This week the fall season of All Around This World classes starts in Philadelphia and beyond, with most of us landing squarely in Latin America. Classes start this week in several places around Philadelphia and will begin within the next couple weeks in several other cities. This is the first season I’m teaching with the professionally produced (and professionally duplicated) All Around This World: Latin America CD. I know kids in the great out there who have never heard me sing won’t be yearning to hear my voice instead of those of the accomplished Latin singers who graciously lent their voices to the project. Some parents have wondered if listening to these CDs rather than to the handmade CDs I used to hand out, which truly were all-me-all-the-time, will change their kids’ intimate relationship with my classes. I don’t think so, but we’ll have to see. Have a listen to one of my favorite tracks on the AATW Latin America CD, the Brazilian samba, “Bambo du Bambu”:
While all other AATW aficionados out there are going to Latin America, at home in West Philadelphia I’m birthing a special season of AATW material drawn entirely from music I found in the extraordinary Smithsonian Folkways collection. Even if you don’t know Folkways you’re still in the debt of label founder Moses Asch, whose ethnomusicologists and music researchers performed the service of recording over 2,000 albums of “the People’s music,” recorded virtually everywhere around the globe, over the several decades from the label’s founding in 1948 until Asch’s passing in the 1980s. Folkways extensively documented the music of distant world cultures just as the modern world was mounting its most insidious offensive, not obliterating them this time through the strong arm of colonialism, but through a combination of Hollywood blockbusters and carbonated beverages. Today many of the cultures whose music Folkways documented have diminished, or simply no longer exist. Folkways gives us the rare opportunity to hear those cultures in all their pride. Since the Smithsonian Institute acquired the Folkways collection it has continued Asch’s mission, bringing forth music of the world that may never have had a chance to be heard.
In the course of my research to find just the right songs for All Around This World I found myself time and again listening to Folkways recordings and having musical revelations. Most generously the Smithsonian Folkways label makes the extensively researched and always thoughtful liner notes of all their albums available online. For cultural music geeks like me, that’s gold.
This fall in my “Smithsonian Folkways” season we’re singing only songs I found on, and adapted from, Smithsonian Folkways releases, and in class when we listen to music on the CD player I’m only drawing upon releases on the Smithsonian Folkways label. Each week’s in-class “experience” focuses on something I find interesting about the recording of “the people’s music,” or of ethnomusicology. Trust me. It’s more fun than it sounds. Click on the “Music of the Worlds Peoples” album art below to hear a clip from an original version of the song “Bambo du Bambu,” as I first heard it on a Smithsonian Folkways release:
