New Music from Faraway Lands

You know what's fun? Listening to new music from other cultures, sometimes on unfamiliar instruments, and occasionally in languages unlike anything we know. I listened to these CDs while at my desk working and at home at another desk while writing. As I write this post, I'm listening to a recording called African Guitars Anthology (Lusafrica, 2012). According to the brief liner notes, the guitar has figured prominently in African music for about 150 years, and  the performers here represent the entire continent from north to south. Some are solo guitarists, and some support star performers. That is it, though, barely a paragraph

of information, so the curious prospective listener has no choice but to bravely dive in and listen. It's not difficult to imagine this music coming from Africa with its complex rhythms and characteristic percussion instruments. This brave and curious listener gives the recording a thumbs-up for its clarity of sounds and voices, festive spirit, and diversity of styles. Check out some samples at this site (but check your library, too).


Have you ever been to Iceland? Me neither, but it's at the top of my travel bucket list. For now, I'll have to be content with Icelandic Violin Duos (MSR Music, 2012). The performers call themselves Duo Landon, Hlif Sigurjónsdóttir from Iceland and Martin Frewer from a lot of places but currently Germany. Both musicians play instruments made by Christophe Landon, a French violin maker, who originally commissioned them to record Béla Bartòk's 44 Violin Duos. After the Bartòk recording, the duo was looking to put together an album of Icelandic violin duets, but only found three. They contacted some Icelandic composers they knew and commissioned three additional duets. This CD brings us all six duos.

A trip to Sweden would not be a bad thing, either. This record is more jazz than global probably, but they are all Swedish tunes. This is a diverse post, after all, culturally and genre-ly. I hear that the Swedish people appreciate jazz, and traditional Swedish tunes have found their way into some well-known jazz standards. (Listen to Quincy Jones's Stockholm Sweetnin' for example.) Swedish Ballads... & More (Charleston Square, 2013) features American tenor saxophone player Scott Hamilton (NOT the ice skater), with a Swedish trio: Jan Lundgren (piano), Jesper Lundgaard (bass), and Kristian Leth (drums). Here's a short review of this recording of Swedish tunes jazzed-up and arranged by Swedes. I found this gem of a video on YouTube, Hamilton performing "Dear Old Stockholm," which is not technically from the album because why would they put it up there for free?! This is an older recording of Hamilton performing with the Scandinavian Five. A newer version of this tune is found on the Swedish Ballads... & More CD discussed in this paragraph.

And now for something completely different, Compositions for Geomungo and Gayageum (Sub Rosa, 2013). Baudouin De Jaer is the composer of this unusual music, and the performers are Kim Hyunchae and Lee Hwa-Young. The geomungo is a Korean zither that dates back to the fourth century. It has six strings, but only two of these contribute to melody. They are hit with a bamboo stick, and the resulting music comes out sounding like a combination of string and percussion. The gayageum dates back even further, to the first century BC in Korea. It is similar to a zither and the geomungo but has at least twelve strings, and possibly as many as 25. The music produced by this instrument is more melodic, less percussive, and more similar to traditional Asian music we've heard in movie soundtracks and media. It is difficult to describe fresh new sounds using mere words, but I'll try: both instruments, and these compositions for them, produce an elegant, nature-based, unpredictable listening experience.