(2008 - 2009 Archived Other World Music Page)
This is the Other World Music section of Rainlore's World of Music, covering all types of world music not already encompassed by existing categories on this site.
In order to secure its future as an ongoing project, and indeed resume regular activity such as new reviews, Rainlore's World of Music urgently needs to raise substantial funds through some kind of sponsorship or similar. (Please also see The Future of Rainlore's World of Music on the About page, and the News entry for 2008/11/09 on the Home page.)
It has regrettably become impossible to keep Rainlore's World of Music going on a purely spare-time basis. The amount of work involved is simply too overwhelming. At the rate that for example CDs kept arriving for review and gigs were covered during 2004, there was enough work to keep two people busy on a full-time basis!
Of course, I wish to preserve the non-commercial and not for profit nature of Rainlore's World of Music, but without some kind of sponsorship the site simply cannot continue in any meaningful active way. Despite not having had any updates for about four years until its re-launch in October 2008, Rainlore's World of Music remains a popular site. The reviews and artists' profiles have always achieved excellent visibility in search results, and have also been referenced widely. There are also many new features I would like to add to Rainlore's World of Music, such as a Gig calendar to replace the old one
and a Features section that should have been added during 2004 already, plus more.
Sadly, without some form of sponsorship none of this will be possible and the site will at some point soon become purely archival.
If you think you might be able to help in any way, please get in touch through the sponsorship form. |
News
2009/10/01
Anytime just about now, jazz flute titan Mark Weinstein's Tales From The Earth, a collaborative effort with Cuban mallet and piano wiz Omar Sosa and reviewed here, should hit a CD store near you as well as being available online. Don't be misled or put off by the jazz tag - this album has incredibly wide appeal and should please world music fans just as much as free jazz aficionados. Apart from Weinstein, Sosa and Jimi Hendrix-successor Jean-Paul Bourelly, the line-up includes several African musicians including balafon virtuoso Aly Keita. The music itself goes right back to the African roots of jazz and other forms of African diaspora music. Completely freely improvised without any preconceptions, the music is nonetheless wonderfully coherent.
Hopefully coming soon also will be the fabulous Koby Israelite's two albums from this year, and maybe some more catch-ups, time and time on a friend's computer permitting. In the meantime, there is a new Koby Israelite A/V Page full of all the best of Koby Israelite videos in one place.
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2009/07/01
Any further update will, I regret, likely be some considerable time in coming. I don't have the loan of a computer anymore, no computer at all for some time most likely and certainly no regular internet access, no assets left, and my financial situation is critical. So certainly in the absence of some kind of sponsorship, this may be good bye for some time.
Rainlore's World of Music
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2009/06/14
Two reviews, two very exciting albums.
Daphna Sadeh And The Voyagers, since their inception back in 2003, have remained easily the most exciting band on the UK world music scene. Continually growing and evolving, their recently released Reconciliation marks the latest stage in this ongoing process. A superb album with an exciting new sound.
Equally unmissable is award-winning Hollywood actress and acclaimed singer-songwriter Merle Winningham's then-new (and still most recent) release from 2007, Refuge Rock Sublime. This arrived here, unexpectedly, from LA based label Craig 'N Co. back in 2007, along with a few other pre-release promos, but as Rainlore's World of Music was at that time effectively in hiatus, with the new version of the site already in development, a review of this outstanding and haunting album had to wait until now. Refuge Rock Sublime is a kind of country-bluegrass singer-songwriter album with a Jewish flavour, a bit like Leonard Cohen (without this latter's 'music to commit suicide by' attribute) meets the Man in Black, the one and only, much missed Johnny Cash. Regardless of where you come from at this album, Merle Winningham rocks!
Rainlore's World of Music
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2009/06/04
We've finally reached the penultimate of the old 'ketchup' updates, from the period 2004-2006. This time, there are two album reviews, and one gig.
The former feature folk legend from down under Danny Spooner's then-latest album from 2006, Danny Spooner's The Great Leviathan, a fabulous collection of whaling songs that form one of the most powerful arguments for the abolition of this evil. An absolute cracker. The second album comes from Trinidad and the world of the steel pan, the excellent Exodus Steel Orchestra's Exodus II - The Power And The Glory. Also a real cracker of an album.
