Chaino and Türkbas: False Ethnography for Hi-Fi Travelers

Growing up, Chaino’s face was always around, floating in and out of the amazing collection of LPs and reel-to-reel tapes my Dad had accumulated before marriage. Every now and then, we’d plop it on the turntable and groove to raw African beats, churned through a mesh of steel drums, slapping palms, shakers, bongos, and moaning voices (yes, moans!) Never stopped to think about which African country Chaino was from – “just Africa” was enough for us. The convincingly tribal LP cover sealed the deal – Chaino was real in our minds.

Chaino: Safari Jungle Maze
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/09-Safari-Jungle-Maze.mp3]

40 years later, while digitizing the LP collection, took time for the first time to, you know, actually read the liner notes:

“Chaino is the only survivor of a lost race of people from the wilds of the jungle in a remote part of central Africa where few white men have ever been… [he was discovered as a boy in] the remnants of what had been a native village. Surrounding hostile tribes had attacked the village and massacred its inhabitants. They found only a small boy near death starving amongst the ruins…”

Full liner notes here.

Add to that a closer study of the track titles (“Torture of the Mau-Mau?” Really?) and my B.S. detectors finally went off. Clearly the Chaino story was fiction, written for a white audience seeking exotic audio adventures on their home Hi-Fi sets. Vinyl and accompanying literature for the armchair traveler. But if the story and photography were all fabricated, then how to explain the music, which is pretty darned authentic sounding? A quick search turned the truth up to 11:

The self-styled “percussion genius of Africa,” exotica-era enigma Chaino was actually born Leon Johnson in Philadelphia in 1927; raised primarily in Chicago, the details of his early life are largely a mystery … following surgery to remove a brain tumor, he suffered a fatal heart attack on July 8, 1999.

Chaino was a brilliant drummer, but he was an American drummer riding the exotica wave of the 1950s and 60s (and who wouldn’t?). But leaving aside multilayered and complicated questions of identity, he was an awesome percussionist, and clearly knew his way around African rhythms. Unlike Martin Denny and a lot of the exotica scene, Chaino was not some white guy pretending to sound African – somewhere along the way, Chaino got real. But he still chose to present himself as a cultural fiction… as something not quite from Chicago.

Somewhere in my wild and somewhat random record-collecting teens, I happened on this LP by Özel Türkbas – How To Make Your Husband a Sultan. OK, truth out: I probably bought it for the cover. But through it, I discovered the wonders of actual Turkish belly dance music.

Özel Türkbas: Andalou Asia Minor:
[audio:http://stuckbetweenstations.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/07-Anadolu-Asia-Minor.mp3]

The coolest thing about the record is that it comes with a little pamphlet (which I still have) demonstrating exactly how to make your husband a sultan, i.e. how to pretend to belly dance for your husband. The pretense that a suburban American housewife could convincingly learn an ancient art from an eight-page pamphlet is ridiculous of course; its real purpose was to provide an excuse to show off Türkbas’ mighty assets through the convincing guise of cultural education. I have a feeling the pamphlet was deployed more frequently for ogling than for training.

Where Chaino and Türkbas disconnect is that her record is the real deal – these are real Turkish musicians playing fantastