Author: Jonathan Ward

Two from the American Southwest

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I wanted to focus on two examples of local, almost “one-off” 78 rpm releases that feature music of the American southwest, in the states of Arizona and New Mexico.

Broadly, throughout the 78 rpm era commercial recordings that featured music of American Indian cultures and tribes mostly fell into these categories: 1) field recordings of traditional music by ethnographers that were released commercially in boxed sets, such as Indian Songs of the Southwest recorded by Santa Fe local John Candelario, Laura Boulton’s Indian Music of the Southwest issued by RCA Victor, and American Indian Music of the Sioux and Navajo on Folkways; 2) traditional music of American Indians recorded in a studio, like this one; 3) imitative recordings of imagined traditional American Indian music, such as the RCA Victor set Music of American Indians, which is dominated by tracks performed by a studio orchestra interpolating American Indian melodies; 4) recordings of a couple of “Vaudeville Indians” who may or may not have been actual Indians, such as Chief Os-Ko-Mon aka Charlie Oskomon (who likely was not Mi’kmaq or Yakama as he claimed at different times).

A major exception to all of the above was Canyon Records of Phoenix, Arizona, established in 1951 by a non-native couple named Ray and Mary Boley. The Boleys had bought a recording studio in 1948, located a few blocks from downtown Phoenix, and named the business Arizona Recording Productions. They decided that the Canyon label would be devoted to the music of American Indians, but they operated with a less-scholarly approach and, according to sources, they preferred to let the people themselves dictate what they wanted recorded. Therefore, what was on Canyon in the early days was a broad mix of traditional and non-traditional, studio and field recordings.

The reason I mention Canyon is that on November 15, 1951, the same year Canyon was established, Arizona Recording Productions recorded this disc…but it was a private pressing and not issued on Canyon. It remains the first disc of a social dance music of southwest American Indians known as waila, or sometimes chicken scratch (though waila is preferred and the latter is considered by many to be a term used only by whites). Sounding very similar to norteño music, waila music is played by the Tohono O’odham (formerly known by the exonym “Papago”) whose reservation is in the extreme south of Arizona along the Mexico border, the Akimel O’odham, whose Gila River Indian Community is just south of Phoenix, the Quechan, or Yuma, also of southern Arizona, and the Pascua Yaqui. The term “waila” stems from the Spanish “baile” and again, like norteño, it features polkas, schottishes, boleros, cumbias, waltzes, redovas, and two-steps. Adding to the mix is the fact that waila often borrows or covers norteño songs in the overall repertoire.

One of the best sources on the history of waila was James S. Griffith (1935-2021), who apart from writing two articles on the history of waila, also directed the Southwest Folklore Center at the University of Arizona for decades and devoted much of his scholarly pursuits to regional arts and culture in the region. Griffith, who interviewed and was friends with many waila musicians, traced the existence and development of that music in Arizona from the 1860s, when the violin and guitar has been documented as common among the Tohono O’odham, and how this instrumentation expanded to include saxophones and accordions, in part due to exposure to marching band music in the Indian boarding school system (a system of assimilation that forcibly removed Native American children to church- and government-run boarding schools).

This disc has appeared on the internet before (it’s on the Internet Archive) but we can now add context. It was one of two (?) discs on the Komatke imprint (please see the comments for information on the other); it’s credited to Harry Marcus and Orchestra, though Griffith has credits for the all of the musicians: Harry Marcus (violin), Eugene Jose (violin), Augustine Lopez (guitar), Simon Felix (guitar), and Alex Augustine (guitarrón). According to Griffith, this disc was apparently recorded for “supporters of the Saint John’s Indian School” as well as for friends of the band. The school, also known as St. John’s Mission School, was founded in 1894 by a missionary named O’Connor and was a fundamental institution for many on the reservation, active until – I think – the 1990s. “Komatke” was the location of the mission and the school (the ruins of the latter are apparently still in the location, technically part of the larger town of Laveen) and is the name of a nearby mountain that is considered a source of the wind by the Akimel O’odham. Because of this, I think it’s possible that the group themselves were Akimel O’odham – however, I am hesitant to definitively state this because of the relatively common names of all of the band members and therefore the difficulty in precisely tracing them.*

This disc features two string-band versions of songs from the Mexican and Mexican-American mariachi repertoire: “Honor y Patria” and “Nos Fuimos.”

Harry Marcus and Orchestra – Honor y Patria

Harry Marcus and Orchestra – Nos Fuimos

The next item is a little different: a disc of fiddle and guitar music issued in 1949, just like it says on the label, by “Sociedad Folklórica.” As it turns out, La Sociedad Folklórica was founded in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in June of 1935, by Cleofas Martinez “Cleo” Jaramillo (1878-1956), to promote and preserve Spanish colonial folk traditions in New Mexico. After the founding of the group, Jaramillo, originally from Arroyo Hondo outside of Taos, published a Spanish cookbook and a book of Spanish fairy tales, and set about fostering events that featured dance, music, art, and traditional Spanish Colonial craft like colcha embroidery. In 1949, the membership was limited to 35 people and as far as I can tell it was, at least at that moment, run entirely by women. It still exists today.

The group also produced two 12” discs with all four sides labeled as “Spanish Colonial Dance,” performed by Alejandro “Alex” Flores on violin and Ignacio Ortiz on guitar. I suspect the 12” format was preferred so the dances could be extended as long as possible, as each side is about four minutes long. The records appear to have been available only through the “music committee” of the Society and through word of mouth, and were first mentioned in late October of 1949 in the local newspaper. This is the only copy I’ve come across, and it features both an indita, a broad song descriptor that indicates a connectivity between Native Americans and “Hispanos”; and a taleán (or “talian” on the label – and there’s some indication that the song type may be Italian in origin), sometimes called a “weaving dance.” (The second disc features a cuna and a paso doble.)

Alejandro Flores was active locally in Santa Fe with his “dance orchestra” that consisted of Ortiz on mandolin, Tony G. Chavez (violin), Henry Ortega (guitar), and Evaristo Lucero (guitar). They played a variety of dances, weddings, and other events. Ignacio Ortiz had his own band and was active prior to WWII, leading a group called Los Nativos.

Why were these traditional tunes credited to “Nicholson”? I’ve no clue. The only “Nicholson” I could find associated with the Society (or the musicians) was Ernestina Delgado Nicholson, whose family had been in the region since at least the mid-19th century and whose husband was the Assistant Chief of Police. Nicholson was very active with the Society at this time. I’ve tried to contact the Society to see if they had any additional information on these recordings, but received no response.

Alex Flores and Ignacio Ortiz – Indita

Alex Flores and Ignacio Ortiz – Taleán

*There was a Harry Marcus, born ca. 1932 or 1933, who was documented on the Gila River Indian Community during the census of 1950, specifically a student at the St. John’s Mission. This is likely the leader of the group (though none of the other names listed as musicians were attending that year). There was also a Harry David Marcus (1927-1974) who was born in Sells, Arizona, on the Tohono O’odham reservation, and may have been the same person who was Vice President of the tribe in the 1950s-60s. There are several others with the same name that could potentially be the same person or conflated versions of the two (or more) Harry Marcus’.

Discographic data:
Komatke (ARP 132/3)
Sociedad Folklorica (B-6470/6471)

East Africa: Focus on 1930

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The year 1930 was an extremely active one for multinational record companies. The situation in East Africa was no exception. Paul Vernon in his terrific Feast of East article has written about this scramble, but we can also now improve on some of the details. What is “East Africa” anyway? Today, at its broadest definition, it runs from Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa to the southern border of present-day Mozambique, including all the island nations and dependencies. In 1930, at least as far as record companies were concerned, “East Africa” was more narrowly defined (though it would expand). The three major players in this sprawling footrace to sell records and influence markets were those that have been written about time and again: The Gramophone Company, based in England; the Columbia Graphophone Company, also based in England (and a separate entity from Columbia in the US, though there were ties and agreements between them, just as there were between the Gramophone Company and Victor), and Odeon, based in Germany. Other labels, such as Pathé, made interesting but less-significant attempts to record East African musicians during this time frame, and likely didn’t have the wherewithal to send engineers on such a long journey (in Pathé’s case, they sent musicians from East Africa to Paris, via Marseilles, for one session).

