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Listening to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on Spotify, sounds to me like an old honky tonk solo piano recording from before world war 2. Lots of pentatonic melod

Listening to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on Spotify, sounds to me like an old honky tonk solo piano recording from before world war 2. Lots of pentatonic melodies. I'd rather listen to Ethopian orthodox choral music: https://youtu.be/F051ninkSWg https://youtu.be/F051ninkSWg Listen to this instead if you want to hear something different from Africa. This recording from 1968 of drummers from Burundi, was later a huge inspiration for Adam & The Ants in the 1980'ies: https://open.spotify.com/track/3Q6un8mTsYxGU9rN1OSje9?si=285c7d0e8c3c48ce https://open.spotify.com/track/3Q6un8mTsYxGU9rN1OSje9?si=285... Here is the backstory https://medium.com/loopandreplay/burundi-beat-the-ants-annabella-and-appropriation-258a804a2176 https://medium.com/loopandreplay/burundi-beat-the-ants-annab...

nerdponx 4y ago
> Listening to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on Spotify, sounds to me like an old honky tonk solo piano recording from before world war 2. Lots of pentatonic melodies. I think that's partly what's so good about it. It's harmonically simple and a little noodly, but has a lot of atmosphere and feeling in it.
- fillest 3y ago
  I wouldn't call it noodly.. If her composition was a bit more complex, it would be close to Debussy level probably. She's maybe like minimalist Debussy :) Check her "Ballad of the Spirits" and "The Song of the Sea".
giraffe_lady 4y ago
What hits me about it is how similar the sense of rhythm is to that of liturgical chant. Things happen at the "right" time, it's not arbitrary, but it's not a priori precise either. Phrases can be as long as they "need to" be and other parts of the music change to accommodate them. It's not fixed to any sort of rhythmical grid and would be extremely difficult to annotate accurately & usefully, but it still has an order in time. Hard to describe but I recognize the feel of it from chant. On the surface it sounds like jazz but jazz has a very different feel to it rhythmically. Phrases expand and contract but through the mechanism of swing. The speed and swing might change but you can always feel the underlying pulse.

nerdponx 4y ago

> Listening to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou on Spotify, sounds to me like an old honky tonk solo piano recording from before world war 2. Lots of pentatonic melodies. I think that's partly what's so good about it. It's harmonically simple and a little noodly, but has a lot of atmosphere and feeling in it.

fillest 3y ago
I wouldn't call it noodly.. If her composition was a bit more complex, it would be close to Debussy level probably. She's maybe like minimalist Debussy :) Check her "Ballad of the Spirits" and "The Song of the Sea".

giraffe_lady 4y ago

What hits me about it is how similar the sense of rhythm is to that of liturgical chant. Things happen at the "right" time, it's not arbitrary, but it's not a priori precise either. Phrases can be as long as they "need to" be and other parts of the music change to accommodate them. It's not fixed to any sort of rhythmical grid and would be extremely difficult to annotate accurately & usefully, but it still has an order in time. Hard to describe but I recognize the feel of it from chant. On the surface it sounds like jazz but jazz has a very different feel to it rhythmically. Phrases expand and contract but through the mechanism of swing. The speed and swing might change but you can always feel the underlying pulse.