To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929

Audio Compact Disc

Label: Tompkins Square

Category: International

To What Strange Place: The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929

UPC: 894807002608

Release Date: 06/28/2011

Original Release Date: 06/28/2011

Number of Discs: 3

Thom Jurek

With all the 20th century reissues of "lost," "undiscovered," and "private press" field recordings by obscure groups, outsider musicians, and songwriters are coming to light -- and market -- more than ever before. Tompkins Square's To What Strange Place: The Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929, curated and compiled painstakingly by Ian Nagoski, may be one of these, but it is also a breed apart. Simply put. Nagoski's three-disc collection assembles recordings made mostly in New York City between 1916 (the year before the United States entered World War I, and the year after the Anatolian genocide that killed 2.5 million people) through the first year of the Great Depression. Geographically speaking, while situated in the ethnic neighborhoods and ghettos of New York, these artists are "off the boat" Armenians, Syrians, Greeks, and Sephardic Jews. They all came from lands contained within the Ottoman Empire which stretched from Persia to the tip of Austria and recorded in New York. Musicians from these different cultures inhabited small ghetto enclaves and neighborhoods in Manhattan; they frequently played in cafes, taverns, gatherings, and elsewhere. Some had day jobs while others were professional musicians who toured as far west as Detroit and Chicago. Disc one is made up of celebratory love songs and dance numbers and is subtitled "Naughty Girl: Dances & Joys." The second disc contains songs about the harsh realities many of these musicians faced in America as well as songs of nationalism and homesickness; it is subtitled "I Wish I Never Came." Disc three, subtitled "Notes from Home," collects recordings actually made overseas and issued -- or pirated -- by American labels. There are a whopping 56 sides contained here. Enough not only for an aural portrait, but for a story to assert itself authoritatively. This music is strange, magical, and full of deep emotions, ranging from ecstatic joy and wild rage to sorrow too deep, perhaps, to calculate, let alone be embraced by, the average music listener. But that doesn't mean one shouldn't try. Listing individual artists here would be meaningless because it's the package as a whole that really matters. It is a powerful and enigmatic statement made all the more poignant by the strange splinterings of American culture in the present century along falsely nationalistic, political, social, racial, and class lines. The sound quality here is as fine as can be, coming from the source material; the entries are painstakingly annotated with biographies and anecdotal and cultural information, and the presentation in the eight-panel digipack is lovely. Ultimately, To What Strange Place accounts for a beautiful and labyrinthine Americana, one that stretches confines of the definition of the word itself. It is an essential document for collectors of world music, but also for those interested in the unsung personas that created 20th century America. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi