Piaroa (2)

Bark Horns of the Piaroa, charcoal on paper, 11x14 inches, 2020

 

Chant funebre de femmes

 Hugo Zemp, 14x11 inches, various materials on paper, 2020

Top 100 2020, #23 Chant funebre de femmes, Koleo from Iles Salomon: Musique de Guadalcanal. [Ocora, 1994] Recorded by Hugo Zemp, 1990.

Mathangi and Kala

 Mathangi Arulpragasam (M.I.A.) with her mother Kala Pragasam

11x14 inches, pencil, spray paint, watercolor on paper, 2020

 

 

In 2019 M.I.A. received an MBE for her services to music. Prince William was the one who handed it to her during a ceremony which her mother was one of the guests of honor. Her mother had stitched the actual award medal to the ribbon M.I.A. was given. As a refugee she had found work sowing for the royal family and had created similar award ribbons for 33 years. In the photo she took with her mom at the ceremony M.I.A. proudly poses with her mom now wearing the MBE award the had stitched herself. The M.I.A. song in the Top 100 2019 is again Born Free as she performed it live at Letterman's Late Show in 2010. A memorable performance featuring Marin Rev, who in 1977 created the beat heard sampled behind the studio version of Born Free (Maya, 2010) together with Alan Vega. The song is at a solid #2 in my list of counting awarded points kept updated since 1983.

Infanticide

Woman preparing the mesh for manioc beer
14x11 inches, watercolor, pencil, spray paint on paper, 2020

I think infanticide is pretty cruel. The whole concept of it seems very alien, but it didn't used to be that way. The practice was actually rather universal and still used among certain cultures that have not been in contact, or are independent from, the industrialized world. It's a debate of ethics I guess. We in the Western civilization would think of infanticide as unethical and the cultures who practice it as barbaric. They themselves think nothing of it. Ethics is a social construct and for most people in the world it is an effect of organized religion. Philosophy has a great deal to say about ethics too, but it is also formed on the same structures our civilization is built on. Philosophers think a lot about ethics,  they think about identity, and how and when a newborn baby becomes a person. They may consider that an infant becomes a person, a human being, at perhaps three years of age. Still philosophy will not condone infanticide. Imagine our cultural norms would shift, perhaps because of the philosophy of personhood, so that we come to think of babies becoming individuals at the age of one. This is when an infant would get "christened," named, assigned a gender, a character of its own, and so forth. The likely result of such a cultural debate would be that the general population could accept an abortion maybe a month or two later in the pregnancy than it is the case now. This, in my opinion, would be a good thing. Let them choose, and we, men, stay out of the debate altogether.

The Shuar are one of the peoples practicing infanticide, at least they did in 1984, when Michael Harner wrote Jivaro: Pepole of the Sacred Waterfalls.[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984] They would only kill deformed babies though and not, as with some other cultures, do it as a sacred ritual, neither do they have a preference for girls or boys. As I sketched out in May life for a Shuar woman is hell. Who would blame them if they didn't want to bring a new baby girl into the world.

The photograph the above drawing is based on was taken by the same Michael J. Harner who also recorded the Social dance song and produced the record both photo and song are found on: Music of the Jivaro of Ecuador. [Ethnic Folkways, 1972]

COVID

Melakhan Langa, narh flute
11x14 inches, pencil, watercolor, flowers on paper, 2020

The Top 100 2020 series is nicknamed the COVID-19 series. This happened because when I started the series the country was under a lockdown order and people were asked to stay home because of the virus. I thought it was appropriate to make works at our living room table rather than my usual easel paintings done in the studio. To sit down and meticulously draw a picture seemed to capture the spirit of the time for for me. Then I also started to add the COVID-19 stats for the various regions the songs originated in. In that same spirit I felt the need the other day to not only make a meticulously detailed portrait of a musician but also to add flowers to it in a typical low-art-household-watercolor fashion. The wildflowers in our yard give me great joy and before I set out to photograph my drawing I decided to stick some actual flowers to the surface. The result represents for me more than any other the spirit of COVID-19. The drawing will probably look a bit more weathered tomorrow as it does in the photo (not to mention three weeks from now.) It so happened that this drawing was made on the very last blank page remaining in my sketchbook. All 27 works thus far in the Top 100 2020 are still attached to this sketchbook. I have purchased an identical book to continue the series and this full one now I could lay away with some weights on top. I wait a few weeks before I check how the flowers fared during their drying process.  

A bit about the music illustrated: The recording in the top 100 list is Flûte narh avec bourdon vocal and appears on Les voix de monde, une anthologie des expressions vocales published in 1996 by Hugo Zemp. The recording was made by Geneviève Dournon in 1993 in Rajasthan, India. The instrument used is the narh flute, cut from a kane called kar. The performer is Sherha Mahamad who belongs to the Islamic ethnic minority of Sindhi Sipahi. A vocal drone accompanies the way the flute is played. I did not have a picture so I searched for a substitute and learned some things about the flute, the tradition, and the people in the process. And I found a video of a man, Melakhan Langa, playing this flute. A beautiful video. The playing of the narh is yet another tradition in danger of dying out. 

Topoke on Video

Topoke Girl Playing Lilolo
14x11 inches, pencil, pen, watercolor on paper, 2020

Below is the step by step video of how this drawing came about. No need to write any information here as it's discussed in the video at length. It's one hour but really cool!

Amadu of Buzi

Amadu playing a jew's harp
14x11 inches, pencil and spray paint on paper, 2020

One more from Papua here, this time from the south coast, an area that is actually quite modern compared to areas from which other Papuan music I've written about originates. There's been many of those over the years. An area to which Coca-Cola, Starbucks, baseball caps and hip-hop have been introduced. Even in 1964 when the recordings were made that feature on Music from South New Guinea [Folkways, 1971] most photographs in the booklet show the performers in western style clothing. Back then the traditions in music were still remembered, I doubt of the traditions heard on the record are still alive today. The recordings in the collection were made by Wolfgang Laade mostly in Buzi, situated between the mouth of Fly River and the border with Indonesia (Irian Jaya). Amadu was recorded several times by Laade, once playing a darombi (a sort of jew's harp) like in the image above, he's heard on several songs he composed himself, and a recording of a tataro, a bundled panpipe. The tataro tune, the one in the top 100 list, is an improvised instrumental. He had asked a child to bring him some pawpaw stalks that he then bundled and blew into. Papua is still relatively unaffected by COVID-19 as the count still stands at 11, the same number from the last time I wrote it down. Nobody has died.

Red Hair

Charles Duvelle in Papua New Guinea
11x14 inches, pencils and spray paint on paper, 2020

Wame Igini Kamu is back in the list for the third straight year, that beautiful little ditty of a woman singing while washing her child. "The words rolling down her tongue like water," as Roots World quipped. I'm not so sure if there are any words in the song. I can sing along to all of the 1'45" of it, not using any words. (I'm sure if my impression of the song were offered to the singer she would get a good laugh out of it. But really, seriously, it sounds good superimposed. I should record it and post it here, one day.) This little (improvised I think) ditty has now passed the 100 points mark (meaning it entered the best 25 songs of 37 years counting.) I am so curious if the singer is named in the book The Photographs of Charles Duvelle. When it came out I ordered the music belonging to the book but didn't buy the book itself. I really want to read Duvelle's notes on the recording. I've now painted (or drawn) Charles Duvelle (1937-2017, France) four times. Oh...one more thing. I did notice it before but thought it was because of poor photographic reproduction quality, some people in Papua New Guinea have red hair. I just learned that Papuan children are born with red hair, and that with most it darkens when they get older. All the boys in the picture here have red hair save for one. And now I think of it...Sisiwa from the Solomon Islands also has red hair, she will be featured twice in this year's list of musical gems.

The Bobos and Gouins

Bobo Ceremonial Dance
11x14 inches, stencil print on paper, 2020

 From the same collection (The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Volume II: French Africa), from the same year (1948), the same country and district (Banfora, Burkino Faso), and recorded by the same ethnomusicologist (Andre Didier) as the previous post on the Wara People. The two Banfora recordings are consecutive on the record and in the Top 100 2020 (at 18 and 19 thus far). Rather than writing about this tune today I refer you to a forty minute narration behind a video I recorded of the process of creating the stencil print of the Bobo People that you see above. The video is the third in a the Top 100 Archive and Studio series, a sort of video diary that chronicles the progress on the soon to be opened venue. Hope you like it!

Recordings from Ogooue-Congo, 1946

Recordings from Ogooue-Congo
14x11 inches, spray paint and pencils on paper, 2020

Searching for an image to represent the Whistle Band of the Wara people for the Top 100, or any information concerning the Wara was difficult. The only reference, and only image of the Wara tribe I was able to detect came from a Christian site, The Joshua Project, monitoring missionary work and the spread of Christianity throughout the world. Quote: "...the Wara have a dubious distinction: they are generally regarded as the last of Burkino Faso's people to wear clothing..." I assume they meant "don't wear clothing" but hey, authors make mistakes too. The Wara, all 9,600 of them according to The Joshua Project, are resisting change. The liner notes, written by Gilbert Rouget and edited by Alan Lomax, on the album African Music from the French Colonies, number 2 in the Colombia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series, also note that the Wara are an "island of ancient culture around which the mainstream of migration has flowed." The recording of the whistle band was made Andre Rouget in the Banfora district of Upper Volta (as Burkino Faso was then called as part of French Equatorial Africas) in 1948. In 1946 both Didier and Rouget were part of the Ogooue-Congo Mission famous for its distinction as being the first to record pygmy music. For a source image I settled for a photo, presumably taken by Rouget, of Didier recording during the Ogooue-Congo mission. The musician, too tall to be one of the Banbenga people Rouget and Didier recorded, holds something in his mouth (a flute, or whistle?) When I painted Didier last year I edited the musician away, so here is the other half without Didier this time.

'Are'are

Nonohanapata (l.) and Sisiwa (r.)
11 x 14 inches, various materials on paper, 2020

Last year I had chosen an photo taken by Hugo Zemp to illustrate the song Koleo, from the album Iles Salomon: Musique de Guadalcanal (Ocora/Radio France, 1970.) The photo was not taken in Guadalcanal but instead on the neighboring island Malaita, both belonging to the Solomon Islands in Melanesia. The image is a still from the documentary Musique 'Are'are (Hugo Zemp, Musee de l'Homme, 1993.) The section of the film the image appears in is during a performance of "aamamata," a funerary duet style song, a lament. The "koleo" of Guadalcanal belongs to the same tradition but is of a different group, island, and language. Koleo reappears in this year's top 100 and I was going to use the same image to start another painting. Starting another painting usually requires—and this is part of the longevity of the whole top 100 project—revisiting the music, additional research, and the selection of an image. During the research I found I was able to view the full documentary (2.5 hours) on line, and I settled in for the marathon. As a result many of the performers in the film ended up in a top 10 and several may make it into the final list of 100 songs for 2020. Nonohanapata and Sisiwa could very well be one of those in which case the image produced for Koleo should then shift to the funeral lament "aamamata" (called Lament by Mahasiwa.) 

The "Are'are, at the time of shooting the film in 1970s, were Christians, and the traditional music hardly performed any more. Age old traditions are vanishing throughout the world. Notable in the film by Zemp is that in the panflute ensembles he recorded some musicians were wearing blue jeans and t-shirts while others were stark naked.

Great Story!

Tangkhul Great Story Teller
14x11 inches, various materials on paper, 2020

The Canto Tangkhul on the web only collection La Voz Humana en la musica, parte 3 (Polifonias) was recorded dy Deben Bhattacharya in 1960 in Manipur, India. Manipur is a far-eastern state in India, and together with Nagaland home to the Tangkhul Naga. Manipur (and Nagaland) are a ways from the ocean yet their folklore and symbols are rife with maritime reference. The people came from Bhutan (many still live in Myanmar) and trace their origin back to China. While the Tangkhul are predominantly Christian, I was surprised to learn that they were once headhunters. Most Tangkhul today (I assume) won't have any association with their—not even that distant—past but I suspect that the "Great Story Teller" depicted above has quite the scoop on this matter. The story teller probably died a long time ago (I have no idea when the photograph I used was taken but given it's in black and white I assume at least fifty years ago) and in recent photographs the Tangkhul proudly show off their traditional costumes perhaps without the true context. Apart from a chest decoration the Story Teller has no costume at all. He holds a gourd in his hand that I believe is a musical instrument. It may very well be an instrument like that heard in the recording by Bhattacharya, which produces a melodic drone to accompany the mixed chorus singing the same melody. It's remarkable just melodious the song is. The background shows skulls of catttle and horses mounted to the side of a building, in photographs yet older the cattle skulls are human skulls. Blood sacrifice was important in Kangkhul ritual. The great story of the title not only references the Great Story Teller depicted but also the fact that no one has died of COVID-19 in either Manipur or Nagaland.