The Country, Folk & World Recommendation Thread

[Drjohnrock]

I'm amazed by your vast and wide ranging musical knowledge, Safar. Keep 'em coming.

[Safar]

Thx, Drjohnrock. The squirrel eats with difficulty, as we say in Germany. Most of it is "recent discoveries", but looking for new (nuts) sounds for some years now has helped to extend the stock of understanding.

[Safar]

Stephen Wilson, Jr. grew up with his father, the junior followed the senior into the boxing ring as a child before deviating from his father's path to become a scientist and eventually finding his home in songwriting.

Stephen Wilson Jr. - "Stand By Me" (USA)

Guy Clark doesn't just write songs, he crafts them with the kind of hands-on care and respect that a master carpenter (one of his favorite comparisons) would bring to a piece of rare hardwood. Clarks works slowly and with uncompromising dedication to detail... he has produced an impressive range of timeless jewels...

Guy Clark - Magnolia Wind (USA)

A great storyteller and eccentric lyricist, Warren Zevon created some of the most haunting songs of his time and was respected and celebrated by everyone from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen. Zevon grew up in California and studied classical music before moving to New York at the age of 16, where he worked as a folk singer, studio musician and songwriter for The Turtles and later toured as bandleader for The Everly Brothers. His solo career was unsuccessful, however, and he lived on the outskirts of Barcelona, performing in an Irish bar, before being brought back to Los Angeles by Jackson Browne, who produced and promoted his self-titled second album in 1976.

Warren Zevon - Keep Me in Your Heart (USA)

He has played blues, bluegrass and country. His companions include George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Jerry Garcia, Willie Nelson, Vince Gill and Linda Ronstadt. Bromberg is a virtuoso guitarist, but plays the violin just as passionately. When he had had enough of being a musician, he opened a workshop in Delaware and started making violins.

David Bromberg Band - Midnight On The Water (A Texas Waltz) (USA)

Tam-Lin Reel/Glasgow Reel is associated with Davey Arthur who used to play with the Fureys. It is probably based around a traditional melody as the style of flipping between strings is reminiscent of many fiddle tunes.
TAM LIN is a 16th century ballad from the Scottish Borders, it tells the story of Jenny, a girl who defies social expectations to turn a bad situation good, pursue an unconventional love, and then perform a daring rescue of her beloved from the fairy world.

PeakFiddler - Tam Lin /Glasgow Reel (UK)

For 50 years, the cult band from Dublin ensured that melodies and songs from the Emerald Isle also became popular on the European mainland and in the USA. The Dubliners not only conveyed the fun of drinking through their songs, but often also political content. With their music, the Irish folk band influenced a number of colleagues around the globe. Under the title “The Dubliners Encore”, violinist John Sheahan and Phil Coulter, the group's original record producer and current musical director of the upcoming concerts, are bringing the music of the global pioneers of Irish folk back to life on stage.

The Dubliners - The Musical Priest / The Blackthorn Stick (Ireland)

A set of 12 instrumentals – ten originals, two covers – radiantly played by Cape Town-based pianist-composer Kyle Shepherd, double bassist Shane Cooper and drummer Jonno Sweetman, ... This one, then, is a cause for rejoicing, not the least thanks to a sublime cover of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ that finds the trio improvising over those gorgeous rolling chords. The rhythms of West Africa are here, too, oh-so-subtly woven into ‘For Oumou Sangaré’, a glistening paean to the Malian diva that reinforces her status as a pan-African icon.

The Kyle Shepherd Trio - For Oumou Sangaré (South Africa)

Spoiler for Kyle Shepherd Trio - Teardrop/Live in Cape Town 2024:

[Safar]

The only vinyl I bought abroad and carried home. Love the sound of the Shehnai which Ustad Bismillah Khan introduced to Indian classical music. It doesn`t get any better than with this two legends of the Indian classic.

Bhairav raga is an ancient raga that is considered to be extremely old and originated many centuries ago. According to Indian classical vocalist Pandit Jasraj, Bhairav is a "morning raga, and solemn peacefulness is its ideal mood."

Vilayat Khan & Bismillah Khan - Bhairavee Thumree (India/Bangladesh)


Another nice version.

Spoiler for Ustad Bismillah Khan - Raag Bhairav:

Bamboo, a few holes, and it sounds wonderful! This is how Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia described the Indian bamboo flute bansuri. He is considered the most important musician of this instrument.

John McLaughlin · Vikku Vinayakram · Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia · Ustad Zakir Hussain · Uma Metha - Lotus Feet (England/India)

[Safar]

More music from "One Thousand and One Nights".

A reissue of Egyptian producer Ammar El Sherei’s 1976 album Music From the East (Wewantsounds) provides a welcome spotlight for an eccentric but deeply atmospheric blend of Arabic folk compositions with early synth keyboard experimentations, peaking on the 11-minute odyssey Enta Enta.

Ammar el Sherei - Enta Enta (Egypt)

[Safar]

The entire album was mastered and polished at Studio AS One in Warsaw.The growing love of Poles for deep bass, hazy spaces, drums with expression and the idea of creative processing of music in the studio was confirmed by the second part, and now we hope also by the third part of the cult compilation of Polish dub, which is just ready [2009].

Studio As One feat S. Fijalkowski - w ogrodecku dub (Poland)

[Safar]

The Warsaw Village Band (WVB) has shed its skin and transformed its sound for “Sploty”. Heavy bass lines, amplified horns, lots of reverb spaces: WVB goes Dub.
The renewed change in sound has to do with the friendship with producer Mariusz Dziurawiec, a.k.a. Mario Activator, and his studio AS One in Warsaw, which has now lasted over two decades. Mariusz is the producing reggae reference in Poland; he has also been at the controls since the first WVB recordings.

Kapela ze Wsi Warszawa/Warsaw Village Band - Siwa zezulejko (Poland)

Alamaailman Vasarat (translated: "The Hammers of the Underworld") is an avant-garde Finnish musical group formed in 1997. Their music is influenced by European folk, klezmer, jazz and metal. Though not officially disbanded the group has been inactive since 2014.

Alamaailman Vasarat - Vasaraasialainen (Finland)


Vasaraasialainen · Alamaailman Vasarat ℗ 2014 Laskeuma Records

After two decades of living in the US and fronting the successful Afro-pop band Elikeh, bandleader Massama Dogo yearned to release music inspired by his home country of Togo. Now splitting his time between Washington, DC and Togo’s capital Lomé, he set out to create a brand new sound that put his roots and culture on the musical map: the alagaa beat.
Combining iconic rhythms of the Ewe, Mina, Ga, and Kabye people, such as kamou, kpanlogo, kinka and bobobo, alagaa blossoms from a complex interplay......The melodies, too, are anchored in Togo’s cultural history, using unique pentatonic scales known as mina or mami, derived from the music of the local Vodún religion and traditions that permeate everyday life in Togo.

DOGO du Togo & The Alagaa Beat Band - Zonva (Togo)

[Safar]

Eddie Palmieri, born in 1936 to Puerto Rican parents in New York's Spanish Harlem district, grew up with Afro-Cuban music. His musical hallmark is his unusually percussive approach to the piano. Palmieri is regarded as the greatest living salsa bandleader and experimental Latin jazz pianist, who was the first Latin musician ever to receive a Grammy over 25 years ago.
The title track Vamonos Pa’l Monte (“Let’s go to the mountains”) is more than an invitation for urban Latinos to attend a rural party. As Ismael Quintana, legendary sonero (singer) and co-writer of the song, explains: “The lyrics were about trying to cope with the injustices in the world. It meant let’s get out of this crazy mess and so much negativity that we live in, and let’s go to the mountains.”

Eddie Palmieri - Vámonos pa'l Monte (USA)

[Safar]

Started in 2006, the Brooklyn band is made up of musicians from France, Mexico, Venezuela and the US who have been at the forefront of a global movement to revalorize Chicha - psychedelic cumbia from Peru. Like its mentors, Chicha Libre uses surf guitar, organ sounds and Latin percussion to play a mixture of borrowed and homegrown sounds – but its music is a freeform reinvention, not an exercise in nostalgia. The cumbia beats that form the basis of the music are both as inherent and as foreign to them as they were to the Shipibo Indians who first took up the electric guitar.

Chicha Libre - Popcorn Andino (Peru, USA)

Jambú is a plant widely used in Amazonian and Paraense cuisine... Jambú is an exhilarating, cinematic ride into the beauty and heart of what makes Pará's little corner of the Amazon tick. The hip swaying, frantic percussion and big band brass of the mixture of carimbó with siriá, the mystical melodies of Amazonian drums, the hypnotizing cadence of the choirs, and the deep, musical reverence to Afro-Brazilian religions, provided the soundtrack for sweltering nights in the [Belém] city's club district.

Os Muiraquitãns - A Misturada (Brazil)

Choro or chôro is an instrumental Brazilian musical style that probably originated in Rio de Janeiro in the 1870s as a fusion of popular European music (polka, waltz) and the music of African slaves.

Izaías e Seus Chorões - Pedacinho do Céu (Waldir Azevedo) (Brazil)

[Safar]

Drawing on the polyrhythmic Arab sea-music fijiri and wedding poetry, the album marks the first time Ahmed has collaborated with other singers. On opener She Stands on the Shore, vocalist Natacha Atlas’s warm tenor interweaves seamlessly with Ahmed’s plaintive trumpet melody, swelling over bowed bass to evoke the undulating waves....
Lyrics: She stands on the sands of an unknown sea, Her land’s a garden in which the sun walks in the morning, The trees create jewels, Pearls and gold.

Yazz Ahmed - She Stands On The Shore (Bahrain, England)


André von Moos, a professional forest ranger and choirmaster, wrote the jodler about 31 years ago for the wedding of a colleague. It soon became very popular in Switzerland.
The lyrics: (translatet from Swiss German) Little stone man (cairn) yodel.
At the top of the mountain in rainy weather and in the sun, there stands a friendly man without legs, is content without belongings and money, at the top of the mountain, stone on stone, he looks down on all people, can live without a comfortable house and home, the whole world belongs to him after all.

Jodlerklub Innertkirchen - Steimandli Jutz (Switzerland)

Hubert von Goisern (born November 17, 1952 in Goisern, Upper Austria; legal name Hubert Achleitner) is an Austrian singer-songwriter and world musician. His mixture of rock music with elements of traditional folk music makes him one of the most important representatives of new folk music, more precisely of alpine rock. The stage name “von Goisern” alludes to his home town.

Hubert von Goisern & die Alpinkatzen - Da Juchitzer (Austria)

Finest handcrafted music from the Alps. Herbert Pixner grew up on a mountain farm in the Passeier Valley in South Tyrol [Italy], where he learned to play seven instruments, partly through lessons and partly self-taught. Since 2007, he has dedicated himself to his work with the Herbert Pixner Project, which has delighted critics and fans alike with its precise playing technique and interesting melodies.

Herbert Pixner Projekt - Morgenrot (Italy)

Michaela studied accordion and elementary music education at the Hohner Conservatory in Trossingen. She completed numerous seminars and advanced training courses on the Styrian harmonica with Herbert Pixner, among others.

Michaela Fürnschlief - Auszug (Germany/Austria)