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It's a great pity, but an unfortunate reality, that ethnographic recordings usually don't sell enough physical CDs to make many of them financially viable. Better that the valuable material in them should be out there than not, though. So, while I generally don't review from digital-only releases, I reckon it's worth making an exception in such cases. And a plus is that downloads can have more tracks than would normally fit on a CD.
Here are two fine ones to make that exception for. They're the most recent releases from Poland's Muzyka Zakorzeniona foundation, and they, together with its earlier releases since 2018, are available on Bandcamp for streaming or download, with photos of the performers and full booklet notes available as pdfs (mostly in Polish, but nevertheless helpful to a non-Polish-reader in indicating who does what).
The most recent digital release, Muzyka spod Radomia (Music from Radomia) is, currently at least, available free. (The most recent of previous releases are paid download, their predecessors name-your-price). According to the foundation's useful Facebook page, there will soon also be a physical release of this and some of the others. It's 30 tracks of recordings of a range of present-day players and singers in the Radomskie traditional cultural region, which lies in the fork of the rivers Vistula and Pilica in east-central Poland.
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The musicians and singers here comprise a number of bands (kapelas). They're of mixed generations, the majority being in their twenties or thirties but with some middle-aged and some in their seventies or eighties. The younger generation have been enthused to take up the music and dance, and to visit and learn from the older village musicians, largely as a result of the tireless work of multi-disciplinary artist and professor Andrzej Bieńkowski, who in his Muzyka Odnaleziona project and foundation has since the 1980s been recording, photographing, filming, documenting, broadcasting and publishing Poland's regional traditional musics, and restoring their instruments too.
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It's wild, swirling dance music, with instrumentation variously accordions, fiddle, thudding stick-hit tambourine, bass drum (baraban) with cymbal atop and dangling triangle, chugging bowed cello-sized bass (basy), and in one case saxophone. One of the accordions is the very Polish pedal-accordion, which consists of an accordion, whose bellows don't move, which sits on top of a metal tube through which the air is pumped by a pair of foot-pumps; this arrangement saves the accordionist holding a heavy instrument during long dance sessions.
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Biskupizna is a folklore micro-region in Gostyń county in western Poland, south of Poznań. It consists of twelve villages around the town of Krobia. Poland is a big country, with a wide range of regional traditions, and the sound and music on the 53 tracks of the Biskupizna album is very different from that of Radomia. The local women's costumes are very distinctive, too, with elaborate starched lace head-dresses.
The recordings are of members of the Biskupiański Folklore Group from Domachów and the surrounding area. They feature unaccompanied songs, solo or in a couple of cases quartet unison, alternating with short pieces of dance music, solo or duet, on bagpipe, fiddle, or diatonic button accordion (small, push-pull, not the big chromatics of the Radomia album).
As with the Radomia album, the musicians span the age range, though here with a greater proportion are at the higher end of that, and the majority of the vocal tracks are of the robust solo singing of 74-year-old Anna Chuda, with some from singer and accordionist Franciszek Jesia, born in 1930.
Find these two recordings and more online
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