MUSIC

Here's a great one. This is from Death Is Not The End, a great place for digging up antique music from all over the world, from pre-war blues to immigrant music and South American folklore. It's also a great place to dig for antique music from all over the world. This Japanese project follows on the heels of Katsutaro Kouta, which was released in 2018 and was very popular in our store, and contains haunting and unique sounds that show how cultural fusion with the West was beginning to be reflected in popular songs before the influence of Western pop music during the post-war American occupation. This is a work that every Japanese should be exposed to at least once.

Hand-picked by Take It Acid Is, a beautiful collection of drug-themed tracks from the early era of jazz and blues. Featuring the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Cab Calloway, and more of the usual suspects. When it gets low, it gets high! Also features Victoria Spivey, Barney Bigard, Chick Webb, Fats Waller, Stuff Smith, Julia Lee, Don Redman, Lil Green, Jerry Kruger with Cootie Williams, Helen Ward with Gene Krupa, and Trixie Smith.

The A-side includes hit songs with "boogie" in the title, such as "Tokyo Boogie Woogie," a big hit that earned her the nickname "Queen of Boogie. The B-side includes important songs other than "Boogie" such as "Bugle and Musume," "Ire Kutasaya," and "Tayori ni Matterase," her debut song composed by Ryoichi Hattori, and "Koi no Step," which was recorded under the name Shizuko Mikasa, and other valuable sound sources.

Here's a great one. This is from Death Is Not The End, a great place for digging up antique music from all over the world, from pre-war blues to immigrant music and South American folklore. It's also a great place to dig for antique music from all over the world. This Japanese project follows on the heels of Katsutaro Kouta, which was released in 2018 and was very popular in our store, and contains haunting and unique sounds that show how cultural fusion with the West was beginning to be reflected in popular songs before the influence of Western pop music during the post-war American occupation. This is a work that every Japanese should be exposed to at least once.

Here's a great one. This is from Death Is Not The End, a great place for digging up antique music from all over the world, from pre-war blues to immigrant music and South American folklore. It's also a great place to dig for antique music from all over the world. This Japanese project follows on the heels of Katsutaro Kouta, which was released in 2018 and was very popular in our store, and contains haunting and unique sounds that show how cultural fusion with the West was beginning to be reflected in popular songs before the influence of Western pop music during the post-war American occupation. This is a work that every Japanese should be exposed to at least once.

