Bismillah Khan & Party - Music of India #9 (1969)

Ustad Bismillah Khan was a devout Shi'ite Muslim but also a devotee of the Hindu Goddess of art and wisdom. He often played at Hindu temples and festivals, his music a healing force to ease tensions between religious groups:

Tracklist:
01 Sarang
02 Dadra
03 Chandra Kauns
04 Kajaree

You'll find the zip here.

Khalifa Ould Eide & Dimi Mint Abba - Moorish Music from Mauritania (1990)

I've posted this amazing cd after a request from Botched Surgery.

Okay, this is what Afropop has to say about Dimi Mint Abba:
"Born to a musical family Dimi Mint Abba has enjoyed top billing in Mauritanian music since she won the International Oum Kalsoum Song Contest in Tunisia in 1977. Her winning song "Sawt Elfan" ("Art's Plume") argues that artists play a more important role than warriors in society. Dimi has one international release recorded in England in 1990 with husband Khalifa Ould Eide on guitar, vocals and tidinit, and his two daughters on percussion. Backed by tambourine, hand claps, and one deep, dry-sounding kettledrum (tabola), Dimi and Khalifa pluck and jangle their lutes and exchange vocal leads, telling stories as they shift among related musical modes. Catchy melodies and extended improvisation grace this severe, but beguiling music."

Here's what I have to say: If you only ever download one album from this blog, then make sure its this one. This is completely bewitching music from the deserts of Mauritania. The beauty of the singing and playing is breathtaking, and the depth of emotions expressed in these songs is sometimes almost too much to bear, and this is despite the fact that the language is completely alien to me.
Check out this youtube clip, this is not a track from the album but gives some idea of what to expect:

Here's the tracklist:

1. Waidalal Waidalal
2. Yar Allahoo
3. Hassaniya Song for Dancing
4. Hassaniya Love Poem
5. The Tortoise's Song
6. Independence
7. Art's Plume
8. Oh Lord Bring Apartheid Crashing Down!
9. Mauritania My Beloved Country
10. My Young People Do the Youth of Nations Invite
11. Autoot

The zip is here for your listening pleasure.

If you like this album, then check out this great youtube clip by another fantastic Mauritanian singer, Ouleya Mint Amartichitt:

King Sunny Ade & His African Beats - Conscience (Eri Okun) 1983

My next door neighbour found this great slice of '80s electro-juju in a second hand record shop in London. Being a very kind man, he's let me borrow the album to share with anyone with an interest and an internet connection:

Tracklist:

01 Eri Okan / Semi Lasepe
02 Odele Alaga / Igbehin Loju
03 Atiro Gbon Orin Da / Ojumo Oni Tunmo
04 Ebawa Jo / Prince 'Beyo Ade Goke

You can download the zip here.

Scratchy Old Records from the Iran & Egypt & possibly Lebanon

All the broken links from this previous post have now been fixed so you can listen to and download these fabulous Arabic and Persian pop records. Check them out, and I'd still be really grateful if anyone could identify the mystery music.
Thanks.

The Writing on the Wall #3

The Fugs - Golden Filth (Live at the Fillmore East 1968)

The Fugs (like those other East Village outlaws, the amazing Holy Modal Rounders) played a big part in the birth of New York's '60s counterculture. Formed in 1965, they provided a riotous folk accompaniment to the anti-Vietnam movement, playing in the clubs and cafes. By the time this album was recorded, they'd developed a fried psychedelic punk sound to accompany the goofball humour. Here's what Ed Sanders has to say about this electric period in Fugs history:

Exorcising the Pentagon
October, 1967
All through the history of the Fugs in the '60s, the war in Vietnam throbbed like an ever-seething soul sore. However much we partied, shouted our poetry and strutted around like images of Bacchus, we could never quite get it out of our mind. It was like that Dada poetry reading that Tristan Tzara gave in 1922 in Paris, with an alarm clock constantly ringing during the reading. The war was THE alarm clock of the late '60s.
It seemed as if the war might become permanent, so there were big demonstrations planned for October of 1967 to surround the nerve center of the war-- the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Somebody came up with the idea of holding an Exorcism of this mystic pentagonal citadel of napalm and incineration.
I agreed to write and create the actual Exorcism. Tuli and I rented a flat bed truck and a sound system. The Fugs and a group of San Francisco Diggers climbed aboard and joined the protest march across the bridge from D.C. to the Pentagon. We positioned ourselves on the edge of a parking lot a few hundred feet from our target, while tens of thousands of marchers walked past, and I intoned a sing-song litany of exorcism after which we all began to chant "Out, Demons, Out!" over and over for about fifteen minutes. Filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Shirley Clarke filmed the chanting, while magician/ filmmaker Kenneth Anger positioned himself beneath the truck and performed his own ritual of exorcism. It was quite an afternoon.
When we had finished the exorcism, we walked onto the lawn in front of the Pentagon where lines of armed soldiers with rifles thrust forward stood guarding the entranceway. We were carrying dozens of yellow daisies. We paused in front of the young and obviously nervous soldiers and gently shoved some stems into some rifle barrels, then glanced back over our shoulders as we walked away, marveling at the vision of white petal jutting from dark metal.
It was a famous thing we did, and people praised us for our audacity, yet the Vietnam War went on for another seven years. So much for "Out, Demons, Out!" You can learn more about the big demonstration at the Pentagon in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night.
After the exorcism, The Fugs began their final series of performances at The Players Theater in Greenwich Village. Personnel had changed. We had assembled a very talented musical line-up: Charles Larkey on bass, Ken Pine on guitar, Dan Kootch on guitar and violin, and Ken Weaver on Drums. Richard Alderson recorded some of these final shows of 1967, which closed on New Year's eve at the Players Theater.

1968
I took part in a panel discussion on the New Journalism at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in late '67. On hand to discuss the new techniques of presenting information were Jack Newfield, Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau and Paul Krassner. I told Newfield that the Fugs were going to give a concert in a few weeks in Appleton, Wisconsin, the hometown of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the famous right wing redbaiting politician who had wrecked careers through falsehoods. He was buried there. Jack Newfield suggested that we exorcise McCarthy's grave. We thought it was a great idea and made preparations. Our friend Allen Ginsberg was also going to perform in Appleton and he agreed to help in the Exorcism.
So, on February 19, 1968 we performed at the Cindarella (sic) Ballroom in Appleton, and the next morning the Fugs, Allen Ginsberg and about 75 friends gathered at McCarthy's headstone and performed a witty ceremony, which we have included for your listening pleasure.
We asked those present at the Exorcism to place a gift on Mr. McCarthy's stone. I looked back as we left and saw a very interesting visual gestalt atop the granite: a bottle of Midol, a ticket to the movie The War Game, a Spring Mobilization Against the War leaflet, a stick of English Leather cologne, one stuffed parrot, one candy bar, a chap stick, one dozen red roses, one dozen white geraniums, one dozen yellow geraniums, one "Get Fugged" button, some coins, sugar wafers, coat buttons and two seeds of marijuana. "So long, Joe," Tuli said as we walked down the hill.
This was the mode of defiance in which the Fugs began 1968. Yet, in some ways '68 was an American Nightmare. The My Lai massacre happened in February; President Johnson abdicated under strange circumstances in late March; Martin Luther King was assassinated a few days later, and the next likely president, Robert Kennedy, was killed next to an ice machine in a hotel in early June. August saw the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention and November ushered in the years of Richard Nixon. Behind it all, the war wailed onward.
Ai-yi-yi. Nevertheless, the Fugs partied forth. There were dashes of hope-- most notably the student rebellions in Paris and the takeover of Columbia University in New York City. That spring, The Fugs toured Scandinavia with Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac and Ten Years After. One tune from this tour, "The Swedish Nada," from our concert in Lund, Sweden on May 13, is included on Fugs Live from the '60s.
In June, we performed with Moby Grape at the newly opened Fillmore West on Second Avenue in NYC. From that weekend of concerts, which we recorded live, came our album, Golden Filth.
Tuli and I took part in the demonstrations in Chicago in August. We were there with the thousands chanting "The Whole World is Watching" while the police bashed their clubs on undeserving heads. I was a supporter, at the time, of the notorious Yippies, and could not resist including the demo tape of "Yodeling Yippie" in this sequence of live takes.

And this is a Swedish Fugs TV special!

If you're still interested after all that :

Golden Filth Tracklist:

01 Slum Goddess
02 Coca Cola Douche
03 How Sweet I Roamed
04 I Couldn't Get High
05 Saran Wrap
06 I Want to Know
07 Homemade
08 Nothing
09 Supergirl

Its over here.

The Last Poets - Chastisment (1972)

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and we got to complaining about the state of the current music scene, like a pair of old men or something. Maybe its just me, and maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but it seems that we're missing some radicalism in the contemporary music scene. Where is the revolutionary fire that has informed much of the best modern musics from the Fugs to Public Enemy, from Crass to Throbbing Gristle, Black Flag to The Minutemen. Are contemporary radicals just a bit more subtle with their messages, or does today's music reflect a wider apathy or confusion? I don't know. Like I said, I might be missing some hugely important and politically scandalous underground musical movement, one that purposefully shuns the attention of has beens like myself...

Todays album is from 1972, a radical message from a group of proto-rappers from the ravaged Harlem ghetto:
All Music Guide has this to say about this fantastic group:

...with their politically charged raps, taut rhythms and dedication to raising African American consciousness, The Last Poets almost single handedly laid the groundwork for the emergence of hip hop. The group arose out of the prison experiences of Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, a US Army paratrooper who chose jail as an alternative to fighting in Vietnam; while incarcerated he converted to Islam, learnt to 'spiel' (an early form of rapping), and befriended fellow inmates Omar Ben Hassan and Abiodun Oyewoie.

The group's uncompromising stance and hardcore black nationalism landed them under CIA counter intelligence surveillance. And for all of this, Chastisment still sounds hugely funky and is well worth hearing.

Tracklist:

• 1.Tribute to Obabi (Ogun)
• 2.Jazzoetry
• 3.Black Soldier
• 4.E Pluribus Unum
• 5.Hands Off
• 6.Before the White Man Came
• 7.Bird's Word

The zip is available over here.