Cheryl Keyes was nominated for an NAACP Image Award under the category of “world music” for her debut CD, “Let Me Take You There.” The 40th NAACP Image Awards airs live on February 12, 2009 on FOX.

The CD and Professor Keyes were recently the [...]]]> This just in from the Department of Ethnomusicology Faculty News:

Cheryl Keyes was nominated for an NAACP Image Award under the category of “world music” for her debut CD, “Let Me Take You There.” The 40th NAACP Image Awards airs live on February 12, 2009 on FOX.

The CD and Professor Keyes were recently the subjects of our inaugural EARcast and an extended recording review (with audio examples!) by a fellow scholar of African-American music, Dr. Miles White.  A copy of the album is available in the Archive, ARCD 7175.

Congratulations, Dr. Keyes!

See more information and a full list of nominees [PDF] at the 40th NAACP Image Awards site.

SEE ALSO EARcast no. 1: An Interview with Cheryl Keyes

In 1975, Smokey Robinson released an elegiac album and song entitled “A Quiet Storm” that became the basis for a [...]]]> Let Me Take You There
Published/distributed: Los Angeles: Keycan Records, © 2008
Publisher number: 88450104256
Performer: Cheryl Keyes
Archive Call Number: ARCD 7175

SEE ALSO EARcast no. 1: An Interview with Cheryl Keyes

In 1975, Smokey Robinson released an elegiac album and song entitled “A Quiet Storm” that became the basis for a new radio format by that name and which in turn influenced the development of a number of later styles of African American music such as smooth jazz and neo-soul. Targeted to a largely black, urban and adult audience, Quiet Storm music tends towards lush orchestrations, slower tempos, intimate themes, and impassioned yet restrained performances from instrumentalists and vocal stylists who draw from rhythm and blues, gospel, soul and jazz. Typically programmed in late-night time slots, these formats still thrive at a number of local and college-oriented radio stations in urban pockets across the country. The music appeals as much to lovers as to quiet evenings of personal reflection and welcome solitude, tends to be more sensual than sexual and is often as spiritual as it is soothing.

Let Me Take You There, the multifaceted debut CD by composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Cheryl Keyes, is more than simply an homage to Quiet Storm aesthetics, although it may be that as well since Keyes, a professor in ethnomusicology at UCLA, is an accomplished historian of African American music. Let Me Take You There certainly succeeds as the touchstone for a number of strains in African American music broadly interpreted to take in the eclectic mix of hybrid styles that issue forth from the Black Atlantic, a rich heritage that Keyes acknowledges in the Latin-influenced “Seven Wonders of the World” and “Hyacinth.” On the other hand, in its overall scope Let Me Take You There may be one of the more accomplished contemporary renderings of everything that made Quiet Storm programming an understated though defining musical revolution, one that has perhaps been relatively understudied in black music scholarship. At a moment when most African American popular music is hip hop driven, Keyes’ CD contains no such influences, which may be somewhat ironic since she is a scholar of hip hop music and culture. Then again, everybody’s “old school” is different; Keyes’ old school begins in another era altogether. Certainly the importance of a recording like Keyes’ is that it perhaps illustrates the fact that there is probably a great diversity of black music production that is not being heard over the din of hip hop programming, which has perhaps also skewed record company budgets for signing new artists. Quiet Storm programming has always been more or less an alternative to what was happening in the commercial mainstream.

Quiet Storm programming began in Washington, D.C., with the late Melvin Lindsey, who began hosting a late-night show in 1976 for WHUR-FM, a radio station affiliated with Howard University. The music that became identified with the show and others like it over the years included artists as varied as Grover Washington, Jr., Phyllis Hyman, Frankie Beverly, Teena Marie, Norman Connors, Ramsey Lewis, Jon Lucien, Angela Bofill, Marvin Gaye, George Benson, Patti Labelle and Luther Vandross. In more recent years, neo-soul and smooth jazz performers whose music embraces the Quiet Storm aesthetic range from Brian McKnight, D’Angelo, Erykah Badu and Maxwell to Lauryn Hill, Joss Stone, Jill Scott, John Legend, and Gerald Albright. Many of these performers owe their careers to the format because they were played there before they were played anywhere else.
Keyes composed, arranged and orchestrated all of the music for the CD’s ten tracks in addition to writing most of the lyrical content, demonstrating an articulate command of the full range of black music idioms from jazz and gospel to soul and funk. The album opens, appropriately perhaps, with Keyes handling the bass line with a Moog synthesizer for the mid-tempo funk jam “I’m Feeling Down,” recreating a sound that seemed ubiquitous in the seventies as these instruments were increasingly incorporated into styles of black popular music.

Audio example 1: “I’m Feeling Down”

Perhaps the most whimsical piece on the CD, and one of the most startlingly beautiful, is the melancholic “My Fantasy,” a lament of unrequited love that broods in delicate string and wind arrangements and pianistic flourishes that take on a cinematic sweep. Keyes’ vocal performance reveals a rather astonishing upper-register dexterity that is surprising considering her skill at working a gutbucket blues on the low end. The breathtaking operatic plateaus she achieves on the chorus ending with the plaintive refrain Oh why couldn’t he turn out to be/A friend for me reality or could it be my fantasy?, recalls Sarah Vaughan’s poignant excursions into heartbreak. Keyes’ consummate musicianship not undeservedly invites other comparisons to Vaughan that bear out on repeated listenings.