Records were already in urban areas of East Africa – but none featured local music. The Gramophone Company gave the region over to their Mumbai (Bombay) branch, and had a presence in shops by 1926, with a profitable business selling mostly Indian records. In early 1928, they shifted focus to recording the music of the region, and in March of that year they sent Zanzibari singer Siti binti Saad and the musicians in her troupe to record in Mumbai, where they cut the equivalent of 49 discs. Copies were pressed in India at the Gramophone pressing plant. Siti became a star, and the company ended up selling nearly 41,000 copies of those discs. That must have been considered superb (though all are exceedingly rare, today). So, the company continued to record an additional 80 or so discs by Zanzibari performers across two more sessions – another in March 1929, and one in April 1930 – all made by company engineers that were based in India at that time, like Robert Beckett and Arthur Twine.

It was Zanzibar or nothing for the Gramophone Company; they didn’t expand their recording sphere in East Africa until the late 1930s. Nor did they expand their recorded repertoire, as what was recorded by GramCo during these sessions was exclusively taarab music. This is an important music of coastal Kenya and Zanzibar, sung in Swahili, deeply influenced by Egyptian music, the music of the Persian Gulf, and India. To some extent, we can say that GramCo felt that this was the style of music that would sell to people in those coastal regions – and they were right. However, it was obviously not the only type of music that existed in the area. At the time, Swahili was not quite the lingua franca that it is today, so one could surmise that recording only one style of music was also a conscious choice. In fact, it was: the Gramophone Company’s field agent in a 1931 report said as much, suggesting that as “the Swahilis become more civilised their music will absorb more and more Arabic music”; he also suggested that the “language of the smaller tribes will die out and be replaced by Swahili.” Without getting into the loaded content of those statements or the background of the person who made them, let’s just say that neither of those statements exactly came true.

GramCo’s final session in this run, in 1930, was considered an economic failure. This was in part due to musician infighting that produced a less than satisfactory session, overall depression in the trade itself, a business situation that prevented dealers from acquiring new machines or returning their dead stocks, and last but certainly not least: competition from other labels.

I’ve written before about these Gramophone Company sessions and posted an example. However, here’s an extremely rare side from the ill-fated sessions of 1930 that a friend brought back from a trip to Zanzibar years ago (if I recall correctly, it was hanging on a café wall):

Miss Peponi binti Abubakar – Na Mshangao Na Nyingi Fikira, Pt 1

Columbia saw an opportunity and they arrived in East Africa a little late in the game, in early to mid-1930. They also didn’t appear to take significant risk. They, too, primarily recorded Zanzibari musicians and taarab music – in fact, they recorded many of the same musicians that recorded for the Gramophone Company. However, Columbia sent engineers to record onsite in Zanzibar, which was a first for the island, Columbia, and the entire industry. Apparently under the auspices of a shipping company named Samuel Baker & Co., the Columbia engineers also recorded in Dar-es-Salaam – another first for recording history. While they didn’t record much in Dar, Columbia can be lauded for recording the first commercial 78s of ngoma music and music by the King’s African Rifles (KAR) band. Combined, these two sessions yielded about 62 discs.

I’ve posted an unusual example from these sessions in the past. Here’s an additional track that’s a good representation of taarab music from those sessions by Subeit bin Ambar (whose taxim I included here):

Subeit bin Ambar – Nimeiweka Nadhiri, Pt 2

Additionally, here’s one of the scant recordings from Dar-es-Salaam, from that same recording expedition, featuring ngoma music of Tanganyika. (Another appears here.) The artist is credited as Arativu Bocho and the music as “Ngoma ya Changani.”

Arativu Bocho – Chapa Longo

Who were these Columbia engineers in East Africa in early to mid-1930? It seems that the ones who recorded in Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam were not the same as the two – Horace Frank Chown (1900-1981) and Gustave Cook (1908-1993) – that were in Cape Town and Johannesburg in May-June of 1930, just a short while later, as there is documentation of the latter two leaving Southampton in early May and arriving in Cape Town. However, it could have been the same engineer – Wilhelm “Willy” Starkmann (1906-1992) – who, with his yet-to-be identified assistant Mr. Fischer, was in Madagascar in very late 1929, recording for the French branch of Columbia. Or, maybe not. But, more on that in a minute.

Finally, there’s Odeon. The early recording industry in Germany was truly mammoth; not simply as a multinational phonograph business hub, but also as a center for pressing discs by other, local labels around the world. However, much of this history (ledgers, masters, documentation) was destroyed during World War II and thus it has been up to tireless researchers to attempt to piece together this backstory, or at least parts of it, from what remains (existing copies of discs, material in newspapers, material in archives that survived, journals and annuals both for business and the record business, marks and matrices on discs, any clue at all). Despite these valiant, ongoing efforts over decades, there remain plenty of blank spots, even when it comes to a major, competitive label like Odeon.

Odeon’s first foray into East Africa was also in early 1930. This appears to be roughly the same time that the company recorded in West Africa (in Ghana, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone – with records issued on both Odeon and Parlophon). However, Odeon bucked the trend by not recording in Zanzibar and instead they landed in Mombasa, Kenya – yet another first in recording history – cutting the equivalent of approximately 107 discs, most of which was, like the Columbia and Gramophone Company sessions, coastal taarab music.

A couple of examples exist on compilations (I included one on Opika Pende). Here’s one that has not yet been made available:

Mwana Iddi binti Juma – Pumbao, Pt 2

Immediately afterward, Heinrich Lampe, the Odeon engineer for this East African expedition, traveled to Kampala, Uganda – once again, unique for the recording industry – where, without electricity and running his equipment on batteries, he recorded the equivalent of about 30 discs, of which it seems only 23 were issued. No one would record Ugandan music commercially for another eight years or so.

In 2013, I posted an example of traditional music from this session, with generous information from the late ethnomusicologist Peter Cooke (1930-2020). I also included a religious piece from those sessions on my last release. Here is another, a canoe song – the soloist is Mundu Tesaga and he’s accompanied by the sailors of Admiral Gabunga.

Mundu Tesaga – Minuro

What about the OTHER colonies in the region?

In this regard, Odeon was perhaps even more active than its rivals. In late 1929, we know that experienced Odeon engineer Willi Schkölziger (1894-1958) was in Madagascar. This was roughly the same time that the aforementioned Columbia engineer Willy Starkmann was in Antananarivo. Did they cross paths? The rivals must have been neck and neck. We don’t know very much about the precise dates of the Odeon Malagasy sessions as only the Columbia sessions were reported with some detail in the local press (early October through possibly as late as December 1929). Maybe this was due to string-pulling by Columbia’s local agent in town, a Madame Salvatge, but this is just conjecture.

In any case, Odeon’s Malagasy sessions were at least as fruitful as Columbia’s. Scholar Henri Lecomte wrote in 1997 that both Odeon and Columbia’s sessions were recorded in the same structure, the long ago-destroyed Théâtre Muncipal in Antananarivo, also known as the Ambatovinaky theatre. However, recently digitized newspapers suggest that the Columbia sessions were decidedly not held at the theatre and instead at a known local residence, which may cloud things a little. Whatever the case, Odeon recorded well over 120 discs of music which were advertised in 1930 in a 16-page catalog. Most of the discs featured what is known as kalon’ny fahiny, or a type of music that blended Malagasy melodies and harmonies with western operetta, usually with piano. The primary troupes that Odeon recorded (some of whom may have been mainstays at the Municipal Theatre) were Troupe Jeannette, Troupe “Renaissance” founded by Ravelomoria Wast, and Naques Rabemanantsoa’s troupe. However, Odeon also recorded Protestant hymns, comic skits, more traditional songs by central Madagascar highland Betsileo and Betsimaraka groups, as well as at least one traditional solo artist. The discs were pressed in France and had some distribution there, but mainly sold in Madagascar. The primary distributor for Odeon discs and gramophones in Antananarivo was at the Hotel Fumaroli, the new discs being sold alongside their stock of Gujarati, Chinese, and French discs.

Here is a piece from those sessions, recorded by the Troupe Renaissance, and labeled as “Rakotovao C’s famous song.” I find some reference to Rakotovao’s full name being Rakotovao Crespin.

