Showing 31-40 of 247 results
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Tunes for the chill season
Life, John Clewley, Published on 09/11/2022
» The music scene has been given a boost this year with the return of tourists and the reopening of entertainment venues. Festivals are returning to the provinces this month and the local circuits for rock and luk thung are back, too. The summer festival season in Europe, Japan and North America also returned and coincided with lots of summer and now winter music releases. The World Beat desk is groaning under the weight of new music.
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Preserving heritage
Life, John Clewley, Published on 22/11/2022
» Field recordings of ancient, traditional music in the Southeast Asia feature in this column. Northern Khmer Spirit Music in Thailand – Kantrum Dongman (Animist Records, 2022) covers the traditional music of "Northern Khmer" people in provinces like Surin, Buri Ram and Si Sa Ket that straddle the Thai-Cambodian border in Thailand's lower Northeast, while Exploring Gong Culture Of Southeast Asia: Massif And Archipelago (Sub Rosa, 2022) covers traditional gong music from 50 different ethnic groups in the Philippines, Borneo, Sulawesi, Vietnam's highlands and northeast Cambodia.
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Mambo madness
Life, John Clewley, Published on 02/08/2022
» Latin music has been circling the globe for more than a century, creating dance crazes and inspiring local forms of music. From tango to reggaeton, with stops for mambo, rumba, son and salsa, bolero, Latin jazz and more, the Latin music juggernaut just keeps rolling on.
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A woman in a man's world
Life, John Clewley, Published on 19/07/2022
» US R&B legend Big Mama Thornton is one of the forgotten "originators", to use Dr John's term for Professor Longhair, of rock'n'roll. The late Alabama native, who died almost exactly 38 years ago on July 25, 1984, recorded the first version of Leiber and Stoller's Hound Dog in 1952. After the record was released in 1953, it reached the top spot on Billboard's Rhythm & Blues Records Chart and sold 2 million copies. It was her biggest hit, but it paled in comparison to young Elvis Presley's version, which sold more than 10 million copies and helped propel Presley to global fame.
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Seen and heard
Life, John Clewley, Published on 11/10/2022
» It has been nearly 30 years since Dr Grace Nono released her first album on a new label, Tao Music, which she set up with her late partner, producer and guitarist Bob Aves. With her musical collaborator, she set about searching for her musical identity.
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The sounds of the jungle
Life, John Clewley, Published on 10/05/2022
» The acclaimed traditional music ensemble Fong Naam was founded in 1981 by American Bruce Gaston and "Teacher" Boonyong Khetkong. Even after the death of some of the original masters, all of whom were national artists, the band remains Thailand's most well-known musical group internationally.
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Magnificent molam rides again!
Life, John Clewley, Published on 26/12/2017
» This year's party at the Jim Thompson Farm in Pak Thong Chai, held each year at the same time -- the farm opened to the public for six weeks -- was a fun affair. The Farm Tour for 2017 is about the importance of water in the country's northeastern region, as reflected in the title, "Rushing Water -- The Life Force Of Isan".
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How world music fared in 2016
Life, John Clewley, Published on 03/01/2017
» The Merriam Webster dictionary named "surreal" as its word of the year for 2016. It's a relatively new word that was only included for the first time in 1967, which was around the time "psychedelia" emerged as a style of rock music; think of Jimmy Hendrix's guitar pyrotechnics from the time as an example. Psychedelic rock took off and rapidly split into subgenres like psychedelic soul and the whole Funkadelic/Parliament movement that brought psych guitars to the funk groove.
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The country king
Life, John Clewley, Published on 01/03/2022
» In July 1973, songwriter and DJ Surin Paksiri organised a pleng luk thung concert at the Ratchadamnoen Boxing Stadium in Bangkok. He wanted to hold the event in a park or at a big cinema, but both of those options were too expensive. He settled on the boxing stadium, and he called the concert "Luk Thung Isan vs. Luk Thung Pak Klang" (Isan Country Music vs. Central Country Music).
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Songs of hope
Life, John Clewley, Published on 07/06/2022
» The award-winning Canadian-Czech singer and composer Lenka Lichtenberg was going through her mother's effects in 2016 in Prague when she made a startling discovery. She found two small notebooks that belonged to her artist grandmother, Anna Hana Friesova (1901-1987). Inside each notebook, small enough to fit into a back pocket, were poems written while she was imprisoned in the Terazin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp during WWII.
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