Audio example 2: “My Fantasy”

“Hyacinth,” a tribute to Keyes’ mother, recalls the fact that Quiet Storm music provided one of the earliest showcases for the instrumental music now labeled smooth jazz, a contemporary style that has perhaps also been understudied by jazz scholars. The fact that it is essentially rhythm and blues-based music probably accounts for this slight, which of course overlooks the fact that the quality of improvisation that is its most essential element is what separates that which is good from what is merely schlock. In this regard Keyes, a seasoned jazz performer, demonstrates consummate skill and virtuosity on both flute and piano, employing multi-tracking to perform the illusion of accompanying herself. The vocal performance reminds one of the joyous flights of improvisational fancy that Dianne Reeves has made her signature.

Audio example 3: “Hyacinth”

“Moondays (A Tribute to Lady Day)” calls up a smoky gin joint somewhere in some American city where in the wee hours of any given morning Billie Holiday might have graced a microphone. Keyes is evocative on her vocals but wisely does not attempt to mimic Holiday’s style. Instead she finds simpatico and communion in the context of the blues tradition using a trio setting with orchestral accents in the background. She takes it in the style of a torch song, vamping at the end and improvising vocal riffs that engage the full vocabulary of idiomatic techniques that any aspiring blues singer should have at the ready. Nancy Wilson once characterized herself as more of a vocal stylist than merely a jazz singer, a way to suggest that she sees no reason why she should accept categorical boundaries. “Moondays” suggests the same of Keyes.

Audio example 4: “Moondays”

“Let Me Take You There” and “It’s Gonna Be Alright” both appear at the midpoint of the CD and reveal the kind of contemporary R&B songwriting sensibilities that have been a staple of African American-derived mainstream pop balladry since about the early 1980s. Neither would have been out of place on the trilogy of albums Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones collaborated on over that decade, and yet they have that timeless quality about them that romantic ballads tend to have. Of the two, “It’s Gonna Be Alright” probably better reveals Keyes’ sense of dramatic timing, using modulations, dynamic shifts, and vocal colorations to create tension that always finds reassuring resolution.  The gospel chorus at the end, a practice that mainstream pop performers began to incorporate into secular material in recent decades, reconnects black sacred and secular traditions that have always coexisted in a variety of musical contexts, and provides a satisfying sense of closure that is uplifting without overdoing the convention.

Audio example 5: “It’s Gonna Be Alright”

Keyes ends the CD with what at first sounds like the most simple of love songs, introducing a descending melodic line on electric piano that forms the song’s recurring motif. The addition of flamenco sketches from an acoustic guitar pulls still more coloration from what has by now been a full palette of compositional techniques deployed with considerable craftsmanship. Like all of Keyes’ material, this song patiently reveals itself over time. Only after the final strains of its lyric have waned does one discover that it is deceptively something other than what it first appears.

Audio example 6: “No One But You”

Popular music studies have probably given short shrift to African American music in those academic settings that bother to pay attention to popular music at all. Where such attention is given, it has largely tended to focus on classes in American popular music defined as rock ‘n’ roll that marginalize all but the most undeniable black progenitors of mainstream rock styles. Jazz has fared somewhat better and gospel has also made inroads over time, which nonetheless renders invisible a diverse range of African American musical styles and performers who perhaps only survive because we cannot help but to continually conjure them up whenever we lift a voice or instrument in song. If that is true, then Let Me Take You There does qualify as a kind of homage to everything that has come before it, demonstrating a stylistic range in its songwriting that is as commanding for its time as Ellington was in his own, and a knowing intimacy with those styles that suggests Keyes has studied the nuance of every singer who has ever mattered in American song. If it is true that you can’t go home again, it does not mean you cannot revisit it, if only in memory and in songs that have the power to conjure up the evidence of things unseen.

- Review by Miles White, Ph.D.

The Dutch Society for Ethnomusicology and World Music ‘Arnold Bake,’ produced this compact disc that contains nineteen selections, twelve [...]]]> Field Recordings of Dutch Ethnomusicologists 1938-2000
Published/distributed: Leiden, Netherlands : Bake Society ; Leiden, Netherlands : distributed by Pan Records, © 2003
Publisher number: AB 9103 Bake Society
Performer: Various performers
Archive Call Number: ARCD 2193

The Dutch Society for Ethnomusicology and World Music ‘Arnold Bake,’ produced this compact disc that contains nineteen selections, twelve of which were collected since 1990, three during the 1980s, and two during the 1970s. The disc’s first two excerpts feature Arnold Bake’s 1938 journey of India and Sri Lanka. Part of a Sinhala folk performance from Sri Lanka, “Kalamaitu” interchanges singing with a flute solo consisting of two alternating high pitches. Drums, and perhaps shell rattles accompany this selection. Bake (who taught my dissertation advisor Dr. Nazir Jairazbhoy) traveled to nearby Karnataka in Southern India where he recorded a ritual of a young girl that included “Hadaga.” A drone instrument accompanies her.