Troupe Renaissance – Rada Midona ny Atsimo

By January of 1930, Odeon engineer Willi Schkölziger was documented as having traveled 900 kilometers from Madagascar to Saint-Denis, on Réunion island. He was there to record the very first commercial discs of the island’s local creole music, séga – a style and dance that was borne out of the local slave populations, and one that was popular on Mauritius as well. He was accompanied by an Odeon agent named Monsieur Boissonade (or “Boissonnade”) about which there seems to be nothing known. It’s possible that Boissonade was a representative of the sponsor of their Malagasy session, Compagnie Marseillaise de Madagascar, a major colonial importer that had a hand in everything from shipping to sugar processing, and for whom a brief excursion into disc distribution would barely be noticed (and as such, is barely documented).

Of the performances Schkölziger and Boissonade recorded in Saint-Denis, it seems only about 18 discs were issued in total. Most featured a singer and guitarist named Georges Fourcade (1884-1962). Today, Fourcade is revered and recognized as the first person from Réunion to record, and doubly important because he sang local music in local dialect. His career spanned decades, performing on radio, in various groups, with hotel orchestras, and for events. He also performed at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. His family runs a terrific scrapbook-style website that encompasses their lives.

Here’s my own transfer of one of the séga tunes* in the series performed by the “Orchestra Bourbon” – very likely this was just another moniker for the Arlanda-Fourcade ensemble. The creole orchestra backing Fourcade was led by Jules Albert Arlanda (b. 1889), whose son also became a well-known orchestra leader.

Orchestre Bourbon – Mamzelle Zizi

By January 31, 1930, both Odeon engineer and agent had left Saint-Denis. It’s mentioned in the press that they were continuing their “world tour.”

During this time frame, there’s one significant missing piece in the story of these labels and the former colonies in East Africa and the Indian Ocean: Mozambique, or Portuguese East Africa as it was known. We have documentation that Odeon recorded in Maputo (then called Lourenço Marques) and Beira, also in 1930. According to a 1931 document prepared by a Mr. Evans, a scout/agent for the Gramophone Company active in East Africa, the Odeon sessions were the only ones of their kind; “records were made of all the principal languages” and “demand has been enormous.” Apart from that we know little more, as so few copies – if any, in collector’s hands – have appeared since then and no corresponding catalog has turned up. In fact, the only available example that I know of is in an institutional archive, at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France – transferred and made available here, on their Gallica site. Although the resolution is low, Gallica’s label scan seems to suggest that the engineer’s mark in the trail-out shellac is that of Heinrich Lampe – recorded either before or after his sessions in Mombasa and Kampala.

(image courtesy of Gallica, BnF)

Recording halted everywhere in these regions due in large part to the Depression and the merges of major companies into the newfound EMI. One exception was recording of Malagasy music, which continued during the Paris Colonial Exposition in 1931, and with the French branch of Polydor in the mid-1930s. Recording in Ethiopia began in late 1935. For the rest of mainland East Africa, commercial recording was on hold until the late 1930s, after which it was again interrupted, this time by the War.

*There is a 2001 CD issued by Takamba (“patrimoine musical de l’océan Indien”), Georges Fourcade: le barde créole, that is worth searching out for translations and wonderful personal photos – if you can find a copy. (I believe my transfer here, however, is much better.)

(image courtesy of the Fourcade family website)

Discographic data:

HMV P.13415 (80-2327; BX 7313)
Columbia WE 51 (W 63170)
Columbia WE 16 (W 63143)
Odeon A 242009b (BrO 20)
Odeon A 242135b (BrO 434)
Odeon 239022 (My 83)
Odeon 239501 (Reu 4)

Turkish Classical Soloists of 1927

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Sometimes one piece isn’t quite enough; it’s fun to compare, especially within a given time frame. I arbitrarily chose the year 1927 to focus on five particularly graceful taksims and instrumental improvisations within the modal framework of Turkish classical music. Many such discs were recorded and there are others I could have grabbed off of the shelf. This is just a representative drop in a bucket and are performances that I believe have not been reissued…or reissued with decent sound quality. I would definitely recommend digging further and a good place to start would be To Scratch Your Heart: Early Recordings from Istanbul, which contains additional exquisite taksims, including some from our chosen year…


Mesut Cemil had the distinction of being the son of the great Tanburi Cemil Bey (1873-1916), whom many consider to be the most important Ottoman classical performer and composer during the early recorded era. The sometimes irascible and occasionally alcoholic Tanburi Cemil Bey was not only a multi-instrumentalist, but he also revitalized the Turkish art-music solo, or taksim. He also recorded an abundance of discs in the earliest era of recording, well-circulated and revered for years (though very difficult to find in clean condition, today).

Could Mesut ever live up to his father’s revered position? Born in 1902, he studied Western classical music in Turkey as well as in Germany, while also studying tanbur first with his father and Refik Fersan (aka “Refik Bey”), a tanbur composer and student of his father. Eventually he ended up at the Darülelhan conservatory. In 1927, he’d begun working for Istanbul Radio and around October of that year, he made his first records for Columbia, including this one. This piece is a sirto – a dance piece that is also used in Turkish classical music – in the Şehnâz makam.

The long-necked Turkish tanbur (also tambur, tambour, etc) has seven strings, though early examples used eight strings in four courses. Mesut Cemil eventually had a long career both in conservatories and with urban radio orchestras. He represented Turkey at the famed 1932 Congress of Arabic Music in Cairo, and apparently discovered regional performer Âşık Veysel. He retired from music in 1955 and died in 1963.

The engineer for these original recordings must have chosen a large room with a tall ceiling, which greatly enhances their quality and mood. Some performances from these 1927 Columbia sessions were later issued for the Turkish-American market, dubbed from clean copies (as in, not from original metal masters, as they must have been unavailable) and issued on a similar, maroon label.

Mesut Cemil – Şehnâz Sirto


Another masterful performance from those same 1927 Columbia sessions is by the enigmatic poet who went by the name Neyzen Tevfik. He was born Tevfik Kolaylı in Bodrum in southwestern Turkey, in 1879. By the early 20th century he was a practicing Bektashi dervish. Despite being a member of the Sufi order, he is known for having a radical, unusual and sometimes contradictory life and lifestyle. Over the course of his career he wrote satirical and vulgar verse that railed against injustices and condemned autocracy. He was a staunch Kemalist, as well as a wandering vagabond, spending most of his career as a transient, living out of inns, occasionally being thrown in jail or institutionalized, and nursing a serious alcohol problem.

Biographies on him tend to emphasize those aspects of his life, but it also happens that he was a beautiful ney player, as captured here. The ney is an end-blown flute made of cane, and another important instrument in Turkish classical music. According to sources, Neyzen learned his craft in Urla on the Izmir Bay. His career on record was lengthy, recording taksims on the instrument for the Lyrophon label as early as the first decade of the 20th century. He died in 1953.

(Note for maniacs: it never ceases to amaze me the difficult-to-read color combinations that 78 record labels often used. In this case: silver lettering on green background, which makes a centered photo or a straightforward scan virtually unreadable.)

Neyzen Tevfik – Bestenigâr Taksim


Mustafa Sunar (also known as Moustafa Bey and Mousta Bey) was born in 1881 and while primarily a violin performer, it’s his rebab discs that may be his most notable. The rebab is a spike fiddle that is bowed and like many instruments, its origins are vague; there are rebab types across Asia and documented for centuries. What is relevant, however, is that while the bowed rebab was popular in Turkish classical music up to the 18th century, it fell out of fashion with the introduction of the violin. Thus, it was not as well-documented on disc compared to the violin, oud, and tanbur, and as such represents an older era of music.

This piece was recorded September 18, 1927 in Istanbul by the Gramophone Company; a taksim in the Evcârâ mode (transliterated as “Evidj Arrah” on the disc). This was a significant recording session; almost 300 matrices were made, or the equivalent of about 150 discs, by engineer Edward Fowler, right after a session in Cairo. Mustafa Sunar recorded three discs at this session.

Sunar was involved with various Turkish music conservatories and taught many students, perhaps most notably the popular singer Safiye Ayla. He died in 1961.

Eyyubî Mustafa Sunar – Evcârâ Taksim


The oud player known as İbrahim Efendi was born Avram Levi to a Jewish family in Aleppo, in 1872. He apparently learned oud from a young age, spending time in other major cities in the Ottoman Empire such as Damascus and Cairo (which gave him his name prefix: Mısırlı), before eventually settling in Istanbul.

