Voices of Humans, Ancestors and Gods
A Musical Journey Through India's Interior (East and North-East)
Topic Records (www.topicrecords.co.uk)

Over the past century, traveling recordists have collected an astonishing variety of the world's music. Some of it found commercial release, but the vast majority - recordings collected by ethnomusicologists compiling material for dissertations, by folklorists seeking the antecedents of important ballads, by anthropologists documenting rituals, and so forth - rests on archival shelves, essentially as undiscovered and unheard as it was when it was first put on tape. Every so often, a collection of crucial recordings finds its way to release in today's market, as witness the repackaging and release of the Alan Lomax field recordings.

Voices for Humans, Ancestors and Gods is another example of this phenomenon. On the shelves of the British Library Sound Archive are thousands of pieces of music collected over more than a century, the first items going back to a British anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898. This is one of the largest sound archives in the world, and any opportunity to sample its contents should not be missed.

The great thing about this compilation of Indian folk music is that while the music itself is fascinating by virtue of being rare and essentially uncirculated, it is also very beautiful. These pieces were recorded in East and North-East India over approximately a five year span by Rolf Killius, who provides excellent track notes and reasonably clear photographs of the performers. It is worth noting that while Killius' presentation maintains a degree of professional detachment, his enjoyment of and love for the material shines through; it must have been an awful lot of fun making these recordings!

We begin with a ballad from the Daasari people, recorded in 1997. This antiphonal performance tells the story of a suffering bride and her tragic end; the melodic passages are framed with oratorical interjections, a style found in light-classical music as well. Wandering minstrels, the Daasari accompany their songs with simple drone and rhythm instruments. The song shifts rhythm from section to section, and the raw honesty and power of lead singer Ambati Polaroa makes the track memorable.

Next we hear from another minstrel society, the Maasti. The wonderful singing of lead vocalist Simhachalam is attractive and rich in melismatic variety, making a compelling case for the tight symbiosis between Indian folk and classical traditions. Here the musicians tell of Shisireka's wedding, a love story derived from the great Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. The soaring vocals are underlined with surprisingly funky rhythms from a pair of Jankili Konda, small drums with a cord attached to the head. Stretching the string with one hand and plucking it with the other, an astonishing variety of rhythmic patterns can be created. The next two tracks present the music of the Saora, a tribal group settled in the East Indian state of Orissa. The first song is to be sung at funerals; the second is part of a naming ceremony for the youngest members of the community. While both songs are restricted to a 3-note melodic range, there is no sense of inadequate tonal material. The first singer, who introduces himself at the end of the performance as "Mr. India," has a rich, somewhat raspy tenor, and the effect is similar in emotive richness to a fine country blues performance. The naming song features a fascinating variation on the frequently encountered Indian heterophonic presentation: the lead singer is closely tracked by two following voices a split second behind. In contrast to the standard model of accompaniment, where the following voice or instrument is heard as melodically distinct, the effect in the Saora naming song is like an organic digital delay. In some South Indian classical songs, two or more voices execute complex ornamented melodies in startlingly perfect unison, but the Saora's time-staggered unison of extremely simple tunes is an even more striking effect. We next hear two more songs from Orissa, this time representing not the under-documented traditions of vanishing tribal cultures, but the more cosmopolitan approaches of professional performers. The first is a bhajan (devotional song) performed by Parashimani, a 70-year-old woman who is an acknowledged master of the genre. Accompanying herself on harmonium, with a rhythmic underpinning provided by mardala (pakhawaj) player Gobinda Chandra Pal, Parashimani pleads for the blessings of Lord Vishnu in a clarion voice that has lost none of its power with encroaching age. This is followed by a song from the Odissi dance genre, performed by Chandra Mani Lenka. Odissi dance is accompanied by beautifully complex songs which sit exactly at the intersection of classical and vernacular traditions. The pieces are based on raga-equivalent scales and rhythms, and sung with classical vocal timbre, voice production and ornamentation. Their focus on rhythmically constrained presentations of text and the relative absence of improvisation (thereby facilitating stable and consistent choreography) make the idiom closer to Carnatic classical or Hindustani dhrupad, but there is an appealing looseness and relaxation in the idiom that makes Odissi music uniquely attractive. One of the more frequently heard styles of Indian folk music is the Baul song, and we hear two fine examples, performed by members of the Baul community of Bengal. With strings and percussion underlining solo vocal excursions, these songs are compelling expressions of the mystical philosophy of the Bauls. These examples both come from a single family, and especially notable is the performance of 16-year old Soroma Das Baul, whose voice is tuneful, emotive and powerful. We next hear five selections of music from Northeast India. The first three represent some of the traditions of Assam, beginning with the popular singer Vishnu Das and his ensemble, who present a devotional song in praise of Krishna's beauty. This is followed by a location recording made in a Hindu monastery on the first death anniversary of a local spiritual leader. The accelerating tempos, antiphonal chanting and sudden shifts of acoustical attention all mark this as a excerpt from a larger ritual, which seems to my ear to have structural ties with the ritual music of Tibetan Buddhist culture. Before leaving Assam, we hear a group of women from a tribal community singing a group lament in an unmetered antiphony; their voices overlap and ring in a resonant unison before suddenly breaking into a rhythmic refrain. Finally we hear two items from the mountainous areas of Arunachal Pradesh. This culture is much closer to Ladakhi, Bhutanese and Tibetan forms, and both songs come from Buddhist communities. Pentatonic scales, mixed-gender groups and an appealingly open voice production are common features. I particularly enjoyed the final piece, a song accompanied by the Tibetan dramnian lute; Rinchen Tashi's voice is beautifully modulated, and the performance might remind a new listener of music from the high, lonesome mountains of the Southern Appalachians as much as it evokes the wintry majesty of the Himalayas. Voices for Humans, Ancestors and Gods is part of a larger initiative, described in the liner notes as "The Traditional Music in India Project." This recording is a valuable document in its own right; as additional material from other Indian cultures is published the music on this disc will be contextualized more fully, and will become part of one of the most valuable resources for listeners who, like myself, have fallen in love with the overwhelming beauty and variety of Indian vernacular musical traditions. The whole package is a demonstration of how to present archival materials in a manner consistent both with scholarly relevance and wider commercial appeal. As the last page of the notes tells us, the original recordings from which this collection is drawn are housed in the World and Traditional Music Section and can be searched online. The search function is quite slow, but a fantastic time-sink; it's the sort of thing that makes me want to get a ticket to London, right now, and spend a few weeks listening fourteen hours a day. See you there. - Warren Senders The British Library Sound Archive - World and Traditional Music Section: cadensa.bl.uk

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