washerman's dog

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Let's All Calm Down a Bit: Bhajans of Sant Kabir

Kabir

There is a lot of clacking and howling going on these days. The triumphal volume has really jacked up several notches of late. The internet is burning hot with everyone telling everyone else the "Truth" about Osama and Obama. It’s a bloody racket.

Let’s leave the pundits, mullahs, ministers, mercenaries, killers and corpses behind for a while and listen to some real truth.

Kabir

About 800 years ago high Hinduism (that type of highly ritualised religion stage-managed by the priestly Brahmins) was pretty much on the nose. Arabs and Turks and Afghans were sweeping in from the northwest mountain passes and laying the land to waste. And they claimed their victories in the name of a new God and new iman (faith) called islam.

The Hindu lords and chiefs of northern India put up some resistance but their civilisation had atrophied. It was stiff and disconnected from the people. Kingdoms fell and brahmanical Hinduism was pushed off center stage. Many people joined up with the new religion, responding more to mystical music than the sword. The northern half of the sub-continent was soon politically under the control of Muslim rulers and a massive cultural revolution was underway.

Between 1300-1550, the old Hindu religion now having to share space with sufi Islam, pushed up a mystical strain of its own. Rituals and high intellectualism were abandoned in preference to a simple devotional message that emphasised love of a personal God and condemned sectarianism, casteism and ritualism. Religion became accessible to the people again. Preachers and folk poets sprang up across northern and central India singing songs of love for Rama and Krishna. This movement is known as the bhakti movement, or Movement of Devotional Worship.

Kabir Das, was one such folk poet, itinerant preacher who is claimed by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike. His life story is the stuff of legend: born into a Hindu family but adopted by a Muslim weaver and his wife in Varanasi, Kabir, learned only to write one word, rama (God). He is believed to have lived for 120 years.

At an early age he knew his destiny was to preach the one Truth: worship and devotion to God, whether that God be called Ram or Allah or any other name. His message, like that of all iconclasts, was radical and equally dismissive of all sects and religions and their teachers, temples, mosques and ideologies. He sang songs and played a simple stringed instrument (an iktaar, perhaps?) as he travelled around the countryside preaching love of god and fellow humans.

Kabir is credited with the composition of thousands of dohas (couplets) and a huge number of bhajans (devotional hymns). These dohas have entered into popular culture and the many colloquial languages of northern India. So powerful and resonant is this poetry that a huge canon has been absorbed by Sikhs, who especially revere Kabir, into their holy scriptures. His influence is traced through and can even be summed up by the mantra of the great Indian holy man, Sai Baba: Sab ka Malik, Ek. (The Lord of All, is One).

The Washerman’s Dog presents this collection of soothing bhajans of Kabir as an antidote to the wild proclaiming and shouting that is going on ‘out there’. The set, beautifully sung by the classically trained Carnatic singer, O.S. Arun, opens with a bhajan that all partisans (of any ideology) would do well to absorb.

Na mein dharmi/nahi adharmi

Na mein kahta/ na main sunta

Neither am I religious/neither irreligious

Neither do I preach/ neither do I follow

This is music that washes over you and calms you. What more can we ask for at this time of chaos?

Track Listing:

1. Na Mein Dharmi

2. Beet Gaye Din

3. Maan Lago

4. Naherva

5. Hari Bolo Hari Bolo

6. Sadho

7. Uru Rang Laga

8. Dohe

9. Jai Jai Aarati

Listen here.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Holy Ghost Pt 4: Claude Jeter and the Swan Silvertones

Response to the Easter post on the Abyssinian Baptist Church Gospel Choir has been amazing. Obviously, a lot of lovers of gospel music out there toiling on the information highway! To encourage you along that journey, the Washerman’s Dog posts, on this wintry Sunday evening down at the bottom of the world, another stone classic of African-American gospel music.

The story tonight begins in Montgomery, Alabama where a skinny 8-year old boy named Claude Jeter, is informed by his mother that the family will be moving to Kentucky. A few months earlier, Claude’s daddy had died and the coal mines of the Bluegrass State seemed to hold some economic promise for the poor family. Claude attended school and by the time he was in high school was pulling a few shifts down in the shafts. But pulled by contrary desires to support his family and still be his own man, Claude, moved to find work in the deep, rich coal mines in West Virginia.

