Garifuna Celebration

Garifuna Settlement Day Festival
14 x 11 inches, oil/mixed media on canvas, 2019

The Garifuna are descendants of West Africans and the Carib and Arawak peoples. The song Abelagudahami appears on The Spirit Cries: Music of the Rainforests of South America & The Caribbean (Smithsonian, Library of Congress, 1993). It was the first album of the Endangered Music Project series initiated by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart. As with so many indiginous Americans the history of the Garifuna is one of persecution and displacement. Native to what is now the Virgin Islands they ended up in Honduras and spread to neighboring Belize and Nicaragua. The Garifuna heard on Abelagudahami are from Belize. Despite the 'endangered' label on the cd they are today thriving in Belize.

This will be the last painting and posting of the year. I didn't paint quite a hundred pictures. Happy New Year, dear readers!

South African Politics

Princess Constance Magogo kaDinuzulu 
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The image above appears on the cover of the LP The Zulu Songs of Princess Constance Magogo KaDinuzulu as part of The Music of Africa Series produced in the 1960s by Hugh Tracey. The album is number 37 in the series and was also recorded by Hugh Tracey. The recordings are from 1939. The song in top 100 this year is from that album and is called Helele! Yiliphe Ielyiani? meaning 'which regiment is that?' in the Zulu language. I have no clue what the song is really about but the word regiment hints at a political subject. The princess was the daughter of King Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo of the semi autonomous Zulu Nation (r. 1884-1913) and sister of King Solomon kaDinuzulu (r. 1913-1933). Her son Mangosuthu Buthelezi (b. 1928) is a politician and Zulu leader who founded the Inkatha Freedom Party (1971) and remained in the South African Parliament until just a few months ago. Princess Constance remained an advocate for Zulu culture and music throughout her life. You can read more on Princess Constance here.

Tibetan Monks

Tibetan Monks, 1903
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The monks presented here were originally photographed by William Hayman during a controversial British military expedition into Tibet in 1903. Tibet was then still a secretive mysterious country and the British set out to remove Russian influence. The expedition also introduced the first images of Mount Everest to a western audience. I've painted them to illustrate a lament sung by Tibetan monks. Lament for the Dead: Chant appears on a 1951 compilation on Folkways titled Music of the World's Peoples, Vol. 1. The following paragraph appeared in the online VAN magazine:

This field recording from the Smithsonian Music of the World’s Peoples series, captures, according to the liner notes, “Lamas chanting in unison with percussion and bells accompaniment.” The deeply resonant baritone voices, combined with the barely audible, overtone-rich bells, create an almost unbearably chilling sound. This is a lament for the dead by the living, but the sound seems more to emanate from somewhere beneath the earth—from the dead themselves. [Jake Romm – A Giacinto Scelsi Playlist: Sacred Sounds and Sacred Syllables, 2017]

Safari

André Didier
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The 1946 Ogooué-Congo Mission, led by the 23-year old ethnologist Noël Ballif is best known for recordings of Babinga Pygmies made by Gilbert Rouget. They were one of the first recordings ever made of Pygmy music, perhaps the most popular of all ethnomusicological recordings. Many recordings made during the expedition landed on Music of Equatorial Africa on Moses Asch's Folkway label that was released in 1947. The recordings on the LP however, weren't made by Rouget but by another member of the 12 headed Mission, André Didier. At the time the region in what is current day Republic of the Congo, aka Congo-Brazzaville (not to be confused with The Demoncratic Republic of the Congo or Congo-Kinshasa) was part of French Equatorial Africa and the section that is now Congo-Brazaville was then Congo Moyen (Middle Congo). The Middle Congo also included parts of what is now Gabon and the Central African Republic. There are various recordings of the Babinga on the record as well as a host from other ethnicity. One such group are the Bongili, whose "Work Song" is part of the Top 100 2019. Not much is found online today about this ethnic group but their language also called Bongili, is a know and common Bantu language in the Congo. The work in "Work Song" refers to the labor of beaten out bananas (both fruit and peel) for the purpose of a banana paste. A girls chorus and pestles are heard behind a soloist (the chorus takes turns). The notes on the album were written by Rouget.

Maranao Lullaby

Maranao Woman and Child
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The LP Music from the Mountain Provinces contains a lullaby that was recorded in 1988 by David Blair Stiffler while he was held captive in the Philippines. Stiffler and his travel companions were abducted at gunpoint by an MNLF rebel group. They were taken to a hut in the mountains on the island of Mindanao and held for over two weeks before they managed to escape. He was given permission by his captors to record a woman he heard singing a lullaby to her baby but later all his equipment was confiscated. They escaped with only the clothes on their backs, their lives, and one cassette tape. Music from the Mountain Provinces was intended for Folkways but after its founder's passing it remained on the shelves until it The Numero Group eventually released it in 2011. The woman, and her baby, in the painting are from the Lanao Province on Mindanao. She was photographed inside a refugee camp. The Maranao are a Muslim minority in the Philippines. Political unrest, rebel groups and ethnic fighting have been the norm in the Philippines for decades especially on Mindanao.

A Qiarpa

Group of Inuit Women
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

The Qiarpa (chorus) this painting represents was recorded at Eskimo Point by Ramon Pelinski in 1980. It can be found on the cd Canada: Jeux Vocaux des Inuit (Inuit de Caribou, Netsilik et Igloolik (Disques Ocora, 1989). The performers on most of the 90(!) tracks on the cd are credited by name but not this particular track. The chorus of the heading appears to be a class of young students being instructed on the traditional singing styles of the Inuit, demonstrating just how much the indigenous culture is alive in contemporary times. The painting shows half of a group of female throat singing (kattajaq) singers who were invited to perform in Strasbourg, France for the occasion of an exhibition of Inuit sculpture in 1984. A video of the performance is embedded on a site selling the cd.

Torres Strait Expedition

Malo Ceremonial Dance

14 x 11 inches, oil and spray paint on canvas, 2019

The Cambridge Anthropological Expedition (also called Torres Strait Expedition) was led by Alfred Cort Haddon in 1898. The objective was to record the customs and sounds of the indigenous Australian (aboriginal) peoples. Haddon was well aware that his work would be important because aboriginal life would soon be overwhelmed by encroaching civilization and zealous missionaries. The yearlong expedition yielded many papers, artifacts, and sound recordings now mostly housed in the British Museum. The wax cylinders, on which the music and other sounds were recorded, are now part of the BBC Sound Archive, all available to anyone interested in listening (and downloading) these valuable early recordings. The masked dancer in the painting is featured in one of several films Haddon recorded during his stay in the Torres Strait Islands.

Weaving

From the cover of Aboriginal Music from Australia
14 x 11 inches, oil on canvas, 2019

Continuing the playing card format using the mirroring in two directions/diagonal symmetry (see previous post) I now added the element of weaving. Not using a linear axis of symmetry the arms of the figure continue as if they embrace its own mirrored image. The image of an Aboriginal preparing food I used comes from the LP Aboriginal Music from Australia on the Phillips label. The source of the music this image represents is a cd however, a reissue on UNESCO's Collection of Traditional Music now named: Australia: Aboriginal Music. The cd has the texts and music of the original LP but not the photographs. I can not identify the images on the LP cover. I'm not certain about the gender either but the breast shown seems to indicate a woman. There is only one track sung by women on the record but it does not necessarily mean that a photo on the cover illustrates a song on the record. The song is a type of Wu-unka song sung by Utekn and Yaimuk in the Wik-ngatara language in northern Queensland. The song was recorded in 1966 by Alice M. Moyle, who I assume was also responsible for the photograph on the sleeve.