A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF LIEUT GEN A. YANI

As it says, a short biography of General A. Yani.... General Ahmad Yani was the Commander of the Indonesian Army, and was killed by members of the 30 September Movement during an attempt to kidnap him from his house in 1965.... GET IT HERE Enjoy!

PIDATO BUNG KARNO

Here's a cassette with speeches from Indonesia's first President, Sukarno, or as he was lovingly called, Bung (brother) Karno.... GET IT HERE Enjoy!

GEORGE DELERUE, HALIM EL-DABH & OTHERS - SON ET LUMIERE PYRAMIDES ET SPHINX

A sound-track recording from the "Son et Lumiere" which took place in the areas of the Pyramids,Sphinx and Citadel of Salah el Din. It involved a large number of Arab and foreign archeologists collaborating in choosing historical materials and sounds, with music composed by Georges Delerue and Halim el Dabe. Featuring a score for voices and celebrated actors presenting a spectacle of sound and light. This record set documents the project and was produced by The Ministry of Culture and Information in the Arab Republic of Egypt. This record is in French, apparently there's also an English version and it seems both versions, French and English are quiet rare.... GET IT HERE Enjoy!

EARLY MUSIC QUARTET - CARMINA BURANA - AUS DER ORIGINAL HANDSCHRIFT UM 1300

Here's music made from the Codex Latinus Monacensis 4660, known better as the Carmina Burana, not to be confused with the beautiful Carmina Burana by Carl Orff that used the same source material, composed in 1935 and 1936....

The accompanyments reveal the extensive influence exerted on medieval European musical performance by Arab culture, instruments like the long-necked flute (balowa) and the hour-glass drum (darabukka) were used, so, I guess that makes this a very, very early example of exotica music :)

Bit of a confusing task to record this record, the A side is pretty straight forward but the B side.... It lists 13 songs on the cover, 12 songs on the label of the record but there's only 9 separate songs on the record it self, so I lumped a few titles together in the 16th song, probably made some mistakes there, but hey, you've got the whole record.....

GET IT HERE

Enjoy!

SONGS FROM GREEK PARTISANS 1941 - 1945

Here's a cassette with songs from the Greek partisans fighting the Nazi occupation from 1941 till 1945.... Bought this cassette some 30 years ago when I was staying in Athens for a month, wanted to go there after reading, among other books (Xenophon, Herodotus etc.) the Illiad and the Odyssey by Homerus, a fantastic holiday, visiting the ruins of the old palace where Atreus and his son (or grandson) Agamemnon were living, in Mycenae, the theatre at Epidaurus, the Parthanon and much more, my only regret is that I didn't visit Delphi and that I didn't buy any of the big bags full of war time original photographs taken by soldiers from the occupying force....

You can read more about the Greek resistance here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Resistance

GET IT HERE

Enjoy!

KAMAL EL MALAKH, DR. IBRAHIM AHMED & GAMAL SALAMA - THE STORY OF TUTANKHAMUN

The story of Tutankhamun, The Golden Pharaoh, son in law of the heretic king Akhenaten.... Written by Kamal El Malakh and translated in English by Dr. Ibrahim Ahmed, music composed by Gamal Salama....

Some of the oldest instruments known to man were employed in recording the musical score... These instruments now exist only as museum pieces... The exceptional instruments employed as well as the tune in the recording date as far back as the days of Traditional Egyptian Pharaonic musis, slowly becoming extinct nowadays.

What a cool album! This came out in 1973, comes with a lovely booklet with beautiful pictures and the story about discovering and excavating the tomb of Tutankhamun as told by Howard Carter who discovered and excavated the tomb with Lord Carnarvon and his daughter, Lady Evelyn Herbert in 1922.... Tutankhamun's life, what we know about it, is told also....

Takes me back to the early 80's, watching Egyptologist/historian John Romer's fantastic BBC series Ancient Lives which I watched again on Youtube some months ago, reading loads of books on the subject (philosopher Paul Brunton's beautiful book A Search In Secret Egypt comes to mind)....

GET IT HERE



Enjoy!!!

BUNG KARNO - DI PBB TAHUN 1960

Here's the speech that Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, gave at the United Nations in 1960 (in English)......

GET IT HERE

enjoy!

SOEHARTO BAPAK PEMBANGUNAN INDONESIA

This is a propaganda cassette, came out in 1983 when the dictator Soeharto and his regime were still going strong....

I started living her at the end of `1996, I still remember when he was president, Indonesia was another country, very, very different from now, very isolated, all news was controlled and censored. You didn't see much police on the streets (like now) all you saw was the military everywhere. If you started to talk about politics or "The Family" Indonesian people would just get up and leave, it was too dangerous to talk about these things openly... You would see him and his family on tv every day, all the time and there were propaganda movies on tv all the time....

When he and his regime went down in may, 1998, things got CRAZY and I was in the middle of it, lucky to get out alive and in one piece really. I had a trip home to Rotterdam planned on the day that everything went crazy. I was trying to make my way to the airport in Jakarta, Suharto was supposed to land there that day on his way back from Mekkah (he didn't land there he landed at some military airfield) and I was in a taxi. Got stuck in the tens of thousands of people demonstrating on the toll road to the airport and people started breaking the windows of the taxi to get at me. Only the quick-thinking of the taxi driver saved me, and he managed to get out with me hiding under a blanket. He drove me back home, all the way to Bandung and the next day I tried reaching the airport again, by train. The train never made it to Jakarta, at Purwakarta the whole train station was on fire, an incredible big fire and after waiting for a while buses came to bring all the passengers to Jakarta. A young English couple with a little daughter, about 3 years old or so were sitting in front of me. Saw them later om tv, getting dragged out of a taxi, mercilessly beaten and robbed.....

The bus arrived at Gambir train station in the center of Jakarta and it was already dark. The city was burning, riots everywhere, huge groups of people running around and i was walking completely alone with my backpack through all this madness trying to reach Jalan Jaksa, where all the backpacker hotels were, not too far from Gambir. Soldiers with tanks would shout at me, telling me I was crazy, a foreigner all alone in all that madness.... Came to Jalan Jaksa and everything was closed so I decided to try and take a taxi again to the airport... Got into the taxi and the driver was a huge, giant guy with a big ass afro, must've been 300 pounds at the least and he started driving into a completely wrong direction so I got a bit scared, I'm not ashamed to say it, there were warnings about violent robberies (two English boys were found later at the toll road with their necks cut through), but we had a conversation, about all the craziness going on and at one point I said "Alhamdulillah" and I guess that saved me. He started calling me his brother and turned the taxi around and brought me safely to the airport....

The airport was deserted and very spooky which was very weird because the day and the night before it was pandemonium there, foreigners and specially Chinese Indonesians trying to get tickets out of the country, to anywhere, for exorbitant prices...

I got a flight to Holland easily, in no time. Was planning a month in Holland but I was back within two weeks, didn't want to let my (Indonesian) wife and daughter alone, things stayed very tense for quiet a while, somebody only had to shout RIOT!!! and people would just run, shops would board up and close, loads of demonstrations, but in Bandung not much happened....

Man what times.... Only a very, very small number of foreigners remained in Bandung, you could count them on two hands maybe, very special times..... Times of high hopes, hope for freedom, the hope that the incredible corruption under the former dictator and his regime would now stop....

Well......

People will not leave as quickly when you start about politics and there's much more freedom for the press, that's true.... The middle class that was virtually destroyed during the crisis that brought about the end of Soeharto is enormous again but the poverty has also gotten worse, the difference between the super rich and the very poor has only grown, corruption never had been as bad as it is now, and there's a lot, a lot more going on....

There's quiet a bit of nostalgia here on the island of Java for those times that Soeharto was in charge.... I'm not so sure if many of these people remember what was really going on back then and if you would like to get a feel about how those days were I can certainly recommend reading this book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10313047-indonesia-betrayed

Or maybe this book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248074.The_Mute_s_Soliloquy

Or even this excellent book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2602190-the-wisdom-of-whores

Or to understand what the Soeharto regime stood for, maybe you could watch these movies, the best movies I've seen about Indonesia:





Personally... I look back on those times with a sense of nostalgia, I was living here, there wasn't much news coming in from the outside, a few letters from friends every now and then, no internet, just starting out here with my wife and daughter, living in a different house every year (rent would always double at the end of the year because they would know there was a foreigner living there), we didn't have much, a tv, a refrigerator, it all went very slowly, but not with a sense of nostalgia for the old dictator and his murderous regime.....

Anyway, it's a very, very lengthy cassette I'll have to give it to you in two parts....


PART ONE

PART TWO

enjoy!

KARYA CIPTA: ISMAIL MARZUKI VOL. 2

Ismail Marzuki (also known as Bang Ma'ing; 11 May 1914 – 25 May 1958) was an Indonesian composer, songwriter and musician who wrote between 202 and 240 songs between 1931 and 1958, including numerous popular patriotic songs. Among his best-known works are "Gugur Bunga" and "Rayuan Pulau Kelapa". In 1968, he was honoured with the creation of the well-known Taman Ismail Marzuki (the Ismail Marzuki Park, often called TIM) which is a cultural centre in Menteng in central Jakarta. In 2004 he was declared one of the National Heroes of Indonesia.

Here's a cassette with some of his songs, sung by Sudharnoto, Adikarso and Paul Irama.....

GET IT HERE



enjoy!

John Hammond, producer of the original BILLIE HOLIDAY recordings discusses them with Dan Morgentern of Downbeat Magazine....

John Henry Hammond II (December 15, 1910 – July 10, 1987) was an American record producer, civil rights activist and music critic from the 1930s to the early 1980s. In his service as a talent scout, Hammond became one of the most influential figures in 20th century popular music.

Hammond was instrumental in sparking or furthering numerous musical careers, including those of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Big Joe Turner, Pete Seeger, Babatunde Olatunji, Aretha Franklin, George Benson, Freddie Green, Leonard Cohen, Arthur Russell, Jim Copp, Asha Puthli and Stevie Ray Vaughan. He is also largely responsible for the revival of delta blues artist Robert Johnson's music.

Here he discusses recording with Billie Holiday and the 30's and 40's jazz scene with Dan Morgentern of Downbeat Magazine....

GET IT HERE

enjoy!