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.


 

Epic poetry from India

Alain Daniélou
11" x 8.5", 2013
watercolor, pen on paper

Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) was a French musicologist and Indiologist. His contributions to the history and philosophy of Indian religion are numerous but the part of his accolades that interests me most is his work as an ethno-musicolgist on the Indian subcontinent. He recorded India's traditional music extensively throughout the mid 20th century. Some of these recordings (from the early 50s) appear on the album The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Vol XII: India. As always with the Columbia series that were edited by Alan Lomax, the music comes with a load of explanatory texts and photos. There was however no picture of Nanku, Bachau, or the Nāgārā player that perform on Virahā, an example of the oral epic poetry traditions of the Ahir people. The track was recorded in Benares (or Varanasi) where Daniélou was a professor at the Hindi University at the time.