Beginning Is A Moving

My blog has a photographic component.  Tradition suggests I add two photos per day.  I haven’t had taken any photos for days now. Puttering about the house uninspired, I suppose.  Its clogging up my publication schedule.  I’m going to go out tomorrow and just photograph some stuff in the immediate surroundings.  Verdant if dry in most seasons, Beijing is fairly bleak come December.  Fauna such as it was, has also split the scene.  So we have cars, and road and dust and skeletal bare trees.

I’ve stumbled, once again, on to some outstanding material on this mega playlist someone has sagaciously curated on Youtube.  This list is entitled “Jazz - Funk - Soul - Disco - Afrobeat – Afrofunk.”  I’ve been unearthing gems from this remarkable list for last few weeks.  One understands implicitly that there are ever deeper strata of rare funk, afrobeat, salsa, releases to uncover, especially in this fertile recording period of, say 1965 to 1980.  Going through rapid discovery though is to relive the distilled joy of teenage music discovery, when it not only gave you joy, but gave you a certain power of knowledge.  Most people wouldn’t agree that what you’d found was good, but you’d be credited with an acknowledgment of something that whiffed of authorship itself.  Yes, I’ve been sharing cuts with my crucial musical intimates. 

This list has six hundred and thirty six “videos” some of which are single songs, and some entire albums.  I’ve found samplings in each genre that have slapped me back.  And consistently I’m humbled by how little I recognize.  Especially in areas where I think I’ve been reasonably completist about things:  half the bulbs laid in the garden of West African gemstones are new discoveries.  By the time I reached the sixth-hundred-and-thirty-sixth entry I headed back to the beginning immediately.  Arriving it’s clear the “beginning” is a moving target.  More “videos” have been added.  An animate list, I’m happy to discover. 

Soon I was deep into a song by Konde Mangue et Les 5 Consuls' Orchestra.  Glorious!  1975.  I might have thought it was a bit earlier.  I didn’t need to check to know it was from West Africa, but where?  I look on-line and It is listed as Upper Volta, which is, of course Burkina Faso.  The guitar work and the drumming sound like a few other albums from Ouagadougou, I tell myself, now that I already know.

The author of this hoard is apparently “Alexander Mac-Lean.”  I’ve looked and he’s managed to keep his persona beyond the first page of google searches.  There are some cuts on here that I recognize, but Alex man, you’ve driven robust archeology with this blossom of musicological exploration within clear parameters of refined taste, unearthing pounds of things that would have taken me another few lives to have searched out, back when all I had were record stores.  Salut!