h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't played this for years:

The Dawn - Osibisa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds8Splf4piA

Rudest Elf

Do you know the opening of "Wayaya" the second LP?

The First LP was very much a prototype with lots of raw energy. Wayaya was perhaps better engineered and finished with that (for perhaps a British romantic) unforgettable start with the sound of a tropical rainstorm broken with thunder and lightning that merges into Teddy Ossie's flute.

I could have said on the post natal abortion thread that Our son was listening to Osibisa (as well as his Dad) before he was born. My wife was about 7 months pregnant when we went to a "home Gig" for Osibisa in the old cinema that had become Brixton's main music venu. Spartacus' electric base was throbbing through my wife's abdomen and she could feel our baby responding. I think I read that he died not long ago in Streatham near here.

The first airing (I think) of Osibisa was from a BBC studio recording session and I have to say that I was really quite hurt when Teddy Osei said that he did not think that white people could really "get" the music.. though I fully accept that some of my black colleagues were much more "into" really extensive sessions of pure drumming than I have ever been.

Cass

No, Cass, that first album *was* Osibisa for me.

I spent countless evenings in Tuffnel Park with some West Indian/African friends, playing Kalooki or Scrabble,
and broadening my musical horizons listening to a variety of sounds, such as:

Ube Frank Special - Nkengas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OXIFbmr5B0

Cass, can you clarify this 'ghettoisation' thing you keep mentioning.

To quote Inigo Montoya "you keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

To 'ghettoise' oneself musically would mean having to restrict oneself to listening to and creating only one type of music and, really, is there anybody older than 17 who actually does that?

Half Man Half Biscuit - Eno Collaboration
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEAKPOlnazY

On musical ghettoisation - it's interesting that a lot the African music that suddenly burst fresh on the scene in the '80s was a melting pot of influences. Yes, yer blues is basically West African music, and you can still tell that - but sometimes it's hard to tell whether African musicians are taking their cues straight from Africa or via America - or both.

Similarly - many African countries went through vogues for Cuban and Brazilian music, which came from...where?

And then there's African Reggae...but I'm afraid the likes of Lucky Dube just aren't a patch on my beloved Jamaican reggae.

But my favourites of all is a genre of Tanzanian wedding band music. Over the years bands have picked up more and more instruments from different places which are now considered as integral parts of their ensemble. Including...the Japanese koto.


QUESTION: Which North American instrument originated in Africa? (ie in the sense that previously instruments of that type were unique to Africa)

The only instrument I can think of that I specifically associate with North America is the banjo, so I'm going to say 'banjo'.

Beetles in the Bog - War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zkaeeJ8iUE

OK.. Ghettoisation

As I have said I believe things "fell apart" for the Sixties Generation because they were unique in their global collective experience.

It is true, however, that the First World War in its build-up and actuality had produced some creative minds that were struggling for a global vision that was not in essence a "White supremacist"/ "White Man's Burden" point of view.

Duncan Bell wrote that for his Bloomsbury Circle 1914 had been a year of great promise with a New Dawn in the cutting edge art that came together in the Ballets Russe- perhaps the first really innovative multi-media extravaganzas that cut across the limits of national history, classism and linguistic entities in music, painting and design, and dance. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" seemed to reconnect Humankind with its universal roots. The First World War shattered all of that.

In my nightly trawl through "The Chronicle of the Twentieth Century" last night I ended up with the art of 1923 with T.S. Elliot's "The Wasteland" headlined, and a photo of W.B. Yeats who received a Nobel Prize for literature. "Things fall apart The centre could not hold etc.."

As I wrote before the Opec Oil Crisis really flagged up the fact that thoughts of "One World" were irrelevant to modern realities- for there were at least three worlds- "The Western Bloc", "The Eastern Bloc" and "The Third World"..

All three were largely based- both internally and in their external relations - on the kind of Nineteenth Century philosophies that had swept the world into the age of catastrophe- nb. Capitalism, Communism and Nationalism, and these three all became very active again when the straightjacket managed reality based upon the US and USSR Superpowers after 1945 no longer worked properly because of the "Third World movement".

I suspect that the oil wealth of Nigeria and the PanAfrican movement generally had an impact on Osibisa. They could now make a living touring and selling in Africa, and the all African line-up became an advantage in that market.

