Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music-making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical, and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.
These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped.
Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the ones here), in which every tune gets discussed – the first is a South African miner’s protest against police brutality, the last a sultry Cuban dance tune whose singers sound like they might have been hitting the rum while recording.
This sonic smorgasbord from across the globe lives up to the provocative title, with music from Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico, and elsewhere. Ever wondered what the Crimean Tartar Orchestra might sound like? Well, their raucous, minor key, brass party music is fabulous.
The album is the work of Jonathan Ward, a collector of old 78rpm records who started his website Excavated Shellac in 2007, posting up a recording every day. Avoiding Robert Johnson, Geeshie Wiley, and other such blue-chip 78-era collectibles, Excavated Shellac focuses on music recorded across the non-Anglo world, offering a glimpse into myriad communities at the dawn of recorded sound. “When people think of early recorded sound – if they ever do – they tend to think of early American jazz music,” Ward says.
“We’ve been told for decades that those are the primary performers and performances to revere, but every country had their own roots musicians, their pop bands, their entertainers and troubadours.”
Ward is a Los Angeles-based “metadata tsar” who works in the field of museum documentation. Applying the same scientific rigour to his record collection, he has gained huge amounts of information on recordings where there has often been very little, becoming one of the world’s foremost authorities of the 78rpm era.
“My collection slowly and constantly grows and shrinks,” he says, picking up new finds on travels abroad but more often “through private connections and via the global marketplace, for lack of a better phrase. Maybe all collections are just representations of a collector’s state of mind at any given moment. Mine certainly is. That said, I’m not sure if it takes any real talent to collect – mostly just patience and money.”
For listeners who love to travel via music, An Alternate History is a perfect project for our current confinement: here, it says, is humanity at its most creative and playful. “Many people who are not steeped in this subject can be just as fascinated and moved by this music as I am,” Ward says. “They just need an entry point, an on-ramp of sorts. Some of this music might seem to alienate as it dropped down from another planet, but it’s real music by real people, and it’s been right here all along.”
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