The work is dusty, dirty, tedious and difficult. To find relief, Claude, who is blessed with a special falsetto voice, and who has promised his mother that he will never use his gift for anything other than “praising the Lord”, gets an a cappella gospel quartet together called the Four Harmony Kings. It is 1938 and Claude Jeter is 24 years old. There aren’t that many options available to a poor black coalmining man in the United States at the time. The Four Harmony Kings keep singing around the mining towns of West Virginia and eastern Tennessee, making no money but blessing those who come to hear them at small churches and tent gatherings. The boys change the name of their group to the Silvertones and when, in 1941, the Swan Brothers Bakery in Knoxville, Tennessee sponsors them for a radio show, they become the Swan Silvertones.

Swan Silvertones

Little did the bakery realize that it had just been the catalyst for the launch of one of the most influential vocal groups in American music. As the saying goes: from little things big things grow.

The Swan Silvertones were a blend of strong, rough-edged gospel voices that included, in addition to Claude Jeter’s amazing falsetto/tenor lead, Solomon Womack (uncle of yet to come 1970’s R&B superstar Bobby Womack), crooner Paul Owens and ‘shouter/testifier’ Louis Johnson. For the first part of the group’s existence they sang in the traditional (for the time) a cappella quartet style, each singer contributing his vocal in an intricate rhythmic structure. And though they enjoyed a national reputation and made a number of recordings, in the 1940-50s, they made just enough to meet their expenses. And as with so many similar groups members came and left. Not everyone had the commitment of Claude Jeter, who continued to lead the group as the lineup changed.

In the 1960s the group was signed by Vee Jay Records who were keen to capitalise on the emerging R&B sound. For the first time the Swan Silvertones added guitars, drums and bass. Their sound became more contemporary and rocking; the guitar work of Linwood Hargrove was exciting and added a dimension that created a whole new audience for the Swans. Part of that new audience (black and white) included professional musicians who heard in Claude Jeter’s voice the tinkling of cash registers. Many approached him with many offers of secular fame and fortune but Claude remained true to his promise to mother to never sing but for the Lord. Others, like Sam Cooke, and Al Green, lifted much of Claude’s style and made reputations as male singers of the highest order. In what is probably their most famous song Mary, Don’t You Weep, Claude inspired by the Spirit, let’s rip: “I’ll be a bridge over deep water, if you trust in me, Mary”. Many years later a young Paul Simon incorporated the line into a song that would go on to become, Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water.

Eventually, even the rockin’ style of gospel that the Swan Silvertones pioneered fell out of vogue and in the mid 1970s the group gave it up. Claude Jeter, still poor and with not many more options than back in the 1938, turned to full time Christian ministry. He moved to New York and in 2009 died of natural causes. Though not widely appreciated except by enthusiasts of gospel music, Claude Jeter left behind in the recordings of the Swan Silvertones a truly exceptional heritage.

This collection covers many of the latter period Swan Silvertones avec instruments. The account is opened and the listener is left in no doubt about the group’s mission statement with, If You Believe Your God is Dead, Try Mine. The guitar fretwork that drives the Swans on this track is as deadly as anything Nile Rodgers ever concocted for Chic. Other highlights include a moving Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, a powerful retelling of the Prodigal Son in I Got My Act Together, the iconic Mary, Don’t You Weep, and a stunning, smoking organ laced, live recording of Brother Claude shouting Amazing Grace.

Again, this is not music for Christians but music by Christians for the rest of us. Please partake and enjoy it again and again.

Track Listing:

1. If You Believe Your God is Dead, Try Mine

2. He's Sweet, I Know

3. Happy With Jesus Alone

4. Jesus Made Me

5. A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King

6. Marching On to Zion

7. In My Heart

8. I've Got Myself Together

9. Tell God

10. He's All I Need

11. Leaning On Jesus

12. Lord Have Mercy

13. Mary Don't You Weep

14. He's My Friend

15. Til He Meets Me

16. No Secret

17. The Fault's In You

18. Stand Up and Testify

19. Amazing Grace

20. Breathe On Me

Listen here.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

A Tale of Two Artists: Reinette l'Ornaise and Taha Rachid

This is the story of two musicians from the same but very different country. One kept an old tradition alive. The other transformed it and made it something modern.

