1 - Leonardo Paniagua - Mi Secreto - Bachata Roja - Dominican Republic - Iaso - iASCD3
2 - DJ Rupture - Musquito (club foot mix) - Special Gunpowder - USA - Very Friendly - VF013CD
3 - Yael Naïm - Levater - Yael Naïm & David Donatien - Israel/France - Atlantic - 2564696038
4 - DJ Click feat Leontina Vaduva - Pana cand nu te - Flavour - France - No Fridge - CDNø9SP
5 - Umalali feat Sofia Blanco - Yündüya Weyu - The Garifuna Women's Project - Belize - Cumbancha - CMB-CD-6
6 - Uun Budiman and the Jugala Gamelan Orchestra - Bayu Bayu (The Winds) - Banondari: New Directions in Jaipongan - Java (Indonesia) - Felmay - fy8098
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Three months into the new year, and already there are murmurs from website contributors wondering if music has gone off the boil, suggesting that this year’s crop of albums is not as good as last year’s was at this stage. By the end of March 2007, we had heard the new albums from Andy Palacio, Bassekou Kouyate, Vieux Farka Toure and Mayra Andrade, all of which are celebrated among the nominations of this year’s Awards for World Music.
My impression is that there are plenty of good tracks, but perhaps not many albums that hold up all the way through. This week’s programme was not designed to support any particular point of view, but as usual pulled itself into shape after the first track had been chosen, ending up as a mixture of brand new, belatedly discovered and ruefully remembered.
Leonardo Paniagua
‘Mi Secreto’ by Leonardo Paniagua (does his last name mean bread and water?) is from a compilation of Bachata songs from Dominican Republic, the island’s country music that is less well known than the slicker urban meringue style. Drawn from the 1960s and 70s, I think, the various artists album rolls along nicely enough until this track jumps out to demand special attention.
DJ /Rupture
The album Special Gunpowder by DJ /Rupture has been sitting on the shelf set aside for albums that have been played once before and deserve a revisit before being filed away. It’s a shock sometimes to realise how long that wait can be, but something about ‘Mi Secreto’ took me back to listen again to ‘Musquito (club foot mix)’ whose vocalist sounds like he might come form the Spanish Caribbean, although the sampled rhythmic loop is surely from Zimbabwe. DJ /Rupture himself is harder to pin down – various references have him based in Madrid, Barcelona, New England and New York.
Yaël Naïm
A song in English by Yaël Naïm & David Donatien is being featured in TV ads for Apple’s new wafer thin laptop, which has not only put her in the charts but drawn attention to the rest of her album, on which she also sings in French and Hebrew. An Israeli based in France, Yaël and drummer/programmer/producer David Donatien are admirably adventurous in their arrangements, and their album may turn out to be one of the year’s highlights.
DJ Click [photo: http://www.myspace.com/djclicknofridge ]
DJ Click’s name has been hovering the background for a while, often as a remixer shown in brackets after song titles. Flavour is not his first album, but the first I’ve paid attention to, and he turns out to be a rare DJ/producer with a distinctive style of his own who is respectful of the structures of songs and the contributions of his guest vocalists. Since recording this programme, I’ve learned that Leontina Vaduva is a bona fide Romanian opera singer – exactly what she sounds like!
Umalali
Umalali: The Garifuna Women’s Project is the female parallel to Andy Palacio’s album referred to above, and becomes all the more significant in the light of Andy’s tragic early death at the age of 47. Producer Iván Durán scoured the Garifuna communities of Honduras and Guatemala as well as his homeland Belize in search of interesting female singers, most of them amateurs, who sing a mixture of traditional songs and their own compositions. Iván’s luxurious instrumental beds are endlessly satisfying.
Steadily working through the rows of yet-to-be-listened-to albums spread across two rooms in my office, I wince with embarrassment when I run across a good one whose publication date is © 2006 or even © 2005. I daren’t look too closely at the details on Banondari: New Directions in Jaipongan because I know it’s been here a while. ‘Bayu Bayu’ was one of the first songs I ever heard in the distinctive Jaipong style of the Bandung region of Java, on Idjah Hadidjah’s classic Tonggeret album for Nonesuch back in the mid-1980s. It’s high praise to confirm that Uun Budiman (pronounced Yoo-yoon Boodyman) manages to rival the original version. Can't find a photo of her.