Ajdin Asllan was born in Leskovik near the present-day southern border of Albania on March 12, 1895. At the age of 30, on July 12, 1925, he married a girl named Emverije, who was one month shy of her 16th birthday, in her native town Korçë, about 80 miles north. He arrived in New York by himself less than a year later on September 20, 1926, and when he filed his Declaration of Intent to become an American citizen in 1928 as a resident of Detroit, he gave his occupation as "musician." Emverije joined him in New York City on July 27, 1931. Asllan appears to have made his first recordings in November 1931 as a clarinetist on four songs issued as 12” discs by Columbia sung in Albanian by K. Duro N. Gerati. In January 1932 he recorded again, this time singing and playing oud on three Columbia 12”s along with several Albanian singers and the violinist Nicola Doneff (born March 21, 1891 Dichin, Bulgaria; died July 19, 1961 New York). In 30s Asllan launched an independent label called Mi-Re (roughly “With New” in Albanian) Rekord primarily to release his own recordings, but it stalled out after about 6 releases. In October 1941 he accompanied a Greek singer and songwriter named G.K. Xenopoulos as an oudist along with the beloved Greek clarinetist Kostas Gadinis and accordionist John Gianaros for the Orthophonic subsidiary of Victor Records run by Tetos Demetriades. The trio of Gadinis, Asllan, and Gianaros cut another four sides for Orthophonic May 1, 1942. Shortly thereafter, Asllan relaunched his label as Me Re with the help of Doneff and then quickly renamed it, more generically, Balkan. Gianaros came in as a business partner, and Balkan released scores of records, some of them seemingly selling thousands of copies in the mid-40s, but Gianaros split angrily with Asllan after just a few years over money problems. By 1947, Doneff had trademarked the Kaliphon label, which drew from much of the same roster of New York musicians of the Greek- and Turkish-speaking performers as Balkan and apparently collaborated in distribution, marketing, and manufacturing into the 1950s, but some business distinction had been drawn. A third label, Metropolitan, was launched and became at catchall for further Greek, Turkish, Armenian, and Ladino material by New York players, but it's not clear who was in charge or how things were divided up. Maybe Metropolitan was started by Asllan as a separate business to dodge the taxman or old creditors? We don’t know. All three labels shared a standard black-on-red color scheme that, it would seem reasonable to guess, was based on the Albanian flag and Asslan’s original, core purpose as an artist and impresario. Adjin and Emverije lived during the 1930s into the 50s first at 143 Norfolk St. and then at 42 Rivington St. (where Asllan opened a record shop), in Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Eastern European Jewish immigrants surrounded the small Albanian community and Turkish-speaking Sephardic Jews, and abutting Little Italy and a strip of Greek coffee houses on Mulberry Street. He worked within a network of primarily Turkish- and Greek-speaking performers in New York and released recordings prolifically made both locally and overseas through the 40s and 50s. He corresponded with his brother Selim (who sings on track 1, side A, later worked on the radio in Tirana and co-founded the National Ensemble of Folk Songs and Dances) back home, who was able to secure masters of Albanian performers recorded in Istanbul and Athens along with performances by Turkish- and Greek-speaking stars including Rosa Eskenazi and Udi Hrant (both of whom subsequently made extended visits to the U.S.) Greeks and Armenians had, even at the low ebb of immigration during the 1940s-50s, substantial immigrant populations in New York and around the country - Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and many other cities. Those markets kept the Balkan label afloat for nearly 20 years. But Asllan also issued about 40 discs for the Albanian-language market ca. 1945-50 (at which point he retained a 500-series numbering scheme for them, picking up where he’d left off with his Me Ri label a decade earlier), including both folk music of southern Albania and choral music, much of the latter anti-Fascist Communist songs. In addition, three discs were issued as part of Balkan’s Greek series of uncredited musicians from Pogoni and Konitsa, towns about 30 miles south as the crow flies from where Asllan was born. The total Albanian-speaking population in the U.S. at the time was less than 10,000, and many couldn’t afford record players. But despite the small market for Albanian-language songs, he made sure to release discs for his countrymen. It was a time of immense political and social turbulence in both Albania and Greece, and the sense of duty to music is palpable in his work. Balkan’s business model was haphazard. Its numbering system, if one can call it that, indicates a tendency to start a series, then add to it - or not - sporadically, driven largely the question, “can we sell 500 of these? (And if so, can we sell 1000?)” The last Balkan 78s were issued around 1959; a few LP releases appeared around 1960, more than 20 years after Asllan released his first discs. We know he visited his native home and family in 1951, 25 years after having become American. He died in New York in October 1976. He had no children, save the records. ========= We have so far been able to trace a biographical narrative of only one of the other immigrant performer among those who play on this collection, Chaban Arif, who apparently sings on track 9. He was born May 22, 1899 in Berat, Albania, attended school through the second grade, and arrived alone at Ellis Island on November 2, 1920 at the age of 19 under the name Aril Shaban. His intention upon arrival was to meet up with a cousin, Mahomet Hajrules (who, in turn, had arrived only six months earlier under the name Mehemet Airula) in Southbridge, Massachusetts. However, there was a family of four from Shaban’s hometown on the same steamship who were headed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (via a stop first at the south Philadelphia home of a relative), so Shaban wound up in Pittsburgh. He filed his first papers to become a U.S. citizen in Canton, Ohio in 1925, but he had returned to Albania in June of 1928, where he married an 18 year old woman named Nadire, and by 1931 had returned to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where he was working at the Duquesne, Pennsylvania Carnegie steel mill. (When his cousin Mehmet Hajrulla filed his Declaration of Intent to naturalize as a U.S. citizen in 1937, he was a widower living on Braddock Ave. in Pittsburgh and working as a painter.) The 1940 census found Shaban Arif relocated to 55 Clinton St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about seven blocks from Adjin Asllan’s place on Rivington. Arif told the census enumerator that he worked 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year for $916 a year (about $17,000 a year in today’s money) at the counter of of a restaurant. The man he listed on his WWII draft registration card as his closest contact was named Kardi Braim, who gave his country of origin either as Albania and Macedonia on different documents, had himself worked for a brick manufacturer in Erie County, Pennsylvania in addition to a string of other laboring jobs and worked at the time at Stewart’s Restaurant. It would seem reasonable to guess that both Shaban Arif and Kardi Braim were in Adjin Asllan’s limited social circle of Albanians in the neighborhood in the early 1940s when he recorded on this song. The $1 that the disc cost could have represented three and a half hours of labor at the restaurant. We know nothing else of Shaban Arif’s life except that he died in New York City in September, 1971. (Kardi Braim died in 1978.)

