Lomax and another Zemp

 

From the cover of Fataleka and Baegu Music/Hugo Zemp

Top 100 2021, #19 (provisional): Fataleka divinatory songs: Uunu. Fataleka Music, Uunu song form, Divinatory songs, performed by men's choir seated in two rows facing each other.

From: Solomon Islands, Fataleka and Baegu Music from Malaita, recorded by Hugo Zemp in 1970. Unesco Collection of Traditional Music, CD released by Smithsonian, originally released on LP on Phillips, 1973. Images in the painting: The flute player comes from the cover of the CD. An image of an uunu performance appears on the LP version but no indidual from this tiny image could be singled out so I opted for the musician shown on the cd cover. For the Hugo Zemp image I resorted to a photo that appeared in the study guide companion to the movie "Are'are Music and Shaping Bamboo by Hugo Zemp. The photo was taken by Ada Zemp-Partinkus on Malailta Island in 1975.

Alan Lomax

Top 100 2020, #86: Smasalom sung by a woman from the Pyuma tribe, Southwestern Formosa (Taiwan).

From The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol. XI: Japan, The Ryukyus, Formosa and Korea. Collected and edited by Genjiro Masu for the Japanese Music Institute of Tokyo. Series collected and edited by Alan Lomax (Columbia LP ca. 1955).

Note: when I first became interested in field recordings in the 1990s, Alan Lomax was the chief musicologist I turned to. Numerous songs from his extensive catalogue have been featured in past top 100s. Most of these are recordings of traditional music from the United States but Alan Lomax did field work in many other locations in the world. He is also the man behind the Columbia World Library series from the 1950s, a series of LP's that continue to be a main resource of music for the Top 100. The notes provided with each album are usually richly illustrated but the Smasalom song did not come with an image, and an image of Genjiro Masu I could not find.

'Are'are and Mitsogo

Hugo Zemp/Sisiwa, oil on canvas, 11x14 inches.

 

Ya Mwei masks/Pierre Sallee, 11x14 inches, ink on paper

The otherworldly sounds heard on Voice of the Genie Ya Mwei (mother of the inundations) come from two performers who ingested irritant leaves causing a swelling of the throat. While performing the secret male-only rite they also wear Ya Mwei costumes establishing a total transformation from man to spirit. Pierre Sallee recorded the sounds of a night of rituals by the Mitsogo people of Gabon in 1968. 

Top: Aamamata: Lament by Oko'ohimana sung by Sisiwa and Nonohanapata. Outake from the film 'Are'are recorded in Malaita, Solomon Islands in 1974 and 1975 by Hugo Zemp. For the film Hugo Zemp made a special effort to employ Sisiwa who was the only singer who knew the old lullabies and funeral lamentations. Zemp had made sound recordings of Sisiwa when he visited the Solomon Islands in 1969 to capture the music of the 'Are'are for the Ocora record label.

New Toys

Portrait of a young Tuareg, ink and gel pen, 14x11 inches

The latest drawings I finished for the Top 100 2020 series are numbers 82, 83, and 84: Depicted above is number 84, an individual from a Tuareg group from Mali. Even though in theory the caste system is abandoned among the Tuareg, the practice continues. The Ikelan, or Bella, are the lowest caste, they are slaves, that simple. The song a group of about 12 Bella sing and that features in the top 100 is a type of song called Ihamma. The word is onomatopoeic and does not have lyrics. Bernard Lortet-Jacob calls it a panting song. The source, like so many in the list, is Les Voix du Monde. I have new toys: A set of gel pens from the dollar store. There are eight pens in the set which makes each pen 12.5 cents. I have no idea how they will hold up over time. When I made a drawing using highlighters depicting Hang on the Box (Chinese punk/pop) in 2008 the colors faded after about a half year.

Number 83 come from the same collection as above. The location is now Taiwan, the ethnic group are the Bunun. The Track Pasi But But was recorded by the Taiwanese musicology professor Rung-Shun Wu, who is also depicted using the same gel pens. At number 82 then is an American popular music entry. The song in the Top 100 is The Theme from The Black Cat and was written and performed by Scotty McKay. Scotty McKay is known for his frantic style of playing (and performing) during the late 1950s into the 1960s. Black Cat is from 1966 and appears on Beat Jazz, a collection of Jazz music related to the Beat Generation. Last year a track from the album featuring a recording of Jack Kerouac made the list. The image I used for the drawing is a commercial publicity shot. I can't help but to recognize the sassy facial expression of this dude in a MAGA hat who was in the news last year.

 

"Jivaro" (Updated developments)

 

Jean Rouch/Jivaro woman, oil on canvas, 11x14 inches, 2021

I received my copy of Visages de Bronze in the mail the other day. The "Faces of Bronze" on the back cover made me hope the text would be in English as well as French. No such luck, it's French only. There's only a little bit of text though, so little that between my limited knowledge of the French language and Google Translate I can figure out what's in the text. I had hoped for an image of the author Philippe Luzuy inside the book but here too I was not so lucky. I just finished painting the third one of five selections from the record "Jivaro" in the Top 100. I substituted the customary portrait painting of the person responsible for the recording first with a image of the record sleeve, then with Bernard Taisant (director of the film Visages de Bronze), and now with the well known filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch. Philippe Luzuy is listed as editor on many Rouch documentary films, hence this desperate substitution. Rouch's specialty is African culture and he is known to have revolutionized the way Africans and African culture are portrayed by western institutions. Rouch thus appeared to be a positive choice for my object/subject series of juxtapositions. Rouch died in 2004 and some years after that the artist Coco Fusco, known for her work concerning racial and gender identities, a social justice warrior, told the world about how she was sexually accosted by Rouch many years earlier showing, in the process, that the object subject separation between genders, races, and cultures lingers in all its colonial forms. Fusco, who is Cuban-American, shows how exploitative power structures continue to exist. With this in mind I set out to paint a portrait of Rouch next to an image of a Shuar (Jivaro) woman who was photographed by Luzuy for Visages de Bronze. Now that I have the book I can inform you that the individual whose image I questioned last week, was, for the cover of "Jivaro" indeed photographed by either Luzuy or his collaborator Pierre Allard. The earlier image of what I believe to be the same individual was photographed during the Lewis Cotlow Amazon Expedition. The same man was simply about ten years younger when Cotlow met him and Luzuy ran into the same person. In the Luzuy/Allard photographs (I assume) the man had gained status as he is more decorated than in the earlier photographs. I read that the necklace (made from pelican bones) the Jivaro warrior is wearing in the images in Visages de Bronze and on the cover of the LP "Jivaro" is a status symbol whose right to wear is earned. From reading the book I know now too that the cover image, that I used for the first of the three finished "Jivaro" painting is not a Shuar woman (child rather) but she belongs to the Colorado Indians also from Ecuador.

White Stripes

 

Meg White and Jack White. 5.5 x 10 inches each. Oil on wood, 2007.

There is a precedent to the double portrait concept for the Top 100 2021 series. I took quite a few liberties with the double portrait concept for the Top 100 2006 though and I didn't manage to do all 100 as double portraits either. The idea then was to select two people who'd have a relationship to one another. While there were a good number of sound recordings belonging to world of ethno-musicology in the 2006 list, the bulk of musicians were rather well known and popular musicians compared to whose who are being painted in this year's top 100. It's now ten years since the White Stripes split, but in 2006 they were at the height of their popularity (they had four songs in the top 100 that year.) The White Stripes is one of those few rock 'n' roll bands that I still listen to every once in a while. I figure I'd share these with you since The White Stripes were not in the archive of this blog yet. I started the blog in 2010 and the band was not in any Top 100 since. In the meanwhile the hundred paintings (on paper) for the Top 100 2020 are nearly finished and those for the Top 100 2021 (on canvas) are well on their way. The newest addition of the latter series is a painting of Rosa Alarco, a composer and musicologist from the Lima Province in Peru, paired with a musician performing during the annual Festival of Water also from Lima Province. Alarco's name is closely associated with the festival. On the Smithsonian's Andean Music of Life, Work, and Celebration, two of Alarco's Water Festival recordings are included. A Harawi sung by three women is found at #19 in the Top 100 2021 as it stands. The painting again displays a reversal (or collapse) of the object/subject juxtaposition at the heart of the Top 100 2021 concept. While the musician in the image plays a western instrument (a clarinet) and is wearing western style clothing, the musicologist who recorded the music (and who took the photo I used) is wearing traditional Andean clothes (white stripes) and holds an ocarina, an ancient Meso-American instrument.