The Whole Music Experience

World/Galician   Radio Cos Radio Cos   Folmusica The American song collector Alan Lomax knew a good thing when he made field recordings of Galician music decades ago.  In some ways Galician folk music with its Celtic influences could be mistaken for Scottish or Irish music and in other ways, it sounds like Basque traditional music, some Portuguese traditions tossed in and the musicians sing in the exotic Spanish dialect, Gallego.  Radio Cos performs Galician dance music on Radio Cos punctuated by “aye, la, la” and on one of the tracks, I could have sworn I was listening to a Mexican ranchera (listeners also dodge animated bullets on that song). Romp-stomping accordion bounces along delicious polyrhythms played on the traditional frame drums and tambourines, maracas, violin, gaitas (bagpipes), saxophone and vocals.  The vocals supply us with harmonies and occasionally passionate outbursts.  On Pandeiretada (traditional drum) the music...

Rhythm: Gotta Have It For many years I felt self-conscious about keeping rhythm with other musicians. I thought I lacked a sense of rhythm because a male musician had spread ugly innuendos about me in regard to rhythm, which I won’t describe here. Then I met a woman at a new age shop who wondered why I mentioned that I had no sense of rhythm. Impossible, she said. Then she asked, do you breathe, does your heart beat? We all have a sense of rhythm. Every creatures on this earth from the dog wagging his tail to the rhythms of Bob Marley’s reggae to the squirrel running in staccato up and down the tree. The fish swimming slowly in the murky pond has rhythm, and as we know, George Gershwin got rhythm too, so did Fred Astaire. If you breathe, if you have a heartbeat, brainwaves, and if you walk, talk, sing, dance, run, crawl, or eat, you do so with rhythm. Back in the mid-1990s I came across Gabrielle Roth’s five rhythms, which included among them, “flowing” and “staccato,” to na...

Cree Confederation Pow-Wow Songs Recorded Live at Twenty-Nine Palms CD & DVD Canyon Records Bear Creek Pow-Wow Songs Recorded Live at San Manuel CD & DVD Canyon Records Attending an actual pow-wow provides the best way to experience pow-wow drumming and singing. Recordings, even live recordings remove listeners too far away from the context and the dynamics of the drumming and singing, although present on recordings, acts as a poor cousin to watching the singers and drummers performing, sometimes under pressure of a competitive environment. Having said that, pow-wow song recordings provide musical teaching tools for singers and drummers, as well as, providing archival material for ethnomusicologists. These recordings provide souvenirs for those folks who were unable to attend the pow-wow. Both Cree Federation’s and Bear Creeks’ live recordings feature DVD footage of songs performed in electrically-charged pow-wow environments. You hear the master of ceremony ...

Photo: Nancy Smith-Jones Sounds of the Desert: An Interview with Master Drummer Will Clipman Fans of Native American music and especially performed by Canyon Records artists, need little introduction to master drummer-percussionist William Clipman. The master drummer resides in the Sonaran Desert, a landscape that leaves an impression on Clipman’s playing. Clipman and I have been exchanging e-mail correspondence since I reviewed his solo CD, Pathfinder some time ago. I thought now would be the perfect time to interview him for this healing music blog. Below you will find an unabridged interview with the global beat drummer himself. WME: We had spoken of this earlier how you knew your life path as a drummer since you were a child. Did you want to share your earliest experiences with percussion with the readers of this blog? William Clipman: I started playing my father’s drums and my mother’s piano when I was three years old. I had no doubt absorbed the sounds of these ...

Will Clipman Pathfinder Canyon Records If you have listened to R. Carlos Nakai or any number of Canyon Records artists, you have heard Will Clipman's work on percussion and drums. On Pathfinder , the master percussionist Clipman performs on all of the global percussive instruments himself. The pieces feature polyphonic drums and global percussive melodies--that's right, Clipman plays melodic percussion. The music ranges from whimsical to dance-inducing-hip-swaying and many moods in between. The rhythmic music lifts our spirits and begs us to dance along with it. Sometimes we find ourselves on the African continent, or we find ourselves snaking our way across an American Southwest desert. The drumming comes from ancestors and it hails from the spirit of the present. Clipman who calls himself, Saamokee (a marriage between Saami and Cherokee), finds his shamanic roots while igniting his passion for drumming on Pathfinder . With such titles as, Bodhisattva , Thirteenth Moo...