Folk

Okbari: Armenian and Anatolian Folk Music

Sam

What the folk?

Okbari explore Armenia and Anatolia

Raise your hand if you know where Anatolia is.

Liars.

That’s unfair. I’m sure some of you were geography majors in college and are totally aware of Anatolia’s crucial place in the creation of civilization. You might also know it as Asia Minor (that’s a place I could pick out on a map), the peninsula that forms the Asian part of Turkey and was named by the Greeks in reference to that land east of Constantinople (now known as Istanbul, as any They Might Be Giants fan is well aware).

As the bridge between Asia and Europe, it is very much the Middle East and saw Phrygians, Cimmerians, Lydians, Persians, Celts, Tabals, Greeks, Assyrians, Armenians, Romans, Goths, Kurds and many more cultures set up shop among its mountains and plains between the Black and Mediterranean seas. As you might imagine, that has led to an incredibly rich culture in what is now Turkey, and Okbari have done us all a serious service by honoring the memory of their mentor, Alan Shavarash Bardezbanian (aka Al Gardner), with a 14-song disc exploring the musical heritage of Anatolia and Armenia, a musical heritage Bardezbanian brought to Maine, virtually unassisted for decades, before he died far too early in late 2006, at the age of 56.

The unassumingly titled Armenian and Anatolian Folk Music is enjoyable on its own merits, with impeccable playing of often upbeat and danceable tunes that ought to appeal most to bluegrass and math rock fans. It is also, however, a reason to think about a region of the world most of us don’t know a great deal about.

Okbari have done this for us before. Amos Libby and Eric LaPerna released a self-titled disc this time last year, and introduced themselves to Portland and beyond with their debut full-length, By the Banks of the Red River, in 2004. Both times, I marveled at their ability to take the foreign and make it familiar, in a time when so much of our attention is focused on the very volatile part of the world from which the pair take their musical inspiration.

What they most succeed in doing is conveying a sense of how old and textured this music is. Compared to the poppy indie and radio rock that mostly comes across my desk, this sounds positively ancient, which, of course, it is. My favorite tune, “Rompi Rompi,” is popular enough that I found a translation telling me it’s about a savvy trader named Rompi who’s encouraged to “let Halime’s navel jiggle.” The song has swagger, with LaPerna’s quick percussion punctuated by hand claps and Libby’s vocals seemingly unable to resist cries of “hai!” (This is apparently the song to play for a dancer who requests a “karsilama,” or song in 9/8, and Wikipedia tells me that some international folk dance clubs do a line dance to the piece.) 

Without trying to get too political, it’s hard not to think about how arrogant Americans are when you hear this stuff, like a bunch of toddlers refusing to listen to their parents. Our 300-odd years of history seem like the blink of an eye compared to the millennia that have gone into the creation of these folk songs. The range of the stringed oud, both bassy and bright, is like the breadth of the region’s history.

Some of the coolest contrast comes when cultures seem to collide. In “Elimon Ektim Tasa,” a brief 2:20, the oud opens things with ripping single notes, then is joined by a clarinet that could double as a kazoo. Sometimes, the song could be the happiest you’ve ever heard, which may not always jibe with Western impressions of Turkey and its larger region. “Chinarboyev” features Libby’s voice rolling and fluctuating like the latest American Idol, though the lyrics are delivered with the crisp intonation of a lecturer in applied physics.

Or how about this for traditional meeting contemporary? If you google “Telgrafin Telleri,” the title of track five, the first result is a Youtube video of the comely “Jennifer” entertaining a crowd with a plenty-sexy belly dance accompanied by Snakes Rising. Technology is a wonderful thing.  The longest song here at 5:51, “Telleri” is the closest thing Okbari get to a lament, with a spare oud opening evolving into a strum that supports a quavering vocal.

It’s a moment to reflect on Bardezbanian’s impact on Okbari, but they don’t let it linger. Their take on the rest of his personal favorites is just too fun for looking back.

