The Resian Folk Group were from the Resia Valley in the Italian Alps. What sets them apart from their countrymen are their folk traditions and language, which seem to have a strong Slovene influence. Canary Records does their usual outstanding job remastering this collection. It sounds absolutely gorgeous considering the age of these recordings.
From the Canary Records Bandcamp site:
“When middle-class Americans in the 1950s found that they could get access to a tape recorder and a microphone, it then became possible for them to make recordings that they could pay to have pressed into discs. One didn’t need to go to dedicated recording studios, most of which had been for decades in the cosmopolitan centers – first New York, then Chicago, then the temporary make-shift, studios set up in hotel rooms Georgia, Texas, Tennessee and Virginia, or the independent studios in Grafton WI, Richmond IN, Los Angeles, etc. It was part of a process of decentralization of the business of making records that exploded into thousands of small labels quickly sprouting up and, more often that not, just as quickly collapsing through the 1940s, the last days of the 78rpm disc in the ’50s, and the parallel emergence of the microgroove 45 and 33rpm formats. Regional bands playing musics in an enormous number of vernacular styles seized the opportunity to include themselves in the marketplace of home entertainment for their own communities.
To get a picture of those communities and of the kinds of music being played and enjoyed in them, one has to encounter the discs themselves. Easier said than done. Of the eight discs presented on this collection, at least half have so far survived without either a trace or a whiff of the fact of the existence anywhere on the digital megamind. So, here was are, “fixing” that as if the potential of them as an experience might open a door to something for someone somewhere.
Meanwhile, if you run into any more discs by Costas Kamanis, send em on over. They’re bound to be very good. “
Canary Records have released yet another treasure. This gem features a collection of tracks performed on gamelan by Entjar Tjarmedi, Enip Sukanda and others. The music is gentle and otherworldly, one worth spending a day sipping coffee to.
The ever-brilliant Canary Records graces us with more Greek theater music and rebetiko. From the release’s Bandcamp site:
“The word “mangas” for instance is untranslatable into English but has remained central to the notion of rebetika. It is a word that indicates a man who does not aspire to middle-class values and knows something deep about how to operate in the world. It has been compared to a “dude” or a “hipster” in their old, early 20th century senses as someone with their own way of being, based on the hardness of life, created outside of societal norms. Some correlate it (accurately, I think) to the contemporary American usage of “gangsta,” just as it was correlated a generation ago to the 1930s usage of “apache” to describe a similar demimonde type in Paris in the 1930s. Spiv. Ruffneck. Motherfucker. Badass. There must be dozens of other possible context-dependent translations. On these old records, we see it translated into English as “hobo” and “bum,” indicating the anti-capitalist and pro-intoxicant lifestyles but with more dismissal and judgement. As an Anglophone, I will likely never have total access to the word in its fullness. It is interesting to notice that as it arose, in the ’20s, it didn’t come out of nowhere.“
Hakki Obadia was a New York-based violinist of Iraqi Jewish extraction. The ever-wonderful Canary Records presents a 25-track collection of wonderfully remastered tracks Obadia did for various labels. The music is a reminder of what Baghdad must have been like a century ago.
Ian Nagoski’s stunningly and consistently impressive Canary Records releases a giant collection of songs from immigrants of the, by then, collapsing Ottoman Empire. These songs span the time period between the First World War and the Great Depression, and are lovingly transferred and curated by Nagoski, whom you can hear in tracks 54, 55 and 56.
Be they Christian, Muslim or Jew, the sons and daughters of the Empire brought so much incredibly good music to America’s shores. It’s a blessing to have these works preserved.
Canary Records are the kings of shellac-era reissues, and this is one of their most fabulous. It’s a collection of female singers who were active in Turkey’s cultural capital, and Ian Nagoski, musicologist and venerable head of the company, has made these recordings sound as clear as possible, despite being around 90 years old. Yet another stunning peek into the past.
Canary Records is one of the best independent labels specializing in archival recordings. This batch comes from Lemko immigrants, who hail from the Carpathian Mountains, and it documents some of the tunes they brought with them to the United States.