Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes
by Leyla McCalla (Dixie Frog DFG 8752 CD)
Singer and instrumentalist Leyla McCalla – she favours the cello, though banjos and guitars are runners-up – used to sit on milk crates playing Bach in the streets of New Orleans. Then she was being pointed towards Music Maker, a programme supporting the musical folk traditions of the American South. Bach hasn’t much to do with the American South but McCalla, born in New York of Haitian parents, is a musician steeped in multivalent ideas. Relocating – physically and musically – to New Orleans sees her immersed in a tradition that encompasses the city’s zydeco sounds as well as music from black Creole, Cajun and Haitian backgrounds.
Funded via a Kickstarter appeal, Vari-Colored Songs links these traditions: McCalla’s velvety voice has a generous inflection and her music is clearly articulated. It’s apt, given her commitment to the recent past, that this début album contains many settings of lyrics by Langston Hughes, the poet, musician and black activist who rejoiced in the rhythms of the jazz age. McCalla’s stark setting of ‘Song for a Dark Girl’, a depiction of a Southern lynching, is shocking in its power. She gets more upbeat on the handful of Haitian traditional songs and ‘When I Can See the Valley’ – the only song authored entirely by her. This is an album that introduces a considerable talent.
★★★
Mortissa
by Çiğdem Aslan (Comet 056 CD)
Rembetika – that booze-soaked, hash-smoked music of a bygone Athens – is enjoying a revival, with much of it coming from outside Greece. Mortissa – the word means a strong, independent woman – is one such album which extends our picture of the genre by including the Smyrna (current-day Izmir) side of things.
A Turkish Alevi Kurd, Çiğdem Aslan is mindful of the ruptured history of a music that, though often dubbed the ‘Greek blues’, is more than that. It is shaped, in part, by the mass expulsion in the early 20th century of native Greeks and others from what is now Turkish Anatolia.
Mortissa, which concentrates on the Anatolian roots of rembetika’s smyrneika style, acknowledges wide influences – Turkish and Greek but also Armenian and Levantine Jewish music. Ably assisted by Nikolaos Baimpas’ small band, Aslan’s vocals have the right kind of poise – coy one moment, desperate the next – necessary to make these famous songs live again. Singing in Greek and Turkish (the sleeve notes, unusually, print lyrics in both these languages as well as English), the instrumentation has the traditional baglamas and kanun, darbuka, while strings and santour also feature in the lucid production.
Poignantly, Aslan dedicates the album to a contemporary mortissa, Lobna Alllamii, the young music promoter who suffered critical head trauma when she was hit by a gas canister fired by police during demonstrations in Istanbul earlier this year.
★★★★