Chapter One: Princess becomes Queen

Sultana Daoud was born in the scrabbly hill town of Tiaret into a poor Algerian Jewish family at the end of the First World War. Before she was three the little girl had lost her sight from small pox and seemed doomed to a life of insignificance and anonymity. But Sultana (Princess) loved music. For years, while attending a school for the blind, she sang to herself and friends without arousing much interest. But Sultana’s mother was moved by what she heard and approached a master musician, Souad l’Ornais, who operated a music café in the Jewish Quarter of city of Oran, near the Mediterranean coast.

Souad l’Ornais, was a living master of an old musical heritage often referred to as Arab-Andalusian. I quote from the French Israeli writer Pierrette Missika: “Arab-Andalusian music, a unique art form, the love and knowledge of which are transmitted entirely by oral tradition, is not played in Morocco in concert halls, but is performed at festivities, often at family gatherings, where the traditional songs are sung. In this living creation, moving like the sands of the desert, the musician is guided by a master or by the musical community which each year is present at Fez or at Oudja.

“The texts, set to music, were written between the eighth and 15th centuries in classical Arabic form. This classical Arabic, hardly understood by the population at large, is still highly appreciated in Moroccan cultural circles. As for mystical poetry, often connected with Sufism, this is sung outside the mosques, inside which is no singing, unlike the case in the synagogues, where piyyutim (liturgical songs or poems) are part of the ritual. Various themes courtly love, devotional celebrations of the Prophet or of Islam, descriptions of the gardens of Andalusia, of Seville, Granada and the River Guadalquevir, or the nostalgia of the expelled Arabs for Andalusia, which parallels the poignant aspirations of Sephardi Jews were treated by the great Andalusian poets, either in classical Arabic (muwasha, a poetic form originating in Andalusia but formulated in classical Arabic), or in the Andalusian dialect of the period, zajal. The Moroccan Ministry of Culture has recorded the whole of the 14 musical modes (originally 24, each corresponding to an hour of the day), interpreted by great masters.”

Sensing grace, l’Ornais, mentored Sultana in learning the Arab-Andalusian tradition, a mix of folk, semi-historical and spiritual songs, enjoyed by Muslims and Jews equally. She mastered several string instruments and continued to sing, and kept the flame of old Bedouin song streams, like rai, alive. Such a powerful student did the blind Sultana turn out to be, that the Grand Master changed her name to Reinette l’Ornaise (Queenie of Oran). The Princess became a Queen.

Reinette travelled to Europe in the footsteps of her Master who had opened a music café in Paris. He encouraged her to return home which she did where she began to make her name. Back in Paris, the old musician and her Guide, was picked up by the Gestapo and exterminated in a concentration camp several years later.

In Algeria Reinette’s reputation continued to grow and she was a regular performer on national radio and concerts across the region. In the 1980’s she was ‘rediscovered’ (horrendously Oriental as that phrase is) by French musical boffins and ended her career and life the toast of concert halls and gala celebrations, at the pinnacle of artistic accomplishment.

Chapter 2: Rock’n roll is my soul

About 175 kilometers from Tiaret, the birthplace of Rienette l’Ornaise, is the town of Sig. Several decades after Queenie’s birth a boy child was born into the family of strict and lower class Muslims. Like many others the family answered the call of the French government to come to Europe to keep the factories of a booming post-war economy humming.

Settled in Lyon, Rachid Taha, dreamed of being a rock ‘n roll hero like his idols Elvis, and Robert Plant. While working in a heating appliance factory in the late 1970s, Rachid had hooked up with other Algerian immigrant kids and a few French ones to form a band. Finding there was little hope of playing in French clubs, he set up Les Refoulés ("The Rejects"), a nightclub where he would spin mashups of Arabic pop classics over Led Zeppelin, Bo Diddley and Kraftwerk backbeats. Drawing on the traditions for rai and the Arab-Andalusian music Reinette l’Ornaise had kept alive and introduced to Europe, Rachid Taha made sure that his own music was both Arabic and hard rocking. His live shows are something to behold: his long hair twirls like a dervish gone mad and electric guitars scream as mandolutes and ouds dance delicately above the mayhem.

The Washerman’s Dog is very pleased and thrilled by the two collections on offer today. Two outstanding artists from the same country and traditions but taking their music in very different if equally exciting directions.