Africa Dances

Cover of Africa Dances

 

Ethnomusicologist John Storm Roberts (1936-2009) was an important figure in the popularization of African and Latin-American music in Europe and America. Through his record label Original Records world music became widely available. Some of the first world music in my collection are from this label including Africa Dances that I bought about thirty years ago and still occasionally play. The track Smodern was early on a favorite and when playing the record last year it still stood out as a most exciting track. The compilation record (from 1973) featured many future stars of African pop as well as names already established on the continent. The artists listed as performers, however, have a question mark after their name Miss Smodern. There is no information on the group or song to be found on-line and the only information is the brief introduction in the liner notes written by Roberts that identifies the music as Township Jazz. John Storm Roberts (I believe) recorded all music.

Yaqui Deer Dance

Yaqui Deer Dance Performer

The collection called Anthology of Central and South American Indian Music on Folkways [1975] yielded a number of recordings nominated for inclusion of the Top 100 2019. At number 31 a song called Deer Dance was the only one to make it in though. This intriguing recording of Yaqui male singers with rasping sticks and water drums was made by Henrietta Yurchenco in Mexico in 1952. Only much later I checked out the original 1952 album it was included on: Indian Music of Mexico: Seri/Cora/Yaqui/Huichol/Tzotzil. It provided the recording with much more context. Later yet, in preparation to create an illustration for it, I became further acquainted with the Deer Dance ceremony and with the Yaqui. Yurchenco wrote in 1952: "the original Yaqui cultural pattern has largely disappeared with very few either material or spiritual elements remaining." Yet in 2020 there is ample of information to be found online, mostly of the Yaqui people of Arizona in the US. The Yaqui who performed this ceremony in front of Henrietta Yurchenco in 1952 were living along the Yaqui River in the state of Sonora south of the US border in Mexico. The Deer Dance is still widely performed today.

 

World: 35M, Nunavut 0

Katajjait singing

Much of the the Top 100 2020 comes from regions barely affected by the global COVID-19 epidemic. More than a month after I painted the previous Inuit entry, the numbers for Nunavut (the Canadian Inuit Province) remain at zero. The katajjait vocal style features two women singing/breathing into each other's mouths so their voices resonate. Needless to say that COVID-19 would easily spread in the process. Nunavut is the location with most recordings in this top 100 followed by the Solomon Islands. I just read in the news today that the Solomon Islands recorded their first case of COVID-19. Maria and I both work in public spaces in a city where the virus is spreading rapidly. I thought it would be wise to get ourselves tested which we did today: the results came back negative. The song illustrated is a Qiarpaa, a variation of the katajjaq genre that really are considered games rather than music. This particular example from the collection Canada: Jeux Vocaux Des Inuit was performed by Issumartarjuak and Watuak and recorded by Roman Pelinski at Eskimo Bay.