Author: Kim Simpson

The fiddle of London-born Dave Swarbrick sounds like the very essence of the sixties-and-beyond British folk revival. He made it sing with a distinct combination of wisdom, lamentation, and (especially) humor, and fiddlers have been using his sound as a role model for half a century now. Although he was among the first to plug into an amplifier and breathe fire as he would do alongside Richard Thompson in Fairport Convention, the Dave Swarbrick identifier that might open the ideal playlist is this 1976 instrumental version of “Byker Hill.” It’s a 9/8 reinterpretation of a miner song that he and Martin Carthy had originally recorded with vocals in 1967, but this one, from his solo debut LP Swarbrick, gambols and spins so effortlessly that even though it clocks in at five minutes — twice the time of the earlier version — it could go on for another ten or fifteen minutes and you’d be too entranced to notice.

“Heydarbaba” (2011) – Sari Gelin Ensemble * Written by Mohammad-Hossein Shariar and B. Kerimov * CD: Azerbaijan Traditional Music * Label: ARC

The notes for this disc on the ARC label, billed to the Lök-Batan Folklore Group, credits the “emotive vocals” of Zulfiya Mamedova, who’s female, but the bonus track at the end features an uncredited male vocalist. He’s Gochaq Askerov of the Sari Gelin Ensemble, and he’s singing a musical rendering of the Iranian Azerbaijani poet Mohammad-Hossein Shariar’s “Heydar Babaya Salam.” It’s a mountain of a poem expressing Shariar’s childhood memories of a real, geographical mountain near Tabriz, Iran. Written in the Azer dialect, the verses won a place in the hearts of all Turkic nations to the extent that it brought Shariar’s dialect acceptance in Iran, while certain phrases in the poem became Azeri idioms. A full translation of it can be seen at Azerbaijan International. Music credits go to “B. Kerimov,” who is also credited on YouTube versions by the Azerbaijani vocalist Rubabe Muradova (1930-1983).

“Strand” (1967) – Boudewijn De Groot * Written by Boudewijn De Groot and Lennaert Nijgh * Netherlands 45: “Strand” / “Referein Voor…” * Label: Decca

A Dutch singer-songwriter with a successful 50+ year career, Boudewijn de Groot’s first single appeared in 1964. It’s called “the beach” and enumerates, in rapid-fire fashion, all the memorable things that can happen there: sunburn, fights, poker, hanky panky, crosswords, car crashes, french fries, keggers, arrests, and if translations are reliable, swimming “like a rat.” The Beach Boys this ain’t.

“Add Some Music to Your Day” (1970) – The Beach Boys * Written by Brian Wilson, Joe Knott, and Mike Love * 45: “Add Some Music to Your Day” / “Susie Cincinnati” * LP: Sunflower * Produced by the Beach Boys * Label: Brother/Reprise

A non-Top 40 charting hit in 1970 (#64 on Billboard) with, for the Beach Boys, uncharacteristic acoustic guitar breeziness. The song’s harmonies served the Beach Boys especially well during their 50-year reunion shows. The road does get a little bumpy, though, when Mike Love goes “there’s blues, folk and kun-treee and rock like a rolling stone,” and again when Bruce Johnston goes “Your doctor knows it keeps you calm.” One imagines Brian Wilson being able to sing lines like those with charming naivete, but in the mouths of Love and Johnston they sound poorly chosen. At 2:45 you can hear the same eerie high-register string parts the Walker Brothers used on their “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.”

“Adam et Eve dans le Paradis” (1960) – Frank Schildt * Trad. Arr. * LP: Songs of Love, Play and Protest * Label: Folkways

Frank Schildt was a Dutch folksinger with a stentorian vocal delivery. All seven of the languages he uses on his only album, Songs of Love, Play and Protest, come at you full throttle. After moving to the US in the late fifties and working the folk scenes in New York and Chicago during the folk revival years, his activities go undocumented. One of the album’s clear highlights comes from the island of Martinique where, as he explains in the notes, the French missionaries found its inhabitants abiding in the nude. Charitable clothing donations were immediately sent for, leading to an eventual protest at mission HQ, in which the islanders, all sans vêtements, sang “Adam and Eve in paradise.” The lyrics, as Schildt translates them in his liner notes, go as follows: “Adam and Eve in paradise wore no clothes, so why should we wear them? Tonight we are going to dance with no shirts and pants.” Schildt delivers them here with the gusto of a dirty-minded schoolboy.

