Top 100 2019-6: 41-50

41. Avdo Mededovic – Bonjacke Gusle

Avdo Mededovic, oil on canvas, 2018

Avdo Međedoviƈ (1875-1953) was an illeterate epic balladeer from Montenegro, part of the Ottoman Empire and later Yugoslavia. His repertoire included several poems that counted well over 1,000 lines, similar in length to Homer's (9th century BCE, Greek) Iliad and Odyssee. The British Homeric scholars Milman Perry and Albert Lord in the 1930s, seeking to find credble evidence of their hypothesis that Homer's works were the result of oral transmission (of much older traditions), found in Međedoviƈ living evidence on the memory capabilities of illeterate communities, and their sustaining traditions. The  now fast disappearing tradition of oral poetry was in the twentieth century still found and recorded in parts of eastern Europe and in Anatolia. Despite numerous academic approaches to reconstruct how Homer would have sounded almost three-thousand years ago, I believe the Međedoviƈ recordings come much closer.

42. Nzonzi, deux femmes – Ubuhuha

Ubuhuha, Rundi women, oil on canvas, 2019

 From the liner notes by Michel Vuylsteke: "The ubuhuha (literally 'to blow') which were formerly performed by by women during wakes, have practically disappeared today." This was written in 1967 when Vuylsteke recorded these two Rundi women in Burundi. The women use their hands as an instrument, like a trumpet, "The resultant sounds vary in pitch, timbre and volume according to the position of her hands and the tension of her lips." From the LP Burundi: Musique Traditionelles on Ocora. Talking with my friend Jade before the Cat Power concert last Friday he mused that most of the musicians I painted would be unknown to her. I told him that I wouldn't be surprised if Cat Power would be much more familiar to these ethnomusicological recordings than one would expect. During the concert Cat Power used her hands to alter her singing voice on several occasions very much like the Rundi women, most poignantly during a cover of Bob Dylan's Hard Times in New York City (perhaps to mimic Dylan's nasal voice).

43. Kalinga women winnowing rice song 

Kalinga woman, oil on canvas, 2019

The Kalinga rice minnowing song that appears on Music from the Mountain Provinces is illustrated on YouTube with a vintage photograph of a bare chested woman in a field. I may assume the field is a rice field and the (young) woman is from the Philippines. David Blair Stiffler recorded the song in the mid 1980s in the Kalinga province of the mountainous northern Philippines. The photograph, that I used for the painting above, in the video is certainly not his. The photograph is much older from a time that it was deemed alright to fetishize exotic women. The woman in the photo is quite young perhaps not older as fourteen. Stiffler recorded the Kalinga women inside a bamboo stilt house, whre they certainly had their chests (breasts) covered. I doubt it if women would be working bare-chested in the field at the time the recording was made, or long before that. 

44. Anna Dimitrievna Neostoeva – Throat Song

Anna Dimitrievna Neostoeva, oil on canvas, 2018

Henri Lecomte wrote a number of papers on the subject of Siberian traditional music and his series of cd releases simply called Siberia consists of eleven volumes, all released on Buda Music (Musique de Monde) between 1991 and 2009. They're hard to get by. I have two (plus some downloads of individual tracks from other discs in the series) both ordered via amazon.fr. In front of me lies Volume 3 dedicated to the Kolyma (Chants de nature et d'animaux) which features musicians with Čukč (Chukchi), Even, and Jukaghir backgrounds. The disc is from 1995. There are seven recordings made by Henri Lecomte in the Top 100 this year, as there were last year. One of these is a throat song by Anna Neostroeva who is Chukchi. The source photo was taken by Lecomte.

45. Chukchi Shamanic Ritual

Shamans performing ritual in Pegtimel, oil on canvas, 2019

The impulse of becoming a shaman was, as it is with the artist of today, the manifestation of idiosyncratic traits. Psychosis, gender ambiguity, poetic sensibility led to an existence as an outsider in society. Unlike today, these differences yielded high respect from other members in society. Today we seek medicine to cure idiosyncrasies but back then these traits were not considered the disease but the cure. For the shaman was the doctor. It was a difficult journey, full of obstacles, crises necessary for the acquisition of knowledge, the ability to traverse various planes of consciousness. Art today assumes a similar function; the budding artist, because of her difference, goes through the ordeal of societal rejection, and through deepening crises she becomes a visionary. She shows her audience the reality beyond the mundane and thus provides her community an important service, that of spiritual equilibrium. Let’s not reject the rejects, rejoice in the manifestations of oddness, queerness, and deviance.

 

46. Tumivut: The Competition Song

Tumivut: The Competition Song, oil on canvas, 2019

Depicted is one of the two performers of Tumivut: The Competition Song at the 2010 Aboriginal Day in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It's from a video found on YouTube shot from the audience and is a persistent feature in the Top 100. The video has over 1,000,000 views, thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. I browsed through all those comments just to find out the identity of the two performers. I have not been able to do so yet.

47. David Amram – Pull My Daisy

David Amram, pen on paper, 2018 (signed by David Amram)

Pull My Daisy is a poem written in the late 1940s using the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse technique by the Beat poets Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. The poem featured prominently in the Robert Frank and Arthur Leslie film of 1959 by the same name, narrated by Kerouac. For the film the poem was set to music by David Amram. Anita Ellis is the singer heard in the film. The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at the college I work hosted an exhibition with work of Jack Kerouac, the main feature was the manuscript to his famous novel On the Road. David Amram came in town for a special event. A great concert and a wonderful guest. I gave him a drawing I did of him performing and he signed another one.

48. Mataco Indians of Gran Chaco: String instrument

Mataco (Michí) Indian, Argentina, oil on canvas, 2019
The quest for the origins of music has lead me to listen to, and read about, recordings from the field of ethnomusicology. I have been seeking out recordings and information on the music of those cultures that have lived in relative isolation from the influence of the industrial world. More half of the 100 songs in the 2018/2019 list belong to this category. This painting represents a mataco instrumental piece on a stringed instrument and is played by a shaman. (Argentina, The Indians of the Gran Chaco, Lyrichord, 1977.)

49. Assalalaa (Inuit—Katajjait)

Rekutkar performers, oil on canvas, 2019
I assumed that the three vocal throat singing traditions, the Inuit katajjait, the Ainu rekutkar, and the Chukchi pič eynen, found within the arctic circle must be related and/or have a common ancestor. The painting for Assalalaa I was working on from a photograph found by an image search of the terms katajjait combined with Jean-Jacques Nattiez represents not Inuit but Ainu singers. I intuited this was the case since I had not seen katajjait performed sitting down while the pose was the same as in my painting of rehbuhkara (rekutka).

50. Irina Khristtoforovna and Anna Vasilevna Kolegova – Chant sur les canards

Irina Khristtoforovna Kolegova, oil on canvas, 2019
Irina Kolegova (b. 1935) is a Koryak woman from Kamchatka, the easternmost peninsula of Russia. Recordings of her appear on Sibérie 4, Kamtchatka: dance drums from the Siberian Far East. Recorded by Henri Lecomte. Kolegova's song, a duet with Anna Kolegova, is called A song about ducks in a style that is reminiscent of the pic-eine'rkin tradition of the Chukchi.