World Music
Currently this page features samples of music Julia and I recorded on our visit to India and Nepal in 1995. Also some Canadian Native music I recorded in Canada in 1994. We have tried to give a little background to the artists and places of origin with photos where available. As no money is changing hands I am sure the artists would not object to you having the opportunity to hear their work, but also trust you not to infringe their theoretical copyright by reproducing these recordings to profit. Believe me, the majority of them are probably just trying to get together some food for today.
The recordings were made on a Sony Recording Walkman and are hardly CD quality but we feel they have a lot of atmosphere. We apologise for any extraneous noises made by the mike or cable being touched or moved. In most cases it was a bit of a rush job to get anything at all. I suppose that's one of the attractive qualities of visiting India or Nepal. You might be just be wandering around and suddenly come across the most fantastic music emanating from a shack or something.
Real Audio - Instant Play
Puri - Family group
This is far and away the best piece of music I heard while in India. Once again we just came across a small group of people sitting on a blanket busking in a Bazaar on CT Road in Puri, Orissa.
The group was a family consisting of a mother and four children. The mother sat passively while her daughter who, as you can see, was aged approximately 12/14 sang and played the dholuk accompanied by her smaller brother on the popular accordion type of instrument. One or two of the other children sing back up on some phrases but the music produced by the little girl was stellar. Soaring vocals and pounding rhythms on the dholuk drum. She was without doubt the most proficient player of this drum that I saw and was really on another level with it. She demonstrated the kind of feel a blues player of thirty years would like to have. I am searching for a couple more songs that have been mislaid and they will hopefully be added to this page. Remember you are just hearing the little girl and her brother.
Unfortunately we have no way of knowing if this family survived the devastating cyclone that hit the Orissa coastline some years later. We hope so.
MP3 of above Family group with daughter singing and playing Dholuk drum
We were at Sunauli on the Indian/Nepalese border waiting for a bus up into the Himalayas when a band of Nepalese wandering musicians saw the brightly painted Dholuk Drum that I had slung over my shoulder. They followed us into a Tent/Cafe and gestured to borrow the Drum. I had bought this drum at the carpenters stall in Bhairawa Bazaar the previous day for the equivalent of just £7. Then they improvised the music you hear in the first clip. As we were sitting on the bus waiting to set off, I heard these sounds through the window and slipped away quickly to see who it was. The same group, with more instruments, were stood around under an open sided tent singing this song with beautiful harmonies and several stringed instruments.
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Pokhara is close to the Himalayan Annapurna Mountains in Nepal and one night during the Festival of Lights we came across this rather wild group who were moving around playing in peoples gardens, collecting a bit of money and having a good drink. They dragged me in to dance in the middle of the group while Julia taped them and took photos which, unfortunately, never came out. This was a group of about eight with a few friends and wives. There was a dholuk drum, a couple of cymbals and a reed pipe but they were about the only real instruments that they had. They had made the strange sounding wind instruments out of old pipes and others were hitting things which I couldn't really see in the dark.
It was quite an experience and listening to the recording is still quite moving as the atmosphere returns through the music. Check out how these wind instuments build it up. I swear it sounds to me like Miles Davis.
We stumbled across this group of devotees busking in the bazaar outside Varanassi (Benares) Railway Station at about 7pm one night just as it had gotten dark. The drum you can hear, which, previously I knew nothing of, is called a Dholuk. The Dholuk is a tapered drum with heads at each end, the smaller being tight to give a high pitched slapping sound and the larger much slacker to give a sound nearer to that of the bass tabla. I have two, both of which are about twenty inches in length with heads roughly seven and nine inches in diameter. From what I could see the technique involved playing series of sixteenth notes, some accented, with the thumb and forefingers on the high pitched head, punctuated with booms on the bass head. Sometimes this appeared to be the other way around. If you try playing a dholuk you'll see there are actually a number of sounds you can get.
An "Intertribal" song by Native Canadian "The Couchiching Singers", founded by Russell Noganosh. Learn more about The Pow Wow on our Aboriginal page.