Before there was "world music," there was the influential Nonesuch Explorer series of record albums. From 1967 to 1984, Explorer opened the windows on many distant cultures, providing rare glimpses of exotic, tribal, and ceremonial music from both hemispheres. Nonesuch is now reissuing the entire 110-album series, cleanly remastered for CD, beginning with 13 discs covering Africa. In Africa, music is considered a life form, and rhythm is its lifeblood. These Explorer field recordings introduced many ears to that vitality as it surged through drums made of hollowed gourds and chanted vocal cadences on tracks like the frenzied "Tuareg Medicinal Chant" from West Africa, an otherworldly Malian call-and-answer ritual performed only to heal the sick. Nubian oud master Hamza El Din and the High-Life dancehall bands of Ghana are also standouts. Some of the music here has since infiltrated the global pop landscape. Still, much of the heritage that passed through slave songs and into our American songbook is intact here - like undistilled ancient donno drumming, Ugandan folk whistles, and witchcraft dances of Kenya. Some may find songs about hunting hippos merely quaint. But what's really ear-opening is not the primitive verve but the musical sophistication. The precise layering of melodies and complex beat variations are models for creative modern music everywhere.
--Tristram Lozaw