“Musandine” (c. 1978) – Donald Kachamba’s Kwela Band * LP: Simanje-Manje and Kwela from Malawi * Label: Popular African Music

The Kachamba Brothers—Donald (pennywhistle) and Daniel (guitar)—are a useful starting point for exploring the music of Malawi, which tends to maintain an irrepressibly cheerful sound. The Kachamba family benefited from the attentions of Austrian ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik, whose writings and films eventually made it possible for them to tour worldwide. The genre the Kachambas helped concoct is known as kwela, or “pennywhistle jive.” “Musadine” is a track that appeared on a 1999 German CD reissue of their 1978 Simanje-Manje and Kwela from Malawi album, first released on the Kenyan A.I.T. label.

“Our Love (Don’t Throw It All Away)” (1977) – Bee Gees * Written by Barry Gibb and Blue Weaver * Produced by Barry Gibb, Albhy Galuten, and Karl Richardson *  LP: Bee Gees Greatest (1979)  * Label: RSO

For the 1979 Bee Gees Greatest compilation, the Brothers Gibb included their own previously unreleased 1977 recording of “Our Love (Don’t Throw It All Away),” which younger brother Andy had taken to Billboard‘s #2 slot in late 1978. Their own version has an easier sound and arrangement, truer to the chorus’s bossanova breeziness that deserves more presence. For the Andy version, writer/producer Barry tacks on an unnecessary bridge that calls for more vocalizing that strays further from that precious chorus, while the outro’s closing yacht ride gets spoiled by too many falsetto seagulls. So the Bee Gee one is the best version, and the era’s fusion masters (imagine Joe Sample or Bob James or Ramsey Lewis using the chorus as more of a central hook) missed an opportunity with it. But Andy’s version does anticipate the ’80s, the era of big bloated radio ballads that counted overstructuring as a virtue.

“Alberta” (1977) – Opo * Traditional arrangement by Opo * LP: Opo 2 * Produced by Job Zomer * Label: Stoof

Dutch version of a traditional song that Leadbelly had recorded as early as 1935 and which Bob Dylan credits to himself on his Self Portrait album. Opo transforms it into an expression of desperate desire. The singer is Lenneke De Vries, who, like many folkies from her era, sounds refreshing and clear in the context of the croaky and flip hipster present. By the final verse, when she sneaks into the brass bed from Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay,” and the mandolin strums like a palpitating heart, you’ve stopped what you’re doing and gaze off, listening with longing of your own.

“Acceleration” (1982) – Bill Nelson * Written and produced by Bill Nelson * 45: “Acceleration” / “Hard Facts from the Fiction Department” (Cocteau) * UK LP (MiniAlbum): Chimera (Mercury)

British composer Bill Nelson’s expansive catalog, including his ’70s work with Be Bop Deluxe, now seems to overshadow his new wave credentials, his moment in the early ’80s when freshly-conceived American alternative rock stations like Los Angeles’s KROQ played him with regularity. The radio industry never categorized these stations as “new wave,” although it may as well have, and Nelson techno-pop tracks like “Flaming Desire,” “A Different Kind of Loving,” “Empire of the Senses,” and “Acceleration”—all of which appeared on his US Vistamix compilation—shimmered with new music authority and, even though they never charted in the US or UK, helped calibrate these outlets’ overall sound. After this, Nelson would follow the zigzag course of the musical experimentalist, but listening back to “Acceleration,” in particular, brings to mind the forward-motion giddiness of the new wave pop radio era. (New wavers like Nelson wore their Motown-mania on their sleeves. Listen, let sit, then see how “Acceleration” reminds you of the Temptations’ “The Way You Do the Things You Do.”)

“Canoeiro” (1959) – Dorival Caymmi * Written by Dorival Caymmi * LP: E Seu Violão * Label: Odeon

After the Brazilian singer-songwriter, actor and painter Dorival Caymmi died at 94 in 2008, the New York Times‘ Douglas Martin wrote of him as the man who “helped lay the foundations of bossa nova, [who] wrote Carmen Miranda’s first hit and gave legendary voice to the romance of the beaches, fishing villages and bathing beauties of his native Bahia.” He also refers to a quote from his colleage Ben Ratfliff, who called him second only to Antonio Carlos Jobim in “establishing a songbook” of “Brazilian identity.” Caymmi’s songs charm you with their humble simplicity. His “Canoeiro” (canoeist), for example, is a three-minute voice-and-guitar piece expressing an ocean of gratitude for a solitary fisherman’s craft.