Rough Guide World Music. - Review - book review

Whole Earth, Winter, 2000 by Kk

Travel with your ears. This comprehensive, massive (700-plus pages), and recently updated two-volume guide to global song covers the planet, from Norwegian fiddlers to Filipino folk rockers. It's all here: what kind of music is out there, where it came from, who is playing it, and where to get it. Feeling stuck? Open up this book at random, order a CD, and enter another way of seeing.

Rough Guide
World Music
Vol. 1: Africa, Europe,
Mid East
Vol. 2: Latin American,
India, Asia, Pacific
2000 (2nd edition),
Vol. 1,736 pages,
Vol 2, 720 pages
$26.95 each
Rough Guides

Indonesian Pop

Moluccan Moods Orchestra (Piranha, Germany). If you haven't heard of the Moluccans since they held up Dutch trains in the 1970s, give this disc a listen. Traditional songs arranged in laid-back style with exciting percussion, keyboards, saxophone and flute.

Zambian Pop

From the Copperbelt ... Zambian Miner's Songs (Original Music, US). In the "African Acoustic" series, eighteen interesting-to-beautiful songs by the mine camp entertainers of the copper-belt that straddles Zambia and southeastern Zaire, field-recorded by ethno-musicologist Hugh Tracey in 1957.

Albanian

Famille Lela De Permet

Polyphonies vocales et instrumentales d'Albanie (Indigo/Harmonia Mundi, France). Beautiful and approachable songs and instrumental music from the Permet and Korce regions of southern Albania. Wailing and sliding clarinets give this music an enchanting mournful sound.