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| Cover Image from Musique Proto-Indochinoise |
Musique Proto-Indochinoise - Recueillie Chez Les Moïs Des Hauts Plateaux Du Viet-Nam is a record recorded in 1955 by Frantz Laforest: "Mission Ethnographique 1955 sur les Hauts Plateaux du Viet-Nam." Moïs or Montagnard (from la montangne—the mountain) is an umbrella term for several groups of indigenous people from the central highlands of Vietnam. The record does not specify between different groups. The woman represented here (and on the cover of the record) is most likely one of the main performers from the recordings by Laforest; she also appears on the back sleeve playing a jew's harp. In the image above she's playing a stringed bamboo instrument that I don't recognize from the descriptions of the songs, neither from instruments I've come across before. The top 100 song is performed on a "carillon hydraulique," a sort of bamboo organ. It's also possible that Laforest, who took the photo featured on the cover and back sleeve, posed a particularly cute indigenous woman with the instruments for the sake of increasing sales. Probably not, but the practice of employing cute women, stripping them above their waist, was very much standard procedure a half a century ago. The anthropologists paid extra for the the women, to reinforce the notion they were primitives, to strip. Years ago I swore not to use gratuitous nudity anymore for my Top 100 illustrations but recently a number of 50s and 60s racy photographs have functioned as a source for paintings. Another painting recently completed is of a woman from a group of women in a healing ceremony from an image by the famous Charles Duvelle, that appeared on the record Anthologie de le Musique du Tchad from 1966.
Moundang woman (Duvelle)
