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The Alan Lomax Archive is pleased to announce the launch of its Global Jukebox imprint, through which it will make its vast repository of international field recordings available. Global Jukebox will produce LP, CD, and digital albums drawn from the thousands of hours of traditional and vernacular music recordings that Lomax collected around the world from 1933 to 1991. Partnerships with folklore institutions, indie record labels, university presses, and the digital distributor IODA will ensure both a grassroots and global approach to repatriate Lomax’s recordings from around the world, back to the world.
Global Jukebox is the Archive’s first independent imprint. Its inaugural releases are five albums commemorating the 50th anniversary of Lomax’s storied “Southern Journey” in the American South — the first-ever stereo recordings made of traditional music in the field. Albums forthcoming in 2011 include, Lomax’s debut recordings of bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell; a companion album to the new John Szwed biography Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World; a hardback book and two-CD set dedicated to Alan’s trip through Asturias, Spain — “the land at the end of everything”; and the launch of a series of artist curated compilations, for which guest musicians “Play the Global Jukebox,” and include an exclusive recording of their own. These first five titles were made available weekly starting mid December 2010 and comprise:
Wave the Ocean, Wave the Sea
You can find streaming audio/slide shows here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcRB062Ay1M
Worried Now, Won’t Be Worried Long
You can find streaming audio/slide shows here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2sTm5cowGY
I’ll Meet You On That Other Shore
I’ll Be So Glad When the Sun Goes Down
I’m Gonna Live Anyhow Until I Die
Alan Lomax (1915-2002) is considered America’s foremost folklorist, perhaps best known for making the debut recordings of American legends like Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Jelly Roll Morton and Woody Guthrie on behalf of the Library of Congress. But his independent explorations into the world’s traditional music took him beyond his outstanding recordings of the American South to song-hunting throughout the British Isles, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Romania, the Caribbean, and the former Soviet Union, and won him a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammy Foundation.
Over the past twenty years the Archive has overseen the release of over a hundred album, book, and film productions — including the 2006 Grammy-Award winning Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings box set. This past year the Lomax Archive produced the 9-CD Alan Lomax in Haiti 1936-1937 box set, which is part of their Caribbean Repatriation Program to return copies of the music to its sources. In addition to the commercial releases, the music is being given to museums and schools in Haiti and other Caribbean repositories. Lesson plans have been created from the music and local community welfare organizations have taken the music directly to the temporary camps in Haiti to offer some level of comfort and healing. Large groups at the camps have heard and sung along to the recordings — the sounds of their traditions and past.
Alan Lomax’s career was dedicated to the cause of “cultural equity”: the fundamental right of every culture to express and develop its distinctive heritage of songs, dances, and stories. The launch of Global Jukebox is an exciting continuation of Lomax’s efforts to make sonic space for the world’s musical traditions.
http://culturalequity.org/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alan-Lomax/137779512793
http://twitter.com/CulturalEquity
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlanLomaxArchive