There is someting incredibly beautiful about the first glimpse of an unknown city in twilight. ———— gave us a shock in the evening light. It was so unlike any of the European towns we knew, yet neither did it remind me of any Eastern cities…People were dancing in the restaurant. The stars were up in the dark sky over the dark trees. The dance band went on and on, melancholy music with a lively rhythm. The sound of laughter. A drunken singer went past our van, his voice stumbling like his feet.
Otherwise I had grown fond of the desert’s austerity…It is only the smell of shish kebab hanging around the cafes and street corners which gives character to the Islamic quarters in a city.
-Men and Music on the The Desert Road, Deben Bhattacharya
Deben drove from Paris to Calcutta in 1955 and recorded 40 hours of music in villages, cities, and desert camps along the way, starting in a girls school in Salonika, Greece and ending with temple bells in West Bengal. A single sampling on LP was released in 1956 and Frank Zappa said that he listened to it every day when growing up in southern California. Freak Out! would not have happened otherwise, perhaps.
A four CD set was just released with Deben’s field notes and diary published for the first time. In some recordings he had to cajole tribesmen into giving him a recital. Other times he’d stop in a village and ask around for ”the musician” to identify himself. It was a bit like Paul Bowles’ method in Morocco, recording tribal and city music for the Library of Congress at about the same time.
In 1984 I rode from Sudan to Egypt on a camel drive and had with me a small cassette tape recorder, player, and radio. On the radio we heard about the outbreak of the renewed Sudanese civil war, an attack on a Chevron oil camp not far to our south. On the cassette we played Hanan Bulubulu’s “Zurni Marra”, Visit Me Sometime, a love song, which drove the drovers wild. It wasn’t bad. Prince had the top hit in the US that year, When Doves Cry. Hanan and Prince should have recorded a duet.
But mostly I recorded work songs- at the wells and when driving camels, and also poetry at the campfire, chitchat between the drovers, and some straight up interviews with them, especially KhairAllah who seemed to like the microphone best. These recordings were all low-fi and sand in the gears slowed the speed to make them sometimes almost unrecognizable as human speech.
Back in New York I played the recordings for Alan Lomax who said the well working songs reminded him of throat singing. This was not quite true but they were unusual all the same because of the heavily stressed and syncopated vocal strikes made at each breath exhalation of the two drawers’ alternating cranks while working on a two handled drum to wind the long rope up from the deep well.
As the drum cranking and winding got more and more tiring, the leather bucket becoming heavier and heavier, the pitch, deeper, and speed, faster, of the double vocalized exhalations changed, until the bucket reached the surface and a third man emptied it into the trough while shouting the word, Barra, Outside. Then there was silence other than a splash of water. Either live or as recorded sound, an unexpected splash of water in the desert cannot help but jolt you to attention.
The men liked reviewing the recordings I had made of them. They seemed to like most these work songs. They also liked Polaroid picture portraits we took of them until the camera broke down. They would pull out the pictures from their vest pockets and listen to their voice recordings at the same time. Four years later I made a documentary film about them.
