ARC intern Dionysius Arya Nataraja comes to us via Bennington College via the Netherlands via Central Java. He’s just finished up a few months here and used some of his time to explore the ARC’s World Music Collection. As a scholar of… read more >>
posts tagged: traditional
MW is ARC’s 6,000th Record Donor!
Just acknowledged our 6,000th donor of recordings here at the ARC. Of course there are a whole lot more nice folks who have given us recordings, but we have only been keeping track for the past 20 years. So here’s to Matthew… read more >>
PercPan
What’s a desk jockey to do? It’s been five sedentary years since my last out-of-office experience (see Colombian stories; Picolandia and Vallenato) — much too long to go without nudging the equator, swizzle-sticking fuzzy drinks and scooping up rare petroleum based audio… read more >>
Great Pretenders
In a 2010 obituary, Cat Coore, the guitarist and cellist for the seminal reggae band Third World, called Gregory Isaacs “the Frank Sinatra of Jamaica.” It was one of those “it’s a stretch” references, necessary throughout the world to make a foreign… read more >>
Backtrackin’
Just realized that I have skipped over a few important things, and so, I would like to show you… A series of unissued discs from Rupayan Sansthan, The Rajasthan Institute of Folklore, Jodhpur. They were graciously donated to ARC by Mr. Kothari,… read more >>
Magic Mitts of India
The IASA Confab is winding down and one thing about the presenters of papers from small archives in India is – they all sing. So I’m asking that in the future, when an American presents at one of these shindigs, they MUST… read more >>
Los Tigres del Norte
Los Tigres del Norte have been on our radar since 1990 when we got in the LP ‘Para Adoloridos’ (uh, ‘For Shaking You Up’?). These Californians are in the news this week as Juarez, the capital of Chihuahua State and a major… read more >>
Friends, Encounters + Wished I Met
Easing into the new year, slowly. An old friend, Richard Fleming, aka DJ Richard Nixon, has worked his obsessions (music, hiking, the Caribbean, birding, photography) into a wonderful new book and photographic gallery show. I first met Rich in Cartegena, Colombia in… read more >>
We Built This City On…
It is a little known fact that the ancient Nabataeans were early adaptors of new sound recording technologies. They began with cylinder discs (called columns) but found them awkward. Later, around 70 BC, they sliced the cylinders into wafer thin segments, well… read more >>
Brazil or Brasil
ARC is busy building a comprehensive Brazilian collection here at the Library. To our shame there is currently no major institution in the States actively building a comprehensive collection of this great music. Our chief advisor in all this has been Béco… read more >>
Miriam Makeba
It was sad to learn today that Miraim Makeba died. ARC keeps running bios on many artists, so here is our last entry we did on Ms. Makbe, from 1999. We’ll update again soon and send along. Miriam Makeba South Africa nee… read more >>
Paddy Canny
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBONRwNY77c] Paddy Canny 1919-2008 Because his playing was so identified with the “east Clare” style, Canny’s passing is an important moment in Irish traditional music. He was born in 1919 into a musical family (his father was a fiddle player) and had… read more >>
Dan Donates!
A good friend of ARC, Dan Zanes, has done the impossible; donated ALL, not some, no ALL of his LPs to the library. Sure he threw in a nice pile of CDs (841), but ALL’s a lot, or at least 1,954 discs,… read more >>
Smell of meat, tango
Recently, at Jazz Standard, (one of the best rooms for jazz in New York) I heard the Eternal Tango Orchestra. A plus is that the music from the enthusiastically carnivorous nation of Argentina was performed under the rib-infested Blue Smoke, a pretty… read more >>
The Irish Session of the Future!
We have lots of Irish music here at the ARChive (the entire Green Linnet catalog, for example), but I don’t think we’ve got anything like this. Here is a video of someone playing a very convincing set of jigs on a game… read more >>
Helicopter Girl on Hawaiian Shirt Day
It’s a long story: P. went to Sweden as a High School exchange student. P. loved it. Abba dominated the airwaves. P. was an amateur classical cellist. Later in life, P. went back to Sweden to learn to weave. One of her… read more >>
Harry Bradshaw at the ARC
For fans of Irish music, Harry Bradshaw is something of a household name. Although long an engineer and producer at RTE, what he is probably best known is his work researching and reissuing Irish music recorded during the 78rpm era. Indeed, most… read more >>
“Some are dead and some are living…”
Silence of the lambs… Yes it was lug nuts in the carcasses last weekend at the more-or-less annual Lamb Roast and Bulgarian Folk Music & Dance Party upstate at Breezy Hill Orchard near Poughkeepsie NY. Tell me Clarice, how noisy are those… read more >>