On my permanent playlist in the shop, there are a bunch of non-english artists.
Everyone has probably heard of World Order, but I really like them.
Metisse is wonderful.
My kids have gone in opposite directions. My son has gone full Viking, listening to mostly Norwegian and Icelandic neo-traditional music. This is Wardruna:
My daughter has reverted to Japanese. She watches primarily Japanese film and TV, reads lots of obscure (to me) Japanese graphic novels, and listens to Japanese music.
This is from her list of recently downloaded music. Amazarashi:
I just want to add that this thread is wonderful. I absolutely love discovering new music. I keep an eternal playlist, which sits on a hard drive in my shop, and plays continuously on shuffle. Right now, there are about 400 songs, including some videos, which can play on the surveillance monitors.
I want to add Senbai-Rain. It is in english, so somewhat OT, but I really like it.
My tastes are admittedly less Eurovision, although I could see Rambo Amadeus being very amusing,
I more or less came to this via a fairly longstanding acquaintance with Samir Fejzic - we both came out of the Sibelius community (the notation programme, not the composer ), and we have several friends in common in the Canadian jazz scene. Samir is interesting. A fair amount of what he does is ethnic jazz in a piano trio setting, but a lot is pretty much Third Stream… if the patron saint of Third Stream had been Béla Bartók, not Gunter Schuller.
I get the impression that Samir is quite influential as a teacher in Bosnia - most of the people who chat with him there (and there are a lot) address him as “Professore” (not Italian, but vocative case Bosnian), including Muris Varajic. I first heard Muris’s work courtesy of a post by Samir.
When you start YouTubing these guys, Leb i sol eventually shows up in the recommendations:
Not the most popular band in the Balkans, but very likely the most influential. Vlatko Stefanovski was one of the founding members. I don’t know enough to know if they started the fusion of Balkan folk with rock, jazz, pop, etc., but they certainly got in on the ground floor, and very likely did a great deal to popularise it. It appears to be pretty rare for performers from that region not to touch on that kind of fusion in some form or another. I could certainly hear it in Rambo Amadeus.
My non-English music listening is really just Spanish music listening, but this is one of my favorites. This video isn’t the official one, but whoever added the imagery did a good job. The song is 20 years old.
It includes this line:
Las barras y las estrellas se adueñan de mi bandera
Y nuestra libertad no es otra cosa que una ramera
My (non-professional translation) is:
The stars and stripes owns my flag
And our liberty is nothing but a whore
It’s not at all complimentary to the US, but it feels right.
From what I know about Rambo, he was seeking to employ both jazz and modern electronic and hip hop in his work. He studied jazz and some of his less pop stuff is more in that vein.
Yup, but as I say, Rambo does appear to have some Balkan folk in the background. I haven’t really heard anyone from the former Yugoslavia who doesn’t. To my mind, that’s good - the sense of rhythm fits well with jazz and rock.
Ah, yes! So he was the progenitor of what became known as Turbo Folk in Yugoslavia. He was sort of seriously trying to embrace Balkan folk, while mocking the rising tide of nationalism in the post-Tito era. But it became a politicized genre under Milosevic (Eric Gordy talks about this in his book The Culture of Power in Serbia)…
Makes life miserable for musicians. We generally embrace something because we like the tunes (and occasionally enjoy some satire, like Rambo or Zappa - but we still have to like the tunes!), and then they get appropriated to mean something we never intended. So what do we do? Give up something we genuinely like? <sigh>
It’s hard to say, honestly… other than not letting the bastards appropriate the art we love and not letting politicians with agendas control the narrative of art.
), and we have several friends in common in the Canadian jazz scene. Samir is interesting. A fair amount of what he does is ethnic jazz in a piano trio setting, but a lot is pretty much Third Stream… if the patron saint of Third Stream had been Béla Bartók, not Gunter Schuller.