Within Britain we had a move away from "One Nation Toryism" with Mrs Thatcher and a would-be King Arthur raising his standard for the "Working Class revolution" based upon the class-based and Socialist inspired histories of the Industrial Revolution- like racist and nationalist histories pre-1914 all aimed at brainwashing people into becoming various forms of "cannon-fodder".

Of course- as things fell apart and people retreated to their ghettos, they were entitled to a "pick and mix" attitude to whatever they felt that they could use from all around the world. This became most obvious in the craze for "sampling" and "mixing".

As Naomi Klein explained in "No Logo" this is what happened when the youth in US inner city ghettos created their own new Ghetto culture out of the scrap heaps and rubbish dumps of their urban slums. And they saved corporate America because this "junk" and "Scrap" look of "urban guerrillas" appealed to the youth of the richest country on Earth for whom trashing things and vomiting became essential adolescent "Rites of Passage".

I suppose I stopped going out to perform as the Eighties progressed when I found that Folk/Blues Clubs were buying into the "them and us" culture that I had been fighting most of my life.

I made the mistake one week of deciding to just write some satirical words to "She Loves You" instead of constantly presenting audiences with new stuff (that usually was mostly appreciated by other performers).. It seemed appropriate to just slightly change the lyrics to sing about "Nanny Thatcher" in the kind of satirical tradition of That Was The Week That Was. It went down a storm. But not the kind of storm that I could appreciate. Malevolence, hostility, blame etc.. The kind of attitudes that believe that some people on Earth are "vermin" to be eliminated and/or throw the burden of change onto other people, when the only kind of change which we can truly effect is within ourselves and our own worlds.

Sadly there came a time when it was possible for people to retreat to living in their own "utopian" sound bubble walking through life with their own "pick and mix" selection of music that comforts and reassures them and theirs.. A recent TV News feature on the revival of vinyl included interviews with young people who were discovering "the album" as it was created as a journey of two halves.

Suddenly however people are perhaps beginning to realise that they have wandered blindly into the most serious global crisis since the Thirties- and need the global solutions that were never fully developed.

Cass

Mr D.

Stringed instruments with a sounding box covered with stretched skin originate from Africa. (I learned this from a friend who's a musicologist and collector of musical instruments).

End with a song:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1eWhcDxjc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS1eWhcDxjc

"Stringed instruments with a sounding box covered with stretched skin originate from Africa."

Well, only if you mean it in the sense that life in general originated in Africa. Stringed instruments are just something that livestock-rearing people invent, when they have the inedible tendons left over. I'd be very surprised if they weren't simultaneously invented in Asia and Europe. And the stretched skin would have been an earlier development than that, even.

Well it would seem not. I'm not talking about stringed instruments in general - The Greeks etc. etc. had lyres - but only stringed instruments with a sounding box enclosed with stretched skin. It seems there are no extant indigenous European skinned instruments. They really do seem to have come from Africa.

What Africa has going for it is calabash gourds which form the box in instruments like the kora.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8luhdxS2KuM

But the operative word there is "extant", isn't it?

(I shall check with my friend, though. There may be skinned instruments from say Asia).

Talking of African instruments:

Back in the Sixties I visited someone in France who had an LP of music from Madagaska played by a stringed band using intruments based upon the principle of a cylindar that served as both finger-board and sound-box, with frets and strings on the outside. As with our common stringed instruments (of the guitar/ukelele or violin/double base) size determined the sound range.

Has anyone else encountered these instruments/music?

>>But the operative word there is "extant", isn't it?

Ah yes. There must've been others that have disappeared.

>>Has anyone else encountered these instruments/music?

It's called a valiha.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valiha

My favourite African instrument is the electric mbira (thumb piano) used by the wonderful Congolese band, Konono No. 1.

The mbira is generally a quite instrument. I have one myself made from an old sardine tin. Come ca: http://www.gigoitaly.com/public/photo/417.jpg Only...their guy wanted one that could hold its own against a full band. So he scavenged together some old car parts and fashioned one out of the likes of alternator coils. With stunning results.

'I wanted to be louder than...what's that band with the guy with the warts on his face?'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cU19URUe6o