Secret Museum of Mankind 4 / Various

I love this entire series. It's an incredible collection of early and authentic music in its pure state: not-yet-cross-pollinated by musical globalization. Can't recommend highly enough. This collection, as with all of the Secret Museum of Mankind discs, provides many tracks you'll never hear the likes of elsewhere. Great for world music lovers, vintage music collectors, and any musician or music lover looking for new, clean sounds for their ears.

The Secret Museum of Mankind series is a wonderful collection of music and musicians from around the world and across time. The notes give a lot of insight about this stage of "world" music. The music is beautiful and amazing. If you have ecclectic musical tastes - you will be very happy with any of the CD's from this series.

Magnificent curations. Truly. Nowadays everybody curates their own playlists, and we may have really lost sight of how instructive the kind of great curation is, or can be. How much has changed since 1997!In listening to these discs, I often find myself lost in a Post - Cagean reverie, where I speculate on the reasons one track follows another:Similarity of texture?Contrast of texture?Similarity of tempo?Contrast of tempo?Et CeteraThe mind, the ear, and the connections they make. Well, whatever these connections are, and whatever they mean, they feel pretty perfect. I can't live without this one.

This is a collection of recordings that was compiled by a man named Pat Conte, a New York postal worker who has collected old recordings of music from around the world. His collection focuses on music recordings from before World War II, the 20's and 30's. Conte's collection includes several recordings that are so rare that the only known copies still in existence are there in his keep.The music contained in this and the other volumes in the series can transport one to a time and place that existed before anything like a golobal economy, before chia-pets, before TV's and CD's and DVD's and American pop culture. These recordings were captured when sound recording technology was brand new. The imperfect artifacts from the recording processes used are audible on the CD and remind the lister of how far we have come. When you play this music listen for the culture, for the history and for the simple humanity. There's a lot to enjoy.

This series offers music selections from around the world, not glossy studio productions by famous "world beat" musicians, but honest music played and sung by musicians still close to their sources. One of the best pieces on CD #4 is Mbube by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds, a song known to the English-speaking world as "Wimoweh" or "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." Mbube gave its name to an entire style of South African all male a cappella music, still practiced by well-known artists such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The CDs in this series are worthy additions to any collection of ethnic music.