of occasions singing a cappella. The mood iscalming but with a passion that's all the morepowerful for its understatement and it allworks surprisingly well without the storiesand the costumes (although if you wantthose, check the CD booklet). .

www.dancingturtle.co.uk

Jamie Renton

MAHSA & MARJANVAHDATI Am Eve Kirkelig Kulturverksted FXCD 335

The Vahdat sisters'Kirkelig Kulturverkst-ed (KKV) debut,Songs From A PersianGarden, was the doc-ument of a live recording, a soiree held insecret in the grounds of the summer residenceof the Italian Embassy in Iran. It was held insecret because in Iran women are forbiddenfrom singing in public. The sisters' sequel isagain recorded in Iran, but this time the resultof clandestine studio recordings, and onceagain a mixture of poems dating back as far asthe 11th century and words from current writ-ers. The acoustic settings by producer andcomposer (and Mahsa's husband) AtabakElyasi are spare to the point of austerity,allowing the voices to luxuriate in the space.Mystery is a wonderful track ("When themoonlight of your eyes scatters nightJ It rains[lowers-in my sorrowful field") with Mahsa'svoice strong, clear and defiant over PashaHajai's sorrowful ney. There's an effortlesslyheartbroken quality in Mahsa's voice, evenwhen singing Rumi's ecstatic lyrics, while Mar-jan's voice has a more formal tone, thoughequally piercing. Separately they are power-ful, when they come together, their strangeharmonies, such as on the setting of Rumi'sKing Of Love, are extraordinary.

KKV is a prolific label, founded by theNorwegian church in 1974, and among itsoutput of sacred music and Norwegian folkthere are some surprising records: real gemsof delicacy. This is one of them. Where ECM inGermany has earned an untouchable reputa-tion for releasing records where the musicshapes the silence, KKV is fast becoming aninternational label to watch. Hear a track onthis issue's fRoots 32 CD.

www.kkv.musikkonline.no

Tom Jackson

Mahsa & Marjan Vahdat

VARIOUS ARTISTSSprigs Of Time: 78s From The EMIArchive Honest Jon's HJRCD36

Give Me Love: Songs Of TheBrokenhearted - Baghdad 1925-1929Honest Jon's HJRCD35

Back in the 1990s, Interstate Music beganleasing 7Brpm masters from the EMI archivesfor release on their Heritage and Harlequinimprints. They issued vintage African,Albanian, Cuban, Greek, Puerto Rican,Portuguese, Sardinian and Spanishcompilations and I had a hand in it all.However, with those labels' unavailabilitynow, it's wonderful to see that this huge andmassively important archive of vintage worldmusic is, thankfully, being mined once again,and, with London Is The Place For Mealready under their belt, I cannot think of abetter company than Honest Jon's toundertake it.

Here, following their West Africancompilation Living Is Hard, we have a broadsampler and a dedicated regional anthologyto consider. Sprigs Of Time furnishes us with30 wide-ranging samples of the world'smusic' as recording engineers found itbetween 1903 and 1957. It contains someremarkable performances from an Albanianshoket (clarinet) through a Portuguese fadoto English singer Joseph Taylor's titleperformance from 1903. You'll also find stufffrom the Sudan, Spain, Japan, Georgia andelsewhere, so those of you who own, say theSecret Museum Of Mankind sets on Yazoo orDust-To-Digital's Black Mirror, will knowwh at to expect.

The Baghdad anthology is somethingelse again. It comprises 22 performances from1925 to 1929 recorded for the Iraqi market. Alively and diverse selection, it includestraditional and contemporary pieces, sacredand secular, in Arabic, Kurdish and Hebrew,and as a portrait of what was available inIraq in the last half of the 1920s, it's about asgood as you'll ever get on one CD. There aresome startlingly bleak and blunt lyricstranscribed here, offering insight into whatpeople thought and felt at the time, whichturns out to be not a lot different from theirconcerns today. The background notes areexcellent, a model of research clearly drawndirectly from source material in the EMIarchives, and each performance is explainedand contextualised. Very nice production

65 mI!]]D~

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