Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wagogo music is a gift from the Gods, January 3, 2005
Originally released in 1975 as "Africa: Ceremonial and Folk Music" (H-72063), this is a set of field-recordings from Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. It's not listed, but I am assuming the recordings are from the early '70s.
I bought this disc shortly after Explorer: East Africa - Witchcraft & Ritual Music. Overall I probably wouldn't say I like this disc as much as that one, but don't let that stop you from buying this great disc. Even if the Wagogo tracks were the only 3 tracks on here I liked (which is not the case!), they alone are worth the price of the disc. Wagogo Soothing Song and Wagogo Marimba (tracks 11 and 13) are 2 highlights of my entire music collection. Wow! The soothing song is two people playing the 11-stringed zeze as they and others sing to a child who can't sleep. This is not your mother's lullabye. This tune could be the music a movie might use to illustrate a character's descent into insanity... and I mean that in a good way. Wagogo Marimba is the other amazing track here... and to avoid confusion, I don't know if marimba is the Wagogo word for "thumb piano" or if this was just a typo in the original liner-notes, but this is not the xylophone type of marimba you're thinking of... it's a mbira, thumb piano, etc... whatever you want to call it. This track is even more entrancingly hypnotic than the soothing song. These 2 tracks are music to hallucinate to... completely amazing, natural Deep-Space Music. The Wagogo people have certainly discovered the magic!
Elsewhere on this disc you get largely vocal music by Masai women and men, a huge Acholi drum ensemble, a cool horn band performance unlike anything else you've probably heard (Aluar horns, track 2), songs by the Karamajong and Turkana peoples, and a hippo hunting song by the (at the time these original liner-notes were written) nearly extinct El Molo of Kenya, and a right-of-passage Samburu song. This part of the disc ranges from very good to okay, and of course it is always a strange and painful thing to listen to a song knowing that the culture from which it came forth is no longer with us... wiped out by greed, disease, the encroachment of "civilization", or all of the above.
Obviously we all have different tastes. What moves me may not move you, but if I were you I would not pass by this disc. The Wagogo stuff is incredible to me and worth every penny.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
time and the river, December 20, 2005
First encountering this set in the '70's was a delirious ride of discovery, and triggered a prolonged exploration of the interface between this music and the early Southern US field recordings of African Americans by John Lomax. Many of the latter captured vestigial performances of what must have been the reworkings in English of musics not yet entirely forgotten before waves of mass culture washed away deeply imprinted group memories. As you listen to the EL Molo Hippo Song, put away notions of the primitive, and think instead of art, not as an ethereal supra-reality, but a thing as integral to life as the hunt, the food preparation, and the star gazing.
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