Roy Davis: We Are a Lightning Bolt

Sam

Lightning strikes

Weather the storm with Roy Davis’ third LP

When Hank Williams sang a song like “My Son Calls Another Man Daddy” he could sell it because he’d been down low: born with spina bifida, father with a paralyzed face thanks to a stroke, brother he never knew because he was already dead. And when Williams died at 29 no one was over-much surprised, since he’d been drunk most of the time he’d been alive anyway.

It can be fun to sing country songs about lives busted-up and broken, but unless you’ve got the empathy to feel those hurts, the songs just become the clichéd joke mainstream country music has often found itself.

So whatever it is that Roy Davis experienced in his travels over the past year down [this was early 2010] to Nashville and over to Wyoming and back, you’ll be thankful after you hear We Are a Lightning Bolt, his third full-length release and the record on which something important seems to have clicked. The twang and the lilt of alt-country were always there, but somewhere in the country’s small towns and wide open spaces Davis put his hands in the country’s dirt, too, and his always-smart songs have never been so fully realized, so full of real people, as they are here.

Recording down in Portsmouth with Jon Nolan — himself no stranger to great alt-country sounds, but never as dark as Davis is here — and helped out with “Dregs” like Kerry Ryan (Jeremiah Freed) on drums, Travis Kline (an up-and-coming solo artist in his own right) on guitar and backing vocals, Bernie Nye (Pete Kilpatrick) on banjo and bass, and Justin Maxwell (the Coming Grass/Sara Cox/Cindy Bullens) on bass, Davis seems to have needed to get out of his comfort zone, feel what it’s like to truly be uncomfortable, in order to make the record he’s been trying to make all along.

I still listen to those first two records—Grey Town and Deadweight. They’re good. And I like that Ryan Adams/Jayhawks/Uncle Tupelo sandbox in which Davis plays. But on the first listen, I heard something different in Lightning Bolt. Right around “Barbara Lang,” it struck me that Davis had discovered a pipeline to pathos, where chimes of piano match his tentative reaches into a squeaky falsetto like Townes van Zandt, and “he sits at a bar by the Super 8/ She cooks him food, but she waits.” Ryan’s shuffling drumline gives the song texture like sandpaper while “we get up, go get coffee/ Walk around like a couple of darlings/ Just as sweet as the sun.”

Nolan captures vocals especially well, as when you hear Davis close the “k” on “boardwalk,” part of a naked vocal part over cello and indie-rock-flavored alternating notes, before the song charges up with a heavy acoustic strum and a wood-block beat into an alt-country orchestra, staying all-instrumental through the finish where a pair of laconic electric guitars harmonize. And on “Stranger’s House” every instrument is so terrifically crisp that the pedal steel in the song’s second half is like liquid amber pouring over dry, brittle sticks.

In that song, as on album-opener “You Don’t Have to Fall in Love,” Davis explores the nuances of relationships, the degree expressed by a line like “I’m not going to fight you in a stranger’s house/ I’m not gonna give you what you want right now,” in that voice-crack of knowing that can come through with a simple “oh, honey.” The implied plea in “you don’t have to fall in love” he can make heart-breaking.

By the album’s end, Davis seems almost stripped of emotional charge. The songs become more and more bare, as presaged by the 2:02-long “Sweet Release,” where a father does his best to crush the life out of his son: “By now you’re old enough to know your mother’s dead/ And everything’s a lie … maybe you’ll fix cars, or drink yourself to death.” And so, with the finishing track, the falsetto is ever more warbly, the guitar most ghostly, the lyrics more plaintive: “I need a fix/ I need to be fixed/ For ten dollars I’ll sell all my things/ And there’s nothing that I won’t admit.”

Maybe Davis does have a secret or two. He sings with the depth of a man who’s got a few skeletons in the closet. For a songwriter, that can never be a bad thing.