‘ETERNAL’ BY HUUN HUUR TU & CARMEN RIZZO

If the essence of any art, including music, is creative combination, then that’s reason enough to follow world music. I think of it like a genome project, recombining the DNA of culture, in this case music. On their new album ‘ETERNAL’ Tuva throat singers Huun Huur Tu and Californian musician/producer Carmen Rizzo have pushed the envelope about as far as it can go in terms of creative combination. What could be more different than a band of traditional musicians from the Siberian steppes and a hot Grammy-nominated LA producer who specializes in electronic and Middle Eastern music? But wait a minute… maybe they aren’t as different as they seem at first.

For one thing, all music- all sound even- is essentially a form of percussion, whether it’s air striking vocal cords or reeds or drum heads. Hold that and you’ve got a frequency, a note, capable of being modulated and amplified. Do that in a pattern and you’ve got a song, all from the simple act of timing your blows and re-arranging them, like gene-splicing. Of course when musical traditions are separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles, it’s interesting to see how differently they’ve evolved and whether they can still get it on together and create offspring.

As with any true art and artists, what Huun Huur Tu and Carmen Rizzo have most in common is the element of abstraction attained. They each go so far in opposite directions, Huun Huur Tu meta-earthy and Rizzo meta-lectronic, that they come very close to meeting… in the ether. We all have some notion about how electronic music works, but how do Tuvan throat singers accomplish those bizarre poly-tonal chantings? “(False vocal cords)… have minimal role in normal phonation, but are often used in musical screaming and the death grunt singing style. They are also used in Tuvan throat singing.” (mahalo, wiki-Wiki) Aha! You knew they were doing something different, right? They’re using body parts not normally even used for intonation, an extra set of folds above the ‘true vocal cords.’ It’s usually known as ‘overtone singing,’ producing two tones at the same time, and can even be heard in some forms of yodeling. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard before.

The rest is history. I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘the race for Tuvala’ or anything like that yet, but ever since ‘Genghis Blues’, the movie about Paul Pena’s journey to Tuva land to participate in the annual throat-singing competition, interest in the art and its artists has been growing. Ondar started it all, taking a five-year-old throat singer on talk shows, doing Letterman himself, and now rapping with the late physicist Richard Feynman (presumably not talking about quantum electrodynamics, though maybe ‘sums over histories’) in the background. As an interesting aside, Feynman’s interest derived from stamp collecting, the briefly independent country of Tuvala providing the most obscure ones he ever had and becoming a lifelong obsession to visit. Permission finally came from Tuvala’s new owner Russia, but after Feynman died.

Another well-known Tuva band, Yat-kha does Western pop covers and punk/metal like Tom Waits on Valium dépêche mode vocals. And then there’s Chirgilchin maintaining the traditional style. Huun Huur Tu splits the difference really nicely, adapting and evolving the art while avoiding any grandstanding or outrageous showyness. Meanwhile Bela Fleck and Laurie Anderson and others all have big plans for throat-singing collaborations and Tanya Tagaq takes a more playful Inuit throat-singing tradition and does Bjorkish things with it that might get a whale excited.

If much of Tuvan throat-singing is at least something of a… an… acquired taste, well rest assured that this collaboration goes down like honey. Traditional Tuvan throat singing may never be the same. The album can pretty much be divided up into three parts- the ones that include sweeping Chinese-inspired vocals like ‘Ancestors’ Call’ or ‘Mother Taiga,’ the ones that are more purely soundscapes like ‘Saryglarlar’ or ‘Dogee Mountain’ (Interlude), and the more typical deep throaty textures like ‘In Search of a Lost Past’ or ‘Orphaned Child’ or ‘Tuvan Prayer’. All in all the whole thing could be titled ‘Theme from an Imaginary Chinese Movie’ or even be the soundtrack TO that movie and fit right in. Imagine Zhang Ziyi being carried over steppe and dune on the backs of Mongolian porters. Imagine Mongol horsemen gathering on the hillside. Imagine a shaman beating a drum and dancing and chanting inside a rug-adorned yurt. Let your imagination run wild. This album will help, ‘ETERNAL’ by Huun Huur Tu and Carmen Rizzo. Check it out.

INBAR BAKAL’S MUSIC TRANSCENDS POLITICS

The debut album by Inbar Bakal, ‘Song of Songs’, is a wonder and a revelation, with its lush harmonics and rich melodies. This also fills a much-needed niche within the field of Semitic-language music for those for whom Tinariwen is too raw, Algerian rai too slick, Rachid Taha too French, and Ethiopian music too… weird (comparisons to Niyaz are obvious, but they are mostly sung in Farsi, so non-Semitic… more later). The irony is that Inbar Bakal is neither Arab nor Tuareg nor Berber nor Ethiopian. She’s Jewish, an Israeli by birth, via Yemen and Iraq parentage. For those of you who don’t know, there is a pre-Diaspora scattering of ‘oriental’ Jewish people that is the result not necessarily of emigration, but of conversion. Ethiopia was a Jewish nation before its conversion to Christianity, as was Yemen before Islam. This is an important point to remember, since at that time, the similarities between them outweighed their differences and monotheism itself was the powerful belief (and economic benefit?) that defeated a plethora of lesser gods and their demands for tribute. Until the foundation of the Israeli state, Judaism not only survived but even thrived in enclaves within the Islamic world, far better than they fared in Europe in fact.

So Inbar Bakal helps bring Israel and its musical heritage full circle, back to its origins in the Middle East. She does this by looking for modern clues in ancient texts, adapting Yemeni melodies to Torah-inspired lyrics. Her songs are of ascendance, meditation, and worship, the struggles for Yerushalayim and the struggles of an unwilling bride in an arranged marriage. If photos of her at first seem oddly ultra-sexy, given the subject matter and background, notice that they also are extremely enigmatic, of a soul half-divided, an innate tension that plays itself out in song, half-crying and half-laughing. She one-ups Mona Lisa in walking an emotional fence with a combination of resignation and resilience, faith and humor, all lying just slightly below the surface, close enough to sense if not touch.

If Bakal has a talented band of diverse musicians, her chief collaborator on ‘Song of Songs’ is Grammy-nominated producer Carmen Rizzo, himself a co-founder of the Persian/Sufi/Indian-inspired group Niyaz. Thus the question arises as to whether we’re listening primarily to Carmen or to Inbar. This is the same situation as with other artist/producers such as Daniel Lanois or T-Bone Burnett. It doesn’t matter of course, certainly not on a studio album, as long as the music is good. And it is. Ms. Bakal’s voice matches the music perfectly. If this typically takes the form of a melancholy lament, I see no reason why it should always be so. It would be interesting to see how she would interpret more up-beat material. You probably don’t want to play her song ‘The Bride’ at your wedding. Somebody might change his or her mind.

There is another story here of course, one of politics. Ms. Bakal proudly served in the Israeli military, as all citizens must, but she even attained the rank of officer in the Israeli air force. The fact that she advertises this fact rather than obscuring it, all the while playing with musicians of other faiths, including Islam, is commendable. Maybe it’s naïve to think that music might accomplish what negotiations can’t, but then again, maybe it’s not. When you have movies like ‘Heavy Metal in Baghdad’ making the circuits and people in Zagreb camping overnight to be the first in line to buy tickets for U2, there’s obviously a power there that’s more than just muddy metaphor and silly simile. The new album by Inbar Bakal adds an important new dimension to the extant library of modern Middle Eastern music. I want more, and I want it live, but for now the album will suffice for a few more listens. That’s the ultimate test, which she passes with flying colors.