Mother Falcon Not sure exactly how to label all of the music in this week’s program. I tried out international “semi-classical” and that sort of, kind of, works for some cuts. The London Symphony Orchestra, Philip Glass, the Kronos Quartet, Lou Harrison are/were all unabashed classical musicians in the Western sense, yet are found here participating in the creation of worldly strains unrestrained by European precedents. Lambarena at the start, a tribute to Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s work in West Africa, crunches the boundaries of what you might hear in Bach’s home in Germany or back home in Gabon. Two stirring repertoires are better than one! Put Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass together (in their album “Passages”) and dueling cultures turn into a sweet embrace. Javad Maroufi plays classical music as well, Iranian classical. He does it all alone here with a piano and a noble strut. Play it at double-time and it might just recall a little ragtime…I wonder. Mother Falcon defines a sound all th

Let’s start the capsulation of this week’s program from the bottom. Don’t know how easily I could sneak Johnny Otis’s Signifyin’ Monkey on to the USA airwaves, but here in the very deep South there’s no issue. Sassy stuff and a righteous way to end the show. But there’s more…preceded by Nora Dean’s description of her improbable Jamaican boyfriend sporting barbed wire in his underpants. More efficient than a chastity belt. Preceded by Ethiopia’s prince of wailing saxophone, Getachew Mekurya raging alongside The Ex, a Dutch proto-punk aggregation. They match up nicely, methinks. Preceded by (amongst others) Holger Czukay, a founder of the group Can, experimenting successfully in a melding of traditional Iranian and Western melodies – Persian Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. Just ask Khameini! Trickling upwards past multiple hits and (and near-misses?) that all fit this week’s aspirations, we top off the set with the deliciously mysterious sound of the Alabama Sacred Harp Singers

  Mi KPLE DOGBEKPO ("My dog Skip") I always enjoy running a program of music from Africa – so many choices and such incredible diversity from all corners of the continent. Where to start? At the beginning, of course. Everyone knows (or should know) Fela Kuti, political activist and pioneer of Nigerian Afrobeat. His music has influenced dance bands all across the planet and is carried on today by his son and legions of followers. Randomly picking and choosing here…the UniZulu Choir does not lack for enthusiasm! The only thing I can compare it to in our United States would be fans at an Alabama football game. The truly traditional music samples serve as a reminder that the roots run deep. Much of this song and dance is still found, mostly, on the village levels. But even in the big cities the sounds of today often borrow from the precedents of yesterday. Benin strikes yet again with another hit, this time by the Orchestre Les Volcans. There must be something in the water there.

  Breaking the lease tonight. TRACKLIST  “Jazz” and the influence of music from India fir st broadcast on RadioActiva March 9, 2023 01 John Handy - Ganeesha's Jubilee Dance 02 John McLaughlin, Jean-Luc Ponty and Zakir Hussein - Lotus Feet 03 Pharoah Sanders - Astral Traveling 04 Cheb i Sabbah - Shri Durga 05 Ravi Shankar and Phillip Glass - Ragas in Minor Scale 06 VidyA, with Prasant Radhakrishnan – Paavanaguru 07 Brooklyn Raga Massive (Coltrane Raga Tribute) - Blue Nile   So what do jazz and Indian music, at least the classical styles emulated here, have in common? Improvisation. Both work off of pre-determined scales, provide an intro, and then let ‘er rip! There’s a lot of that here and it works wonderfully well. VidyA’s music is probably the most faithful to its roots, playing Carnatic music from southern India. Though Algerian DJ Cheb I Sabbah’s offering is an actual cut-up of Indian music remixed with his outsider’s taste. And then there’s Pharoah Sanders

A couple of programs back the topic was Romani music – not to be referred to as “Gypsy” any more. Because they said so. At that time I flippantly remarked that you’d likely not get stomped  were you to throw around names like Blackfoot, Flathead, and Gros Ventre (Big Belly) – as long as you didn’t get caught. That admittedly facetious time is up! The Halluci Nation stands up here to make it right. AKA A Tribe Called Red, these youngsters are in your face if you’ll let them in. The message of identity they spout is of the utmost importance – to them and society as large. Their electronic hiphop vehicle is to be expected. It’s the way of the entire world of young folk. 20-something Mongolian sheep herders are rapping in studios (or yurts?) these days and it sounds an awful lot like what’s heard here. I want to know what they’ll all be singing together around the campfire in twenty years, as melody takes a back seat to spittin’ rhymes? But that’s a whole other tangent. A Tribe Called Red