"it’s hard not to admire and be grateful for Tracey’s hubris"

February 19, 2017 2:20 PM

Amanda Petrusich writes about a collector of African folk music named Hugh Tracey whose collection of more than ten thousand recordings has been digitized and partly made available online as the International Library of African Music on the South African Music Archive Project website. Petrusich also writes about the Singing Wells project, which aims to return copies of Tracey's recordings he made in Kenya and Uganda to the places where they were recorded, though their main focus is to make new recordings. Petrusich focuses on a recording of Kipsigi girls singing about a half-man half-antelope called Chemirocha, who turns out to have a rather surprising origin.
posted by Kattullus (8 comments total)

The SAMAP site says that most clips in ILAM are thirty seconds long, but that has been a minority of those I have listened to so far, most being full-length.
posted by Kattullus at 2:25 PM on February 19, 2017

Awesome! Thank you for posting this!
posted by nightrecordings at 2:59 PM on February 19, 2017 [1 favorite]

Hugh Tracey also created the kalimba, which, while not nearly as badass as the mbira, is still a very enjoyable "thumb piano" that I would recommend to anyone who's not deaf, has at least one working hand, and doesn't already play an instrument.
posted by uosuaq at 4:18 PM on February 19, 2017 [1 favorite]

This is wonderful; from the first link:

The more the Kipsigi girls repeat the song’s title—with a deliberate pause between the second and third syllable, as if it were two words, Chimi Rocha, Chimi Rocha, Chimi Rocha—the more it becomes clear that, as Tracey discovered, the Kipsigi girls were in fact singing the name of the American country star Jimmie Rodgers.

The SAMAP site looks great, but (and I feel like an idiot asking this) how do I actually hear the clips? All I see are descriptions, with no "click to listen" button.
posted by languagehat at 5:17 PM on February 19, 2017 [2 favorites]

I found this on a 10" a few years back (MoA series No 2 Kenya) and love it beyond words. It melts my heart to even think of it. I found three other Hugh Tracy 10"s at the same time and all are a delight but for me there is one other standout: MoA No 8 track 4 "Musingasinga yakora egali" which is xylophone music with 4 players on the one instrument. It has these moments when patterns emerge and steady then snap together and then just when it's perfect they pull the whole wonderful complexity apart and leave all the structures exposed as they exit one by one.
( And all in under 2 minutes. It's like "Music for 18 Musicians" for the really busy person.)
posted by Richard Upton Pickman at 9:02 PM on February 19, 2017 [3 favorites]

languagehat: The SAMAP site looks great, but (and I feel like an idiot asking this) how do I actually hear the clips? All I see are descriptions, with no "click to listen" button.

When I click on a song link in Firefox on my PC laptop, I have a prominent play button at the top of the page. But I can't see it when I look at SAMAP on my iPad. Presumably there's some sort of script that my iPad can't run, probably Flash, or maybe Java, but I'm not technically adept enough to know for sure. It works just fine on my PC, however. Maybe if you have some script blocker, it keeps the music on the SAMAP site from being accessible.
posted by Kattullus at 11:01 PM on February 19, 2017 [1 favorite]

I had to enable Flash to see and use the 'listen' icon.
posted by glasseyes at 4:10 AM on February 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

Ah, I allowed Flash and now it works; thanks!
posted by languagehat at 6:00 AM on February 20, 2017 [1 favorite]