Happy Holidays

Tuareg woman/Bernard Lortat-Jacob

My teaching semester just ended so I'm on my holiday winter break. Happy Holidays to you all. For the occasion I made some cheerful holiday inspired painting to bright up the dark days of December. This one here illustrates a lullaby (or in French, the beautiful word berceuse) dubbed Bell'ilba by Bernard Lortat-Jacob who recorded the Tuareg woman with a baby in her arms in Mali in 1988. The recording, like so many others in this year's top 100, appeared on Les voix du monde: une anthologie des expressions vocales compiled and produced by Lortat-Jacob together with Hugo Zemp and G. Leothaud. The lullaby consist of words and ululations imitating the sounds of a flute. Like in last year's top 100 the song is illustrated with a random Tuareg woman paired with the recorder Bernard Lortat-Jacob. It's silly to just pick an image of a woman to paint from a non-specific Google search but options were few. I simply picked an image that seemed fun to paint, as I did last year. Last year's Tuareg woman looks very much like this year's but I do believe they're two different individuals.

Raúl R. Romero/Gisela Cánepa-Koch

The Taki song, a free-form and improvised song from the Peruvian Department Lambayeque, is also (like the above) by an anonymous performer and without an image too. I opted for two musicologists involved in the recordings and production of Traditional Music of Peru, Volume 4: Lambayeque, on which the taki appears.

Chitenje Tambala/Alain Daniélou

For the third festive design painting I had no problem finding the images of the recorder and the performer, even though the CD liner notes [Music Tradition of Malawi, UNESCO, 1991] does not have an image for either individual. The song in the top is called Ellis (the name of a woman) and is performed on a bangwe, a sort of board-zither. Tambala belongs to the Achewa cultural group. Alain Daniélou is best known for his work in India. He is a noted expert on Hinduism.