W here a human voice is heard in today’s program it’s often starkly different from what most Westerners might find pleasing and melodic.  But I must remind my listeners that the West probably did not invent the concept of vocalizing as accompaniment to plucked/blown/percussed musical instruments. Why do we sing in the style that we do? I imagine there are knowledgeable tomes wrestling with that idea. I ’ve read that vocals were meant to imitate the sounds made by instruments...or vice versa? The chicken or the egg? I’m not here to answer that question, in spite of the college course I had taken of “Music Cultures of the World” decades ago. What I offer is the opportunity to pay attention to and digest musical expressions performed by people steeped in the traditional ways of their culture.  T here is a geographic component to lumping together India, Nepal and Tibet as the Himalayas served to isolate and circumscribe the peoples of those northern regions. But here’s where I fud...

  These are mostly old songs, as the notion of riding a train is largely an old experience. Who rides trains (or used to)? Hobos, guys on the lam, the lovelorn, wanderers, and fellow travellers. Today’s playlist consists of mostly bluegrass and blues, but rockabilly and rock ‘n roll join in. Even gospel takes its turn ferrying the faithful up to the pearly gates. Trains are linked to a wide range of situations and feelings. They can serve as a means of escape, freedom and joy, abandonment and sadness.  Doc Watson went so far as to wish mayhem on the train that took his girl…“I wish to the Lord, that train would wreck, kill the engineer and break the fireman’s neck.” But trains are like that, adept at taking men’s (and some women’s) babies away. They can also bring them home. Most any instrument can imitate a train sound, the harmonica, fiddle, guitar...and the human voice including a muted hand-trumpet by the Golden Gate Quartet, otherwise performing acapella. Train songs can ...

  This week’s playlist went right over my head. Or maybe, under the radar…I’m not sure. I do know what I don’t know, however that plays out, and I didn’t know the performers or music in this week’s Al compás del mundo radio program. It’s the brainstorm of guest programmer, Ras Haas, a card-carrying member of the familial tribe, though admittedly, of a different generation. This should be apparent as you’ve not heard any of this genre previously on the show. And what genre is it? Not sure. These songs came out of the 1980s and, I’m told, they’re post-disco and an incipient lead-in to rap…or at least it served as fertile ground for a wealth of sampling taken by that next musical movement up.  When Ras passed the finished product on to me, I admittedly had some reservations, disco being a hateful creature in my geezer mind – and it sounded close to disco. But a few listenings have cleared some space and I sense a trend emerging. Funk is foremost and that’s nothing new for most an...

  Shown here: Howlin Wolf --  First thing, got to get this off my chest: I’m glad I don’t have the blues. I’m so glad. I’m   so glad. I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad. When an elderly Muddy Waters exhorted a mostly White college student audience in Madison, Wisconsin (circa 1975) “Can you feel it?”, everyone cried out “yes!”. Maybe they did. Who am I to judge?   But why did the African American listening public back off from the blues while White American youth embraced it at that time? Because the blues were old-fashioned for the former, and top-of-the-charts in the hands of young British and (later) American bands for the latter. Of course, that’s a whole lesson in American sociology and a historic musical diversion that has been explored in previous iterations of Al compas del mundo, i.e. programa #140, “British blues”. But today were dealing with today and everything is in retrospect. So these guys, the likes of Honey Boy Edwards, Ed Bell, Robert Johnson, etc., are...