80 page book with over 50 photos and a 21 track CD. Printed in Belgium by die Keure. Designed by John Hubbard. "Zabelle Panosian sang one of the most amazing notes I've ever heard - so much humanity, sorrow, promise, infinite longing. When I write my novel the main character will be Zabelle's note." -David Harrington, Kronos Quartet "Please listen to the Armenian singer, Zabelle Panosian. [Her ‘Groung'] is a secret song that steals away the breath of those who are fortunate enough to hear it." -Nick Cave "A carefully crafted and detailed, yet succinct biography. Many of us were introduced to Armenian-American singer Zabelle Panosian’s soul-jolting rendition of “Groung” via the 2011 release of To What Strange Place, but here, in Zabelle Panosian: I Am Your Servant, for the first time, we travel with Panosian from her birthplace in Bardizag to her home in New York. We are there in the studio with her at Columbia Records for her historic recordings in lower Manhattan, and we stand with her in the radio studios of WEAF. We become readers of reviews of Panosian’s concerts both celebrated and scathing. We accompany her on performances, minuscule and grand from Waterford to Providence and San Francisco to Fresno, eventually recrossing the Atlantic with her to sing in France, Italy, and Egypt. More than a singer or performer, we learn of Zabelle, the estranged sister, the loving aunt, and the mother who passes the baton to her daughter, Adrina Otero, completing what will be the starting point for future historians or ethnomusicologists wishing to explore Zabelle Panosian and her legacy.” -Richard Breaux, Associate Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Among the most significant Armenian singers in the early twentieth century, Zabelle Panosian made a small group of recordings in New York City in 1917-’18. Unaccountably, she was then largely neglected as an artist for more than half a century. This volume by three dedicated researchers is the first effort to reconstruct the life and work of a woman who had an exceptional and cultivated voice — who toured the world as a performer and made a significant contribution to the cultural lives of the Armenian diaspora, the elevation of Armenian art song, and the relief of survivors of the Armenian genocide. Panosian’s music is derived from a syncretic experience of the Western Armenian village near the sea of Marmara where she was born and a passion for the coloratura sopranos she encountered in Boston. As an immigrant carrying the traumas of dislocation and the loss of her home, she transformed her grief into action, dedicated her life to an expression of the greatest art she could imagine, both from her former life and her new life in America, and she created a path in her wake for her daughter to become a renowned dancer. Tracing her story from the Ottoman Empire to New England, from the concert halls of Italy, Egypt, and France to California, Florida, and South America through two World Wars, the story of Zabelle Panosian is that of a serious talent recognized and celebrated, dismissed and forgotten, year by year, waiting only to be known and loved again.

A historical archive of nine years of Japan's earliest SP recordings, dating back as far as 1903, is now available, from the beginning of the 20th century to 1912. Legendary producer and recording engineer Fred Gaithersburg traveled the world recording for Gramophone, and this groundbreaking compilation is miraculously published by Sublime Frequencies. Simple and complex, alien and familiar. From gagaku (traditional Japanese court music), shakuhachi (bamboo flute), shamisen (three-stringed Japanese banjo), storytelling, and folk songs, this is a unique commercial recording that gives us a glimpse of Japanese classical culture, even a shadow of 19th century Japan, and is a historical document of the beginning of Japan's domestic record industry. The third in the label's series of early Asian recordings, the compilation and liner notes are written by sound artist Robert Millis (Climax Golden Twins), who has produced the previous two releases.

Following up our early 2020 tape The Sun Is Setting on the World with a further collection of hardcore rebetika recordings from the 1930s through to late '50s. More songs of sorrow, poverty, loss and the end of the world.

Mike Hanapi (1898-1958), a famous steel guitarist and vocalist from Honolulu, Hawaii, left behind one of the greatest collections of pre-war Hawaiian music in the 20th century with his Kalama's Quartet. This is the long awaited analog reissue of the original 78rpm disc with remastering! This is a miraculous reissue of a number of recordings that have never before been reissued in any format. Gorgeous falsetto voice with a bottomlessly beautiful clarity and presence, and harmonious voice with a backing band as rich as a lonely yodel. Purely acoustic instruments such as lap steel guitar, ukulele, and harp guitar are gently woven into the vocal melodies, creating fluid, harmonious layers and hauntingly beautiful blue notes. This is truly peaceful, serene, and unique music. Reverse board jacket, 8-page full-size booklet with biography, rare photos, and full lyrics in Hawaiian and English.