Mauritania music reviews

I picked this winner up in 2004 or early 2005 along with another disc of Deben Bhattacharya's field-recordings, River Songs of Bangladesh.

Don't be alarmed by 3 stars. I really like this disc and have never regretted my purchase. I give it 3 stars because there will be a limited number of situations in which you can listen to it. This is a subtle recording, yet also 3-dimensional. Some of the singers/musicians were close to the microphones while others were quite a bit farther away. The result is like being in a room with lots of activity when you cannot hear the people on the other side of the room as well.

My 3 stars are due to the fact that this isn't the cd you should buy if you're in the mood for an intensely polyrhythmic groove that you might like to blast in the stereo while driving down the highway. With road noise, wind and engine noise, many of the essential details of this recording will be obscured. The same can probably be said for any sort of gathering at your humble abode. I doubt there's enough extroverted movement here to be able to hold the attention of the average group of Americans.

Having said that, this cd is really good. I just find it to be of a solitary, personal nature (for me the outsider and listener. Obviously this is communal for the people themselves). I always listen to it in headphones while laying on my bed. The headphones put you in the tent with them. It's a subtle music except for a couple louder male singers on a couple tracks. This disc is at its best when the women dominate. This isn't as powerful to me as the Abayudaya disc but I do like these girls and women. Family and Love as Sound.

The instruments here are the tidinit (lute), the ardin (10-14-string harp) and the t'bol (big kettle drum) with the culture/musicians being Moorish griots.

It's also great for illustrating the fact that there's really no such thing as "African music". That phrase gets thrown around as if there is a monolithic style or rhythm that dominates that vast continent but it simply isn't true. Later today or tomorrow I'll be posting my review of Ali Farka Toure's incredible Red & Green 2-disc set. Mauritania and Mali share a huge border yet that means nothing in terms of stylistic similarities. The music here and on Red & Green couldn't be more different if they were styles from Japan and Russia.

If you get this and find you really like it, you'd do well to consider getting Tartit's cd, Ichichila. I fear the world will only come to appreciate the wonder and glory of our diversity when most of it has vanished.

This is a CD of field recordings made by ethnomusicologist Deben Bhattacharya from 1978. Despite the age of the recordings, Arc Music has remastered these so that you are hearing Griot traditional music and not some dim field sampling of this great musical tradition. Which means that if you have an interest in West African music, this is a unique and beautiful resource to have. Listenable, yet of historical value.