The gig review is of the fabulous Daphna Sadeh And The Voyagers with Special Guest George Youssef Samaan at the Purcell Room at London's South Bank Centre on 28th November 2004, with a programme titled Different Points on the Same Line: A Musical Dialogue. Samaan is famed throughout both Israel and the Arab world as one of today's greatest composers and performers of Arabic as well as Jewish music and was an experience! This review is not illustrated, as health issues at the time precluded this as well as being the cause of this having been a very last minute arrangement.
The final catch-up update will be a little longer in coming as there is still much work involved. A number of albums that arrived during 2007 have yet to be reviewed, and some features originally drafted in 2004 need a lot of editing still.
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2009/05/24
Some more 'ketchup' updates from the 2004/5 period. Today, two gig and three album reviews. The gig reviews both come from the acoustic folk tradition and really are something a bit special. There is Anglo-Australian folk legend Danny Spooner at Spalding Folk Club in Lincolnshire on his 2004 UK tour, an outstanding experience. If you're in a hurry to hear Danny Spooner live, he is currently on a North American tour for two months (details should be on Spooner's web site), and between September 3rd and 10th he will be at the Maribor Festival in Slovenia, with the Australian Chamber Orchestra - long considered one of the world's finest - under Richard Tognetti, with a programme that started life as a hugely successful Australian tour in 2007 called Enchanted. (Full details of the forthcoming tour can be found on the ACO website.) I managed to hear one of those performances on radio and was totally smitten. Surely the ACO should issue this on CD?
The second gig features Essex-based folk duo Mick & Pete at The Jingling Gate Folk Club in Pitsea, Essex, in September 2004. Mick Spooner (the other half of Mick & Pete being Pete Hamlyn) is Danny Spooner's little brother, so you can be sure of something special here too. Mick & Pete actually founded and still run The Jingling Gate, and you couldn't wish to find a friendlier folk club anywhere.
The album reviews include another two by Danny Spooner, We'll either bend or break 'er, probably the finest collection of sea shanties ever, and Launch Out On The Deep, a superb collection of various sea songs. Absolute gems, both albums and Danny Spooner!
The third album today once again comes from the wonderful world of steel pan in the form of Trinidad's exquisite Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra's Live: In The Rainforest, an album I simply cannot live without even now and I'm sure every true lover of pan would feel the same about it.
There also is a minor update to the profile of the fab Daphna Sadeh and The Voyagers, who keep going from strength to strength, and have seen a fair few changes in personnel, as well as another recent album release, this time on the prestigious New York based Tzadik label.
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2009/05/10
The present batch of 'ketchup' updates from the 2004/5 period includes a review of another gem from Anglo-Australian folk singer extraordinaire Danny Spooner, his 2004 album 'ard Tack, of Australian folk songs. All the tough, all-male, all-masculine characters you'd expect from something like this are there, and more. Authentic, acoustic folk at its very best.
And from the world of the steel pan, there is a first review of an album by a British steelband, Ebony Steelband's over-ambitiously, nay I'd say pompously titled Best of Caribbean Steeldrums. By way of (a massive) contrast, there also is the excellent Exodus Steel Orchestra from Trinidad with their album, Exodus. (No biblical connotation, this simply reflects the band's origin as a breakaway faction from another band.)
Of interest here also has to be British composer Rohan Kriwaczek's The Wandering Jew, which combines elements or influences of tradional Jewish forms of music, Middle Eastern, and Indian music into an outstanding work that is hauntingly beautiful.
Last but definitely not least, a review of the major London world music event of 2004, Cultural Co-operation's Diaspora Music Village 2004 Festival Weekend at Kew Gardens, London, on Saturday, 3rd July 2004. This served up a marvellous variety of music from a huge variety of cultures and countries around the world. Highlights included the fabulous London-based Daphna Sadeh And The Voyagers, familiar on this site already, the fantastic Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra and Tassa Drummers from Trinidad and Tobago that we already encountered in two other gigs recently, and one of South Africa's finest Isicathamiya choirs, Green Mamba. If Isicathamiya seems like a bit of a mouthful, think Ladysmith Black Mombaza, who first popularized this genre in the West in the 1980s.
