Sunday, February 12, 2017

Jean Mazel Moroccan Field Recordings via Tuluum Shimmering


Here's a vintage stash of folk music field recordings made and released in the 1950s and 1960s by one Jean Mazel, a French cinéaste and ethnologue, about whom I can find little information online. Most of his published recordings (and a disambiguation with a namesake) can be found here, and a number of his publications are listed here.

Jean Mazel

The recordings presented here were originally released on one 10-inch album (33 RPM) four 7-inch EPs (45 RPM). They have been resequenced and made available for streaming/download by the "UK-based one-man trancedental-drone band" Tuluum Shimmering:



In addition to being offered in their raw form, the Moroccan recordings have been incorporated into 3 CDs worth of Tuluun Shimmering's psychedelic recordings, also available from their Bandcamp page, or as CDs from their homepage.

The original 10-inch album features linking narration in French. If you're interested to hear it in its original state, check the YouTube clips below. (I'm happy to have the narration removed in Tuluum's version. It reminded me of the pretentious voiceovers I heard between acts at the Folklore festival in Marrakech in 1995.)




I went looking online for the original artwork/notes, and to see where the original tracks fit into Tuluum's sequence. If you're interested in that sort of thing, you can find the images I collected and my crosswalk spreadsheet here.

Thanks to tape aficiondo and old Berkeley pal @boxwalla for calling my attention to this.

4 comments:

  1. Thank you. Just a note that the download from bandcamp is a "pay what you want" download so no one has to pay anything. i paid two quid.

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  2. MTS - I have that 10" in the Youtube video above, and if you want / need it I will happily gift it to you! Thank you for all the wonderful Music you've shared with us! Sincerely, Carlos Niño P.S. Innov Gnawa, (lead by Maâlem Hassan Ben Jaafer,) were recently in Los Angeles and played 3 nights in a row, with the middle night being a Lila Ceremony. They were amazing! Hopefully the magic gets recorded at some point. What they've released isn't close to how special they were / are . . .

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    1. Thanks for the kind offer, Carlos. I don't really need a copy of that one, though. Glad you made it to the Innov Gnawa performance - I was really tempted to come down from the Bay, but it didn't work out. Hope we can get them out to the Left Coast again.

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  3. The recordings are just now republished on a CD in France. See:
    http://www.cdmail.fr/affich_fich.asp?refcdm=STC089457

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