For this 10th volume of the World Library we go back to Africa, this time on a trip to East Africa with recordings by Hugh Tracey, perhaps the most important field collector and ethnomusicologist of African traditional music. The countries visited are Uganda, Congo, Mozambique, Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Kenya and other territories who were under British colonial rules after World War 2. The recordings offers us a glimpse of the vast musical expressions among different tribes, with many examples of instruments (xylophones, the hand-piano or Mbira (or likembe), mouth bows, lyres, flutes, gourds, zithers, etc..) and story and work songs. The quality of the recordings is superb, as Tracey was a pionneer in field recordings and used many techniques to improve sound on difficult recording conditions.
-For a biography of Hugh Tracey, you can go to the ILAM website (International Library of African Music) and on the SWP records website, a independant record company based in Holland that issued a serie of superb recordings made by Tracey, a must-have for fans of African music and ethnic music in general
–LISTEN HERE:
British East Africa side A MP3
[…] While searching for field recordings of early African music, I stumbled across The World’s Jukebox. This blog seems to be the only place to find the out-of-print volumes of the Alan Lomax curated series The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music. Given my interest, I snagged the two volumes of this series that cover Africa, namely Volume II: French Africa and Volume X: British East Africa. […]
I’ve taken the liberty of breaking this album into its constituent tracks, labeling and re-posting over at my blog: http://seethatmyblogiskeptclean.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/the-worlds-jukebox/
Thanks so much for the original upload!