A Discussion on "How-To" Enjoy World Music

By Dave Jones

During the Connected Living Discussion Group on the theme of "World Music," the crowd at The Kenwood in Chicago came alive tonight -- once they realized that they could dip into the World Music websites and listen to these exotic new strains of music any time they liked -- all they had to do was get on a computer, click into the Internet on CLN and type in www.worldmusic.net on the Google bar. 

Andrea Bocelli singing in the Roman Coliseum was a popular listen, as usual, which was followed by a hushed listen to Malam Mamane Barka playing the West African Biram Harp (truly an "exotic" sound for most everyone in the room -- no-one present had heard this kind of mesmerizing, poly-rhythmic music before; only one man barked out "We aren't dead yet -- turn that stuff off!").  Then we were asking around the room to hear what kinds of different cultural sounds people already knew and enjoyed.

Storyteller Fran Eaton called out for a song by The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band, which got a few people up in the back of the room dancing.  Scandinavian traveler Jeannette Allen wanted to hear a piece of music played on the strange Swedish hybrid of viola and autoharp known as the Nyckelharpa.  When we started searching more deeply in www.worldmusic.net, people wanted to hear some haunting Fado songs from Portugal and the Cape Verde Islands.  Resident Laverne Corona had traveled to Morocco years ago and wanted to punch in some Moroccan music on our "World Jukebox," so we obliged with several airy, chant-like songs that sounded like modernized renditions of a muezzin's prayers. 

Earlier in the evening, in our Web Tour of How-To sites, we had visited places that celebrated communities putting together Theater and Musical ensembles, especially enjoying a clip of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland playing and singing in a big group of "teen-aged" swing musicians in Strike Up the Band.  As popular music goes, the general opinion was that contemporary TV shows like "Glee" don't have anything on the kind of starry-eyed, putting-on-a-show stories that Hollywood was producing 70 years ago.  This was "real music" seemed to be the prevailing feeling in the room.

Still, by the end of the night, people were asking lots of questions and taking lots of notes about web addresses where they could find some more of that fascinating World Music we played.  Best of all, the ones who were writing down the web addresses were going to be able to find that great wealth of "new" music all by themselves.