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2009/05/03
A very special update today consisting of two new reviews of albums that I found completely irresistible. The first is Carl Nelkin's debut release from 2003, Irish Heart - Jewish Soul, a delightful collection of favourite Irish and Yiddish songs, the latter coming principally from the Yiddish theatre, where both have been enriched by the other tradition. Carl Nelkin is a part-time chazan (cantor) from the small Irish Jewish community in Dublin. This dual Jewish-Irish heritage is particularly well reflected here. The second album is Nelkin's recent 2009 release, The Little Trees Are Weeping, a fabulous collection of Yiddish songs from the ghettos and the Jewish partisans. This is probably the largest collection of such songs on a single album, and a very fine one too - inspired, inspirational and inspiring. Both of these albums are bound to be of wide interest in the wider, general world music scene.
The next regular "catch-up" update will be along ASAP.
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2009/04/26
A further small batch of "catch-up" updates of reviews from the 2004/5 period is now up, comprising three albums and two gigs. If authentic acoustic folk music and British folk are your kind of thing (and even if they aren't!), you cannot afford to miss the extraordinary folk singer Danny Spooner's album When a Man's in Love, a collection of mostly traditional love songs from a male perspective from the English and Irish traditions. Watch out for plenty more to come soon from Anglo-Australian singer Danny Spooner, including a review of a UK gig.
From the realm of the steel pan come two excellent albums by one of Trinidad's oldest and finest "conventional" steelbands, Trinidad All Stars Steel Orchestra from Port of Spain, From Tabanca To Rain and The Nostalgic Panyard. Unmissable! Also, and at least as unmissable, two gigs (in one day!) by an ensemble of the cream of San Fernando's Skiffle Bunch Steel Orchestra (plus Tassa Drummers), one of Trinidad's youngest premier "conventional" steelbands. More from the fabulous Skiffle Bunch soon, including a performance at Cultural Co-operation's Diaspora Music Village 2004 Festival Weekend at Kew Gardens which also includes a whole lot of other world music acts.
More ASAP, though as previous, I really can't put any sort of schedule on this except to say another three batches or so of updates should see things catching up with the 2004-onward period at last.
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2008/10/21
Just one update for now, a review of the fabulous Trinidad steelband Skiffle Bunch's album Skiffle Bunch & Stalin - Live At The Naparima Bowl. This also features one of Trinidad's premier calypsonians, the great Black Stalin, and so we have both steel pan and soca/calypso on one album, plus some rather unfortunately chosen other guest artists. Skiffle Bunch, who hail from Coffee Street, San Fernando, are one of Trinidad's very finest "conventional" steelbands today and have managed to join the stratospheric elite ofthe lonely "Premier Division" of pan. It is therefore a matter of great sadness, deepened by the circumstance of this being the very first pan review to go up on Rainlore's World of Music, that I had to give this outstanding band's album Skiffle Bunch & Stalin - Live At The Naparima Bowl such a mixed review.
The next update may be longer in the making as it will include at least one or two gig reviews from 2004, whose photographs still await editing. This is a fairly time consuming process.
Rainlore's World of Music
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2008/10/07
"Updates" that are included at present are just a few of the album and gig reviews as well as artists' profiles that should have gone up during 2004/5. They are listed here in purely alphabetical order, not in order of date. Please note that many of these may be later than other reviews still outstanding, this is on account of them having been prioritised at the time.
The rest will follow ASAP, though no timeframe can be given at this time.
However, we will do our best, especially as even after about four years without updates, the site has remained surprisingly popular and busy.
Reviews include the extraordinary Daphna Sadeh & The Voyagers' gig at the Purcell Room and the sizzling The Soul Of The Fiddle concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, both from March 2004, while "new" and/or updated profiles include the outstanding Armenian born duduk and zurna (among others) player, Tigran Aleksanyan and world music supergroup Daphna Sadeh & The Voyagers.
More soon
Rainlore's World of Music
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