It’s unclear precisely how many discs he made. He is often confused with a vocalist active at the same time, Hanende İbrahim Efendi, and the dates listed for his life are varied. Although he also recorded for Odeon, this piece is from the only disc he recorded during the same autumn 1927 session for Columbia featured above. He died in 1933.

Mısırlı İbrahim Efendi – Mâhûr Taksim


Aleko Bacanos’ career seems to have been somewhat obscured by his well-known younger brother, Yorgo, a highly regarded oud player who recorded for many labels himself. Aleko’s specialty was the kemençe; that is, the classical kemençe or kemenche, sometimes known as the Politiki lyra, an important instrument both in Turkish classical music but also in popular music and rebetiko played by Greeks in Izmir. Frequently referred to as “pear-shaped,” it’s a small, bowed lute played on the knee or between the knees.

Born in the Istanbul suburb of Silivri, Aleko’s earliest documented recordings were for the important early independent label of Istanbul, Orfeon, run by the Blumenthal brothers. He later recorded for Odeon multiple times during the acoustic and electric eras. For Columbia in 1927, he recorded several duet performances with his brother. This piece was made for the Gramophone Company on September 18, 1927, where, just after Mustafa Sunar had performed on the rebab, he cut six taksims. This piece is in the Sabâ makam.

Aleko Bacanos – Sabâ Taksim

Aleko (left) and Yorgo Bacanos

This selection could continue. At the same Gramophone Company session in September of ’27, apart from Aleko Bacanos and Mustafa Sunar, several other giants of Turkish instrumental art music made records: Refik Fersan recorded tanbur taksims, Neşet Bey recorded multiple oud solos, Neyzen Tevfik was brought back for ney taksims, Artaki Candan cut six solos on the kanun. The same goes for the Columbia sessions that began just as the GramCo sessions were ending, in late September and October of that year. Apart from whom we’ve already discussed, Fuad Efendi performed taksims on the tanbur, Mustafa Sunar again appeared on rebab, Kanuni Ahmet soloed, and even Zurnazen Ibrahim cut taksims on the zurna. I believe these tracks will help add to the conversation.

Discographic details

Columbia 12660, mx 22213
Columbia GT 12299, mx 22175
HMV AX 422, 7-219324, mx BF 1308
Columbia 12307, mx 22147
HMV AX 497, 7-219350, mx BF 1300

Thanks to Gokhan Aya and Hugo Strötbaum!

Curaçao and its Neighbors at 78 rpm

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Entire histories have been written about early recordings from certain regions of the Caribbean. A wealth of truly excellent (and a few mediocre) restorations and reissues have been produced, especially when it comes to the 78 recordings from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, as well as the Martiniquan and Guadeloupean jazz recorded in Paris. Jamaica, which didn’t have a recording industry until the very early 50s, has also been the focus of some wonderful reissues from painfully rare 78s on minuscule labels, with great mento sides featuring rootsy bamboo saxophones and banjos.

What’s known about the nascent and confined 78 rpm industry based in Curaçao and neighboring Aruba is largely thanks to one person: Tim de Wolf of the Netherlands. Sometimes it takes just a single, dedicated individual to shed light on an entire world of uncommon discs. Although some of de Wolf’s writing on the subject is in Dutch, it’s because of his work from the late 1990s onward, including a discography and a single CD, that we have a better idea of how 78 production and distribution worked on the islands, as well as what types of music was recorded. In this entry, we’ll focus on two musical styles with examples that are much less known.

Prior to the 1950s, the music of Curaçao barely registered. The first appearances appear to be from 1928-1930, when compositions by Curaçaoan composers Charles Maduro and Rudolf Palm (1880-1950) were recorded in New York City by studio groups on Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick. The discs on Brunswick are perhaps more notable as the groups that performed the works had relevant names like “Orquesta Brunswick Antilleana” and “Orquesta Bogotana”; the latter was more of an upscale orchestra, but the former group, with their horn section, added a little more flair to Palm’s arrangements of tumbas, waltzes, and pasillos. Still, they were studio bands. Information is scant regarding the make-up of these groups; for at least one session, the Brunswick Antilleana group was led by Puerto Rican pianist Manrique Pagán. This lack of early recording for the “Leeward Antilles” is not really a surprise, especially since there was quite a bit of recording in nearby Trinidad, and by Trinidadian artists in New York. There may have been a feeling by major recording labels in the U.S. that the regional market was being filled due to the relative proximity of the islands, despite cultural differences. It may also have had something to do with the fact that Trinidad was a British colony, and Curaçao, Bonaire, and Aruba were Dutch colonies.

Local recording on Curaçao and Aruba did not begin until the mid- to late 1940s, right at a moment when the islands were seeing an influx of money from both tourism and the oil refining economy. It happened in fits and starts: a few discs were recorded for RCA Victor in Aruba in 1946 by the “Orquesta Alma Latina,” and a handful of discs on one-off labels were issued as part of local political campaigns. In 1948-1949, however, Horatio “Jacho” Hoyer (1904-1987) established his ‘Hoyco’ label in Willemstad, and his colleague Thomas Henriquez (1912-1955), also a shop owner in Willemstad like Hoyer, started his Musika label approximately one year later. A third significant 78 label, Padú, formed by musicians Padú del Caribe and Rufo Wever, ramped up in Oranjestad, Aruba, in 1952. There were several other related and/or smaller labels (such as Caribia, Benarsa, Sabaneta, and Cah’I Orgel), but their output was small in comparison. As Tim de Wolf has written, these labels were run as if they were an enjoyable hobby; profits were minimal, music was recorded on weekends, food and alcohol was served during the sessions, the records were distributed mostly in Curaçao and pressed in numbers of about 500 to 1000 each, and most seem to have been recorded in the back rooms of their local shops, in makeshift studios. Musika and Padú discs were pressed in Miami, Florida. By 1955 or so, these three labels had shuttered. Horatio Hoyer had started a radio station, Radio Hoyer (still in existence today), and no longer had the time for the label; Henriquez suddenly passed away, and Padú began recording with RCA.

At least 275 individual 78s were issued on these labels. Most were entirely from the islands, apart from a few sides by Venezuelan, Dominican, and Surinamese bands that were passing through. Most were sung in the local creole language, Papiamento, which is based on Spanish and Portuguese. Much of what was issued, and most of what has been restored and reissued on CD, is popular music by brass-led, Cuban-influenced bands like Sexteto Gressmann, Conjunto Cristal, and Estrellas del Caribe, performing terrific guarachas, tumbas, and merengues. There was, however, a wider variety of music that appeared on these labels; one example would be instrumental waltzes and pasillos that bear a strong resemblance and instrumentation to the same from Trinidad and Venezuela – languid, flowing, with a strumming cuatro. Another important local style is tambú.

Tambú originated as a music of the enslaved people of the Curaçao and neighboring islands, dating as far back as the 17th and 18th centuries. It is also the name of the corresponding dance, and the name of the primary instrument, the tambú drum, which is usually accompanied by a metal instrument, of which there are several types, known as the heru. It is unmistakably African in origin, and has a primary “cantor” and a “koro” (chorus) that responds throughout. Historically and up to today, lyrics of a tambú piece contain social criticism and sometimes unmitigated protest. The Dutch colonial government considered the music evil and outright banned tambú music (and their gatherings) over the centuries until 1952. Today it is considered important cultural heritage.

A total of eleven known tambú discs were issued by these local labels, most on Hoyco. This example is by the group led by Nicholaas Susanna, known as “Shon Colá,” considered one of the great tambú group leaders and vocalists of the 20th century. It features vocalist “Bea,” or Bea Maria Isemia, aka “Kalukreit,” with Gustaaf Doran, known as “Ta di Djudju” or simply “Ta,” on the tambú drum. Colá, according to an interview, began performing tambú when he was about fifteen years old and continued to give concerts well into his eighties. This piece was recorded circa early 1952.

