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Top 100 2020, #100: Entrance of the Mani Mask

The caption under the photograph I used reads: "One by one the soaring Spirit Fish masks enter Otei village accompanied by chanting and dancing women." Otei village is situated in Papua New Guinea and the quote and photograph, together with the recording Entrance of the Mani Mask come from a 1978 Folkways LP called The Living, Dead & Dying: Music of the New Guinea Wape which was recorded by William E. Mitchell in the early 1070s. I did not reproduce the photograph, which was also used on the cover the record, but made gesture sketches of some of the individuals seen in the ceremony depicted. Since I'm quoting William E. Mitchell, here's his description of the recording in the Top 100: "As the mani demon prances into the village from the forest, women welcome him with vigorous chant. Here, as in most of the large curing festivals, women have an important ceremonial and musical role." The Wape are unique in Melanesia in the fact that their organization is egalitarian. In most other cultures in the region there is a strict hierarchy in what ethnologists call "the big man political system" or "bikman." [William E. Mitchell, On Keeping Equal: Polity and Reciprocity Among the New Guinean Wape] Entrance of the Mami Mask is number 100 in the Top 100 2020 and thus marks the completion of this series of works. After I organize a showing of the works my undivided attention will become the Top 100 2021, that now is already more than a third done. At a provisional number 36 in the new list resides a second track from Mountain Music of Peru, vol. 1 from 1966, [Folkways] a seminal album of recordings by John Cohen. It is thus also the second portrait I painted of John Cohen in the new series of 100. John Cohen was an influential musicologist and photographer who recorded and shot, beside Peruvian mountain music, mountain music from Kentucky, the Beat generation, among many other topics. The dancing child on the right of the painting is also based on a photo by Cohen, be it in the context of a different collection. John Cohen, known too for being a member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a New York bases string band, died in 2019.

John Cohen/Mountain Music of Peru, vol. 2 cover