Among the remaining selections, “Urai Nangnangin” from Siberut, an island off the west coast of Sumatra, stands out because the island’s music is unlike that found elsewhere in Indonesia, and because unlike the other collectors, Gus Schneemann died as a result of fieldwork. He succumbed to malaria at age 28 during his 1986 fieldtrip a few weeks after collecting the example on the compact disc. Near the end of a healing ritual, a group of medicine men were consulting a chicken’s stomach that they consider to be an oracle. Just before this, the soul returned to the sick individual, hence he? she? was healed (the sex of the person is not indicated). Sung in a wide vibrato and sustained pitches, the music consists of a phrase repeated or slightly varied that, after three ascending pitches, descends in a jagged line. The phrase is sung more and more out of tune each time it is performed, until at the end it is about a fourth lower than in the beginning. While Western unaccompanied singers may not be aware of this while performing, such practice may be intentional in Siberut and perhaps other non-Western societies.

For two other selections, the performers’ ethnicity is not prototypical of the region. The Vlachs are Romanians who settled in Epirus, Northern Greece. Although the notes accompanying the compact disc suggest a Turkish modal influence, the music is closer to that found in Bulgaria, because of complex meters such as 28/16, than that of the best known Turkish music such as that accompanying belly dance and whirling dervishes. A clarinet, violin and a plucked string instrument, the lauto accompanies the strophic song ”Sygkathistos.” With the exception of the Arnold Bake selections, this is the earliest example. Unfortunately, since Wouter Swets’ 1970 fieldtrip to Epirus, he realized that he failed to obtain information about the lyrics or the musicians.

The Kalmyks are Mongol Buddhists who settled in Southern Russia. According to Erika Bourguignon and Lenora Greenbaum’s Diversity and Homogeneity in World Societies, only five of the 412 clusters they examined contain societies from a neighboring region, the Kalmyks being one of them. The music style is closer to that found in the nearby former Soviet republics of Central Asia, than that of Mongolia and its neighbors, such as Tibet; however, their two-string lute (dombra) is typical to Mongolia. They are known for their fast, energetic dances whose performers tend to be old female singers In this example, the fishing song “Kök Tengs,” the meter and tempo resemble that of a tarantella, with a garnoshka bell marking each downbeat. The zithers and horsehair fiddles died out, the accordion having replaced them.

Through the church, Western music is prototypical of Northern Sulawesi and the Moluccas. Although colonial music is found elsewhere, especially in Java, Saparua Island in the Moluccas, the region under consideration, is not known for the gamelan. The song “Oh Beilohy” accompanied by a lead and accompanying guitar, and a dustbin used as a drum, praises a small village. The singers hail from various churches. The song resembles Polynesian sacred music, but the lead guitarist’s performing style of bending pitches is similar to Mississippi blues.

Of the nineteen selections, one is a solo, four are solos with an accompanying instrument, five small ensembles, and the rest, large ensembles or ensembles of unknown size. A folk instrument maker performs a yueqin (moon lute) solo from Yunnan, China. The remaining solos are vocal: the girl’s ritual song already mentioned, an Afghan ghazal in which a former Radio Kabul singer accompanies himself on the two-string dambura plucked lute, a bhajan from India with harmonium accompaniment, and a selection from Malawi featuring a speaker accompanying himself on the malimba nyonga-nyonga, a lamellophone similar to a large mbira. The small ensembles are: two male rappers originally from Caracas, settled among the Yanomami society of Venezuela’s Amazon region. An unnamed drum accompanies them. One male singer performs the Cypriot phonos genre to the accompaniment of violin and lauto. Two girls sing a Yunnan love song, with the soloist mentioned above and his friend on the three-string plucked sanxien lute accompanying them. A Malian griot singer performs with a guitar and a lute called a ngoni. They render a bimodal, ancestral praise song. The guitar is tuned to major, but the ngoni to mixolydian (in etic terminology). The singer performs primarily in the latter mode. The remaining small ensemble renders the Vlach song mentioned earlier.
Among the seventeen collectors are six ethnomusicologists, five anthropologists, three musicologists, one unknown (perhaps a member of the community where the music was found), one music journalist, and one Sinologist. The latter established the European Foundation of Chinese Music Research. One of the ethnomusicologists majored in theoretical physics, but while teaching mathematics at the University of Malawi, became interested in the native music of that country. The ethnomusicologist who collected Kalmyk songs and dances is also a Tuvan throat singer. Like the Kalmyks, the music of Tuva, which borders Mongolia, uses the two-string lute.

Overall, the collection is biased toward Asia, with eight nations represented. Three examples were collected in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia, two in India, two in Yunnan China, and one example for each of the remaining nations. Oceania is represented by a single example, a church anniversary celebration in Tuvalu. South America is represented by Venezuela, Africa by Mali and Malawi, and Europe by Greece and Southern Russia. Despite the bias toward Asia and post-1990, this compact disc is an important contribution toward ethnomusicology.

- Review by Sam Parnes