Cola i su grupo, with Bea – Waja Den Cura

Bonaire is about twenty miles east of Curaçao. The Quinteto Bonaire recorded seven sides for Thomas Henriquez’ Musika label, including this piece of Simadan “folklore” with violin. The Simadan is an annual event on Bonaire from February to May with festive music and dance, that has its origins as a harvest festival when the inhabitants of the island would harvest sorghum. Little is known about the group except that it featured the group members “S. Nicasia,” “R. Hart,” and “D. Piar.” It was recorded in Willemstad in October 1950.

Quinteto Bonaire – Simadan

Label: Hoyco
Issue number: 12
Matrix: NWI 24

Label: Musika
Issue number: 1016
Matrix: HEN 128

Much information from Tim de Wolf’s website, release, and his Discography of Music from the Netherlands Antilles & Aruba (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1999).

Thanks to Shayne Schafer and Reto Muller.

Sudan at 78 rpm

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In July of 2020, I attempted a simplistic recording history of Somali music on 78; a history still clouded in a lot of mystery, with most known recordings not fully documented. Perhaps even more esoteric a topic is the recorded music of Sudan on 78. As with Somalia, the early music of Sudan certainly was set to disc and sold commercially, but compared to the music of Egypt and North Africa, or the music of the Levant, or even music from the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, little of it has been documented in a methodical fashion, at least in English. I would also say that outside of some collector and historian circles, this history is altogether unfamiliar.

Prior to the 1950s, it appears there were no “sessions” in Khartoum. It was not a stop for peregrine engineers from the European multinational recording companies, although technically, by 1899, one could take trains from Cairo to Khartoum, crossing the Nile at Wadi Halfa just south of the Egyptian border. The first known recordings of music from the Sudan appear to have been made in Cairo in February of 1903 by Gramophone Company engineer Franz Hampe. It was the company’s first expedition to Cairo and was likely exploratory, to a degree. They hadn’t yet contracted or recorded such famed early Egyptian singers as Abdel Hayy Hilmi or Yusuf Al-Manyalawi. Hampe cut a grand total of four sides by the “Sudanese Vocal Quartet” during his trip. Two were seven-inch, single-sided 78s, and two were ten-inch. The larger discs were both titled “Love Song of Sudan.” The shorter tracks were titled “Prayer” and “Song.” That’s all that is known, for now.

It took that same massive company another twenty-eight years to once again record music from Sudan, when in March 1930, back in Cairo, Sudanese singer Fatma El Chameya cut six sides for GramCo/HMV. Well, technically only two of her records were released, as two of the sides were “damaged” and never issued, according to the files. However, by that time there was a young Sudanese businessman in Cairo working with other labels, and he was bringing Sudanese musicians to the city to record: an entrepreneur who went by the pseudonym Dmitri Al-Bazaar.

al-bazar-2

Dmitri Al-Bazaar was born Dimitrios Nikolaou Kativanides around the turn of the 20th century in the Dongola area of northern Sudan. Al-Bazaar’s father was a Greek-Austrian who lived and worked in Sudan, and whose mother was the sister of famed Austrian soldier and colonial administrator in the Sudan, Rudolf Carl von Slatin (1857-1932) aka “Sultan Pasha.” Al-Bazaar’s father married a local Dongola woman, and while growing up young Al-Bazaar lived an educated, multilingual, bi-cultural existence, with his father calling him “Dmitri” and his mother calling him “Mohammed.”

His first business was in the central “bazaar” of Khartoum in the early 1920s, where he acted as a local photographer and newspaper agent for Cairo papers and magazines, eventually establishing a popular shop and magazine “library.” At some point in the mid-1920s, his Cairo connections suggested he become a gramophone agent in Khartoum, and it appears that by 1925 he was the regional agent for the Baidaphon label which had a thriving Cairo department (although as a company it was largely run out of Beirut and Berlin).

Legend has it that Al-Bazaar tried to engage his Sudanese musician friends to record in Cairo around this time, but they were unenthusiastic, thinking that the act of playing music on discs could be perceived as fomenting resistance against colonial powers. It appears that Al-Bazaar eventually prevailed, although from here on out, precise details are vague. It’s been said, however, that the first Sudanese artist that Al-Bazaar arranged to record was Abdullah Al-Mahi, who recorded several discs in Cairo ca. 1928.

The music that Al-Mahi and the Sudanese musicians who also recorded during that era is now referred to as haqeeba music. The story of haqeeba is fascinating as it was not a term in use at the time. Haqeeba, meaning “briefcase,” is in reference to a Sudanese radio show from the 1940s hosted by Ahmed Mohamed Saleh, on Radio Omdurman. On this show, which was called “Haqeebat al-Fann,” Saleh would play old Sudanese 78 rpm records – discs from his briefcase, so to speak. Thus, the term haqeeba was born, used to refer to older, popular Sudanese music on commercial 78 rpm records.

It appears that, apart from the two discs made in 1930 for HMV by Fatima El Chameya (one side of which can be heard on the 2008 Honest Jon’s compilation “Sprigs of Time”), the majority of early Sudanese recordings were issued on the Odeon label. They appeared scattered throughout their Cairo series from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. By 1937, Odeon offered over 118 discs from Sudan, including discs by Abdel Karim Karouma (Romanized simply as “Karoma” on discs), Mohamed Ahmed Sarour (“Sarur” on discs), Etoum and Ibrahim Abdel Jalil, Mademoiselle Nagat, Osman Kili, and Bechir el Robatabi, among others.

Major labels were not the only outlet for Sudanese song at that time. Again, very little has been written in English about Armenian music entrepreneur Setrak Mechian, except that he was a notorious early gramophone agent, salesman, and recordist. He was born in 1877 and began his career as early as 1904, attempting to get into the business in the Levant. By 1908, he was Odeon’s agent in Beirut, and already had earned the ire of both major and independent labels for bootlegging all of their records, likely by crudely making copies of existing discs with a pair of hydraulic presses. That same year he started his own label – “Fabrik Mechian” – and moved his business and production to Cairo. Apparently he was a one-man-army, recording the artists, announcing the performers himself, and even pressing the records himself; a true renaissance man. While a nuisance to the moneyed international labels and with records pressed on poorly refined shellac, Mechian was dogged, and recorded many important Egyptian singers during the years his label was active. In the 1930s, Dmitri Al-Bazaar, our agent from Sudan, is documented as working for the Mechian company in Cairo and this is likely when a variety of Sudanese recordings also began appearing on the Mechian label.

Mechian_1270-1Mechian_1233-1Mechian_1226-1Mechian_2019-2
(Sudanese discs on Mechian courtesy of Ahmad Al-Salhi.)

In the 1950s, several East African labels issued a smattering of Sudanese discs, including the Tom Tom label (one is featured on my “Alternate History” collection); however, some or perhaps all of these were examples of music from South Sudan. One label named Sudanphone was also active, although the scope of their releases is totally unknown. Their records were pressed in Greece and one issue is in the Benno Haupl collection at UC Santa Barbara.

Sudanphone

It’s unclear to me if Dmitri Al-Bazaar was responsible for the entirety of Sudanese recordings that appeared on Odeon in the 1920s-1930s, but it seems likely. This piece, by Bechir el Robatabi accompanied by the tanbur, was perhaps issued ca. 1927-9.

Bechir El Robatabi – Nassim Habali

Label: Odeon
Issue Number: A 224000 (b)
Matrix Number: Ek 8

Thank you to Ahmad Al-Salhi, Mary Kapkidi, Gokhan Aya, Gabe Lavin, Hugo Strötbaum, and the Michael Kinnear archives.

Orchestra lui Harţegan şi Zmed – Învârtita din Detroit

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This is the first Romanian track I’ve featured on the site. There were a considerable number of Romanian-Americans that recorded vernacular music for numerous U.S.-based labels during the 78 era. Of course, many exceptional Romanian-American musicians played and recorded what is now called klezmer music during their disc-recording careers, although most of those discs were marketed as “Jewish” or “Yiddish” rather than “Romanian” (or “Roumanian,” a spelling often used at that time). Certainly there was musical and marketing overlap between both company-created categories. In today’s case, we’ll focus on Romanian regional music recorded in the United States that falls outside the klezmer category (though, again, this is rather loosely stated).

If we look strictly at the numbers, it was the Columbia Phonograph Company in New York who first took strides in recording Romanian-Americans, cutting the most discs featuring “Romanian” music – far more than their competitors. They began on their massive, catch-all “E-series” of “foreign” discs, beginning in the early ‘teens. Over the next decade and a half, they issued well over 100 discs featuring Romanian-American artists, such as baritone A. Manescu, tenor L. Aurescu, and the Orchestra Romaneasca, whose output also was sometimes issued under the generic names “Jewish Orchestra” or “Yiddischer Orchester.” Then there was Petru Laicu’s orchestra from Banat (via Philadelphia), who recorded wonderful tracks for both Columbia and Victor. Columbia did this while also issuing Romanian discs from overseas performers, often pressed from the master discs made by their sister company in London, the Columbia Graphophone Company.

And what about the Victor label in the United States, Columbia’s primary competitor and America’s most massive record company? Well…they simply didn’t record nearly as much Romanian-American music. When they started a new Romanian series in 1929, it reached a skimpy 24 records before it was shuttled for almost ten years, and almost everything on that slender series was borrowed from overseas masters, thus not Romanian-American.

One group that briefly recorded in Chicago for both labels was a brass band-type ensemble from the mid-west led by Joan Haţegan. The fanfara music they specialized in was music from the Ardeal region, or Transylvania, especially asymmetic învârtita dances. In July of 1927, they recorded their first session, for Columbia, which consisted of two discs of lively instrumentals including two învârtitas named after local spots (Chicago and Indiana Harbor), as well as a tune from Banat, and one titled “Haţegana.” Three of four of these sides are reissued on the Blowers from the Balkans CD on Topic.

Two years later, in December of 1929, what was probably an iteration of the same band recorded five tunes for Victor in Chicago and these are lesser-known. The track featured here, “Învârtita din Detroit,” was originally titled “Învârtita lui Chita” (or “Ghita”) – possibly changed to again add some local flair. The ledgers state that these were “old songs.”

What we know of Haţegan’s band comes from musician and historian Paul Gifford, who interviewed John Boldi, a Romanian-American musician from East Chicago. Boldi claimed he played clarinet on Haţegan’s 1927 Columbia session, and he also identified a trumpet player (Ioan Stoica), a drummer (George Bocan), and a “bass horn” player named Steve Kalman on the same session. However, these 1929 recordings have different and varying instrumentation, with no trumpet or drums. It sounds to me like there are two to three clarinets, at least one sax, and a violin buried under the sound. Very likely Boldi and Kalman played on this session as well. Paul Gifford has identified the “Zmed” in the band’s name as the violinist in the group, Adrian Zmed.

Haţegan himself is a bit of a riddle. His career on disc began in the mid-1920s, playing backup for Ion Ionescu-Ardeal (1894-1935) on the small Ardyal label. It’s likely Haţegan played either clarinet or saxophone. There were several people named John/Ioan/Joan Haţegan/Harţegan/Hartigan in Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio, around the same period. Laborers, all; some listed as “aliens” on official paperwork, but no definitive match to our musician. While Haţegan’s Columbia recordings stayed in print until the 40s, his Victors were never reissued.

Orchestra lui Harţegan şi Zmed – Învârtita din Detroit

Special thanks to: Paul Gifford, Sergiu Sora, and Alexander Afzali.

Notes
Label: Victor
Issue Number: V-19011
Matrix Number: BVE-57203

Quintin Duarte and Salvador Rodriguez – La Resbalosa

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Joropo is the music, but in Venezuela it is more than that – it’s also the name of the couples dance, as well as, at least for a time, the event itself where the music is played. First and foremost it is now an expression of regional pride. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of joropo music is that it features the harp.

It’s likely that the European harp was introduced to Venezuela in the 18th century by Spanish missionaries, but over time it was modified and adapted to play local music. There are two types of Venezuelan harp: the arpa llanera (harp of the plains) and the arpa aragueña. The latter is played in the central states of Aragua and Miranda. The music featured on this track, by vocalist Quintin Duarte (1890-1955) and harpist Salvador Rodriguez (1920-1992), precisely features this kind of harp and is known as joropo tuyero, from the central states of the country. Joropo tuyero (sometimes called joropo central, though there is a difference) has a more stripped-down style with the vocalist playing maracas and accompanied only by the harp (as opposed to other types of joropo, which can be accompanied by a larger band). The piece featured here, “La Resbalosa,” is a rapid style, a golpe. Both Rodriguez and Duarte were highly regarded at the time. They recorded this piece, along with five additional songs, in 1952.

The Turpial label, named after the national bird which is akin to the Baltimore oriole, was one of Venezuela’s first independent record labels (perhaps the first). It was founded in 1948 and began 78 rpm production in 1951. It was owned and run by the Sefaty Benazar brothers, Rafael and Nemias (or Nehemías), who also launched a production and distribution company called Comercial Serfaty. My most recent release contains another example from Turpial featuring the seductive, languid Venezuelan waltz with cuatro in the style of the older waltzes by Lionel Belasco and the music from Trinidad as well as Curaçao. This disc, issued around the same time, proves that Turpial had a wide-ranging repertoire. They appear to have issued several hundred 78s and ceased production of 78s in 1959. Rafael Serfaty eventually became a politician after imprisonment by the subsequent Jimenez dictatorship.

Prior to the emergence of Turpial, recordings of Venezuelan music can be divided into two camps: 1) the pre-World War II 78s recorded in Caracas, and 2) the pre-World War II recordings featuring Venezuelan songs by Venezuelan performers and recorded in the United States. Both are rare, but especially the former, which are nearly absent from archives, collections, and compilations. Furthermore, many of the recordings made in the US by Venezuelan performers such as Lorenzo Herrera are quite different.

It appears the only label that gave Caracas attention in the first few decades of the 20th century was Victor, who had significant control in South and Central America as far as recording and distribution was concerned. Their first session in Caracas was in January-February of 1917, where Victor recorded the equivalent of 23 discs (although they waited at least three years to issue many of them). At the session were larger bands like the Estudiantina Venezolana and the Orquesta Carabeña, some guitar troubadours and duets, a military band…and one joropo group with maracas, harp, and cuatro. They were billed as “Cuerpo de Francisco López y Salvador Florez” and they recorded six sides.

There are some surviving notes about this group by the recording engineer: “Caracas. […] this AM: T. went to the country for harp player to acc. singers of yesterdays date – for this. Could not get Harp player, because player wanted a job himself to put in this particular style. Engagement made.” Three cheers to the harpist for insisting on bringing his own band to play his own music. One of these sides can be heard here.

These 1917 discs appeared to sell respectably, with existing statistics listing sales of 1,800-3,000 copies sold. However, Victor did not return to Caracas for eleven years. Perhaps to make up for this drawn-out lapse, in the interim bandleader Nat Shilkret recorded a number of Venezuelan arrangements in New York, for export to dealers in the country. When the company finally returned to Caracas in July of 1928, their modus operandi was more or less the same, though they managed to record only a few more discs than last time, a skimpy total of 28 1/2 discs’ worth of material. In this batch were, once again, orquestas and estudiantinas performing waltzes, paso dobles, and even an orchestrated joropo or two, or a tumba; there were more guitar trios and duos; there were some comic monologues and another military band. And, once again, there was one harp duo: Augusto Motta and Nerio Pacheco, who recorded a grand total of just four joropo sides spread across four discs (Victor was really fond of issuing “split sides” in South America – a different artist on each side).

In 1930, history repeated itself. Victor re-appeared in Caracas in March of 1930 and recorded the equivalent of 30 discs, and gamely captured another harp and maracas duo. But this time, artists José Tremaría and Pablo Hernández only recorded two songs. One was even a golpe aragueño, just like this piece. That was the end of recording in Caracas for Victor.

America-based Lorenzo Herrera and the “Grupo Venezolano” recorded a number of sides in New York in 1935, but it seems that it wasn’t until the Serfaty brothers and the Turpial label appeared almost twenty years later that more local Venezuelan music, and specifically the exciting joropo, would once again become pressed into shellac.

Quintin Duarte and Salvador Rodriguez – La Resbalosa

Notes
Label: Turpial
Issue Number: 049
Matrix Number: 113 SER

Many thanks to Víctor Márquez for information. Much additional info gleaned from the abiding and ever-expanding DAHR.

Qurban Ali – Raag Asavari

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In the spring of 1925, engineer Douglas “Duggie” Larter began a lengthy recording expedition in Asia for the Gramophone Company. He started recording in June of that year in Lahore, in what is now Pakistan, and over the next two years would record all across South Asia in places like Calcutta, Delhi, Mysore, Colombo, and Karachi, and as far east as Singapore and Jakarta, recording the rough equivalent of 1,800 78s.

During those two years, he returned to Lahore multiple times for sessions. In June of 1926, while in that city, Larter did something historic: he helmed the first significant recording session of Afghan musicians and Afghan classical music. A total of 59 discs were recorded and released. A small group of musicians traveled from Kabul to Lahore for these sessions. Not all of their names are known, but the primary artist was Ustad Qasem Afghan (1878-1957), considered the father of Afghan classical music. Accompanying him was a rubab player named Qurban Ali, and additional performers who were listed on records and catalogs as the “Kabul String Band.”

Ustad Qasem Afghan appeared on 56 of those discs (except for one instrumental side by the String Band). Qurban Ali, on the other hand, appeared as a rubab soloist on just three discs (again, except for one instrumental side by the String Band), with tabla accompaniment. The track featured here is a performance in the raga Asavari, and while the recording is a bit thin (it is a late acoustic recording, made without the use of microphones), the performance is still resonating.

I’ve asked rubab player Mathieu Clavel to help explain the significance of this performance.

Mathieu:

The style of “classical” rubab (also known as Kabuli; the urban rubab, as opposed to the folk rubab of the countryside) is said by scholars to have emerged as early as the late 19th century (see the works of Prof. John Baily). The progress of instrumental music accelerated when Amir Habibullah forbid the performance of dancing girls for the men of the court, as most of the musicians’ performances relied on accompanying dance performances. This legacy of Afghan art music actually began when Amir Sher Ali Khan, Habibullah’s grandfather, invited groups of nautch dancers (court dancers) and related musicians to settle in Kabul after being entertained while on a diplomatic invitation to India in the mid-19th century. Many of today’s professional Afghan classical musicians descend from them.

As the rubab player in the group of Ustad Qassim Afghan at the royal court, and one of the very first Afghan musicians to play on air when radio first launched in the country, Qurban Ali was known as one of the best rubab players of Kabul in the first decades of the 20th century. He also fathered several noteworthy artists, one of them being the late Ustad Ghulam Dastagir Shaida, one of the most wonderful Afghan classical singers of the century.

Raag Asavari is a melody rarely if ever heard on the rubab. It is related to raag Darbari, the “sultan of ragas,” and shares with it a solemn mood. Qurban Ali is showing nicely the character of the raag, setting the mood with a few notes of shakl (the Afghan version of the Indian alap) before getting into the composition. He does incorporate the major 7th, which is out of the raag’s rules; it is however not rare to see such minor digressions in Afghan compositions for the sake of beauty. 

The composition is played with the kharj (tonic) set in Rekap, the 3rd fret of the low string; a typical, historical yet beautiful feature of classical rubab, which gives room to explore the lower octave a little bit, down to the lower 6th, since the rubab does not have the extensive range of Indian classical instruments to perform the same modal material. Nowadays, classical music is quite often played with the tonic set in the 1st fret of the low string, which is sometimes called “chapa”  or “gauchely” as opposed to having the tonic set in the 3rd fret, “rasta” or “straightforwardly” – while folk is originally played with the tonic in one of the open strings.

The rhythmic cycle is the 16 beats tintal, and to my opinion the composition sounds rather “Hindustani,” as in more complex, with different right hand patterns or bols within the composition, similar to sarod material heard from recordings of this time (the sarod having evolved from the rubab). And what a sweet and impressive composition, which two parts he is playing with subtle variations: the asthai, main and opening theme, and the antara, a second melody that goes higher in range. He plays the latter starting at 0:30, comes back to the asthai at 0:50, and again to the antara at 1:30 before moving to a bridge till 1:45 and then a second composition (another Hindustani gat rather than a typical Afghan Abhog and Sanchari section) in faster tempo (drut tintal) for the second half of the recording. From 2:10 until the end he’s basically just playing one phrase, full of rhythmic variations. At this point from the tabla we can only distinguish some loud strikes, but we get the feeling that they work nicely with each other. 

Interestingly, while the compositions within this track have a stronger, more complex Hindustani feeling to them, they are mostly presented with rhythmic variations, a distinctive feature of the Afghan style, and without paltas (melodic variations). He really is playing it so elegantly, the flight of a bird. In the drut part from 1:50, he is playing some typical “parandkari” or stroke pattern variations of a high pitch drone string within the composition. Nowadays, this string is raised above the others on the bridge of the rubab to be singled out easily, which wasn’t yet the case at the time of Qurban Ali.

The rubab has one well known legend who replaced Qurban Ali at the radio orchestra upon his untimely passing, the unmatched Ustad Mohammad Omar who is credited with many innovations of the instrument, and its advancement into classical music. Yet, in this recording one may recognize the most distinctive features of Ustad Mohammad Omar’s school shining already, with high-class compositions subtly elaborated, the fine ornaments and flowing rhythmical variations…

One of the aspects I find the most admirable is the mastery of dynamics, clearly discernible through the noise (powerful accentuated strokes or qamchin (horsewhip!), followed by soft passages) which was also a distinctive feature of Ustad Mohammad Omar’s aesthetics. The rubab is known as the “lion of instruments,” and Qurban Ali superbly knew how to make it roar.

There are very few vintage rubab recordings out there, and this present treasure opens a sonorous new window in time on the history of rubab, amazingly demonstrating how developed it was already a hundred years ago, by the time of Qurban Ali. As someone passionate about the instrument, words can’t describe the emotions elicited upon listening to it. 


Qurban Ali. Photo from Dr. Enayatullah Shahrani’s Music in Afghanistan.

Between this recording session in June 1926 through the late 1950s, when Radio Kabul began issuing 78s via the Soviet recording industry (see this earlier post), recording of Afghan music was only sporadic, and often simply nonexistent.

In April of 1928, Mirza Nazar Khan, an amateur musician and diplomat based in Paris, made a handful of recordings in London after having been flown there on behalf of the Secretary to the Amir of Afghanistan (then Amanullah Khan, who was traveling throughout Europe at the time). These were unaccompanied recordings. They were first pressed in the UK and then repressed in 1930 in India for distribution in the region.

In July of 1928, Ustad Miran Bakhsh recorded five discs worth of Afghan selections with his ensemble, in Lucknow. One year later, he recorded another five discs in Lahore, although those later discs were not issued until 1932 for some reason.

Julien Thiennot, on his excellent website, has noted the presence of several additional Afghan performances on 78. Firstly, a disc by Akram Khan, who recorded at least once for the Afghan market in the same series as Bakhsh’s. Secondly, an additional disc from ca. 1933 by Qasem Afghan (as “Ustad Qasim Khan”) containing a topical piece about the assassination of the King of Afghanistan, Mohammad Nadir Shah. In late 1946, HMV apparently issued three 78s from, I believe, the soundtrack to Afghanistan’s first fim, “Ishq wa Dosti” (“Love and Friendship”) which was produced by an Indian film company based in Lahore known as Huma Films. Further, there was also Ustad Muhammad Hussein Khan “Sarahang” of Kabul, who recorded at least one disc for Indian HMV in the 1950s (in Hindi).

From the early 1930s until after World War II – the years when major labels had drastically reduced their recording expeditions in many parts of the world due to the Depression and the War – there appear to have been two independent labels issuing Afghan music on a semi-regular basis. In part this is likely due to the fact that they were located in Peshawar, in what is now Pakistan. These were the Banga-Phone label, run by the Frontier Trading Company, and the Gulshan label, run by Bajaj & Company. At the time, Peshawar was the capital of the “North-West Frontier Province,” once a province of British India. The region (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) bordering Afghanistan is ethnically Pashtun, which is also the majority ethnic group of Afghanistan (“Afghan” used to be a synonym for Pashtun or Pathan) and its culture and history are inseparable with that of the country. Both Banga-Phone and Gulshan issued discs that were classified as Persian, Afghani, and Multani, as well as Kashmiri and Gurmukhi. These discs are not common. After World War II, the Indian branch of the Gramophone Company acquired the catalogs of these two labels, and reissued a group of their better-known selections in 1949. They are all extremely rare today.

It could be that other discs exist on smaller labels or within the larger repertoires by major labels, we just don’t know yet. It was common, for example, for early Afghan performers to have their discs listed as “Persian” on the record labels themselves, but they actually appear as “Afghan” in catalogs, therefore there are likely discrepancies here and there, and additional Afghan recordings were probably produced during this time.

In the meantime, Qurban Ali from June of 1926.

Listen/Download:
Qurban Ali – Raag Asavari

Many thanks to Mathieu Clavel and the Michael Kinnear Collection.

Discographic notes
Label: Gramophone Company
Issue Number: P 7558
Coupling Number: 9-17901
Matrix Number: BL 2077

The “Ali Orchestra” – probably a young Qurban Ali, center (undated).

Nikolay Dontzoff – Kozlik

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Comic songs were the bread-and-butter repertoire for so many early entertainers, whether they were well-known popular American songsters like Billy Murray, or obscure, often forgotten immigrant performers in the United States. Thousands were recorded, without question. A few have caught my ear over the years, such as those by Finnish fiddle player Erik Kivi. Recently I was delighted by the rustic voice of Russian-Ukrainian accordionist Nikolay Dontzoff.

Nikolay, or “Nicholas” as he was often credited, was born in 1881 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He immigrated to the United States in 1922, getting onboard in Constantinople on the ocean liner Braga, which ran a route from Beirut to New York. With him was his wife, Lucy Dontzoff, who was twenty years his junior. They lived mostly in what is now West Harlem in Manhattan, and both worked the vaudeville circuit.

So far as we know, Dontzoff’s career on record was brief, and separated by extensive lags. He first stepped into a recording studio in New York in late 1922, almost as soon as he was settled, accompanying baritone Mikel Wavitch on a session for Victor. Those recordings, however, were never issued. Five years later, in October 1927, he was back – this time for Columbia, where he would record two records under his own name, including this one featured today.

Dontzoff accompanied his wife Lucy on four discs in 1929, and one disc accompanying Lucy and then-famed Russian “gypsy” singer Vera Smirnova. Then things go dark. He and Lucy were divorced by 1935. Nikolay moved downtown to the Eastern European neighborhood in the East Village. He was still performing both as a solo act, and with Russian music and dance troupes, often touring the country. He performed in the Russian revue Chauve Souris on Broadway, which ran for twelve performances in 1943.

At some point, probably in the late 1940s, Dontzoff issued a 78 on his own imprint, “Nicholas Dontzoff” – but there seems to have only been one issue. It was likely an offshoot of the Argee label, which was a small, Russian-language label based out of a music shop on Lexington Avenue and owned by a Latvian immigrant named Jack Raymond. That record, and the two discs he made in 1927, appear to be Dontzoff’s only moments on record as a solo performer. By 1953, he was working at the Tompkins Square Tavern on 7th Street. He died that year.

“Serenkiy Kozlik,” or “The Little Grey Goat,” is a well-known Russian children’s song about a goat that is loved so much by a grandma that she naturally ends up cooking the dear goat in her homemade soup. The earliest recording of the song I could locate was one made in Saint Petersburg in 1908 by the Gramophone Company, and performed by G.L. Lebedev’s accordion troupe. In September 1910, another version was recorded in Vilnius, Lithuania, also for the Gramophone Company, and performed by a group listed as “Detskiy Khor Vilenskago Pervago Nachalnago Uchilisha.” Another was recorded one year later by Maria Emskaya for the Syrena label of Poland. I suspect there are many other versions, both earlier and later.

This version, however, is not standard – Dontzoff’s version of this song is a parody of the original. Here, he makes it an ironic song for adults.

Listen/Download:
Nikolay Dontzoff – Kozlik

Kozlik
(translated and transliterated by Diana Tarnavska and reader ‘andretges’)

Once upon a time there was an old lonely babushka
And she was very bored, alone
That’s right, that’s right, she was alone

Babushka went along the bazaar
She looked but there were no products
That’s right, that’s right, any products

But it was her lucky day
‘Cause she met a shaggy cute goat
That’s right, that’s right, a shaggy cute goat

She noticed the goat
And brought it right home
That’s right, that’s right, she brought it home

The goat was dirty, besides, and unshaven
And apparently had not washed at least for ten years
That’s right, that’s right, at least for ten years

Babushka took the goat to the bath
Babushka washed it with soda
That’s right, that’s right, she washed it with soda

Goat was for sure all native Russian
But sported a little French beard
That’s right, that’s right, a little French beard

Babushka didn’t like the beard at all
She shaved off the beard at the hairdresser
That’s right, that’s right, she shaved the beard

Babushka called the goat “Dusya”
They were living together, the goat and babusya
That’s right, that’s right, goat and babusya

In the morning as soon as the dawn breaks
Our goat hits the coffee with a bun
That’s right, that’s right, coffee with a bun

Our goat was horrifically comic
He registered her house in his name
That’s right, that’s right, registered in his name

Having taken almost everything from babusya
He left his babushka with horns and hooves [without a damn thing]
That’s right, that’s right, just horns and hooves

Dear babushkas, don’t lose yourself
Falling in love with some young goats
That’s right, that’s right, with some young goats

They will disappear at the first occasion
And you will sit lordly in a galosh
That’s right, that’s right, sit in a galosh


Original Russian

Как-то старушка одна проживала
И в одиночестве очень скучала
Вот как ведь как, очень скучала

Отправилась бабушка вдоль по базару
Глянуть там, нет ли какого товару
Вот как ведь как, какого товару

Значит счастливый денёк ей задался
(На)встречу лохматый ей козлик попался
Вот как ведь как, козлик попался

Бабушка козлика вмиг залучила
И на квартиру к себе притащила
Вот как ведь как, к себе притащила

Козлик был грязный, к тому же небритый
И уж лет десять, как видно, немытый
Вот как ведь как, как видно немытый

Бабушка козлика в баню сводила
Бабушка козлика содой помыла
Вот как ведь как, содой помыла

Козлик конечно был нашенский, русский
Но щеголял он с бородкой французской
Вот как ведь как, с бородкой французской

Бабушка бороду страх не взлюбила
У парикмахера бороду сбрила
Вот как ведь как, бороду сбрила

Бабушка козлика звала всё “Дуся”
Зажили в мире козёл и бабуся
Вот как ведь как, козёл и бабуся

Утро(м) едва только зорька займётся
Козлик наш “кофэ” уж с булкой напьётся
Вот как ведь как, с булкой напьётся

Козлик наш был преужаснейший комик
Взял перевёл на себя бабкин домик
Вот как ведь как, бабкин уж домик

Взяв у бабуси почти все до крошки
Оставил он бабушке рожки да ножки
Вот как ведь как, рожки да ножки

Милые бабушки не увлекайтесь
И в молодых козелков не влюбляйтесь
Вот как ведь как, вы не влюбляйтесь

Козлик исчезнет по первой пороше
Вы же усядетесь важно в калоше
Вот как ведь как, важно в калоше

Notes
Label: Columbia
Issue Number: 20119-F
Matrix Number: 108381 (A-1)

 

Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music

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I am proud to announce that my latest compilation has been released by Dust-to-Digital:

Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music

https://dust-digital.com/
https://bit.ly/37Yw00C

Six years in the making, this is an online release: 100 tracks, a 186 page illustrated book with an introductory essay, extensive notes on each track, and many translations, from Maltese to Sranantongo.

It is entirely global and an extension of, and companion to, all the work I’ve done with the Excavated Shellac site since 2007. It’s all “new” material, compiled from my collection.

It begins with a song about police brutality. It ends with dreamy innuendo.

It is a labor of love. Like all labors of love, it is eccentric. It is written for those who have been coming to Excavated Shellac for a fix, and those who haven’t yet found that crystalline musical spark, but wish to find one.

It was produced by April Ledbetter, Lance Ledbetter, and me, who wrote the notes and compiled it from my collection. Michael and Joy Graves of Osiris Studios did the restoration and remastering. Barbara Bersche was the designer. Good friends Jed Lackritz, Nathan Salsburg, and Arshia Haq helped with some brutal proofreading. Many people were especially supportive and they are thanked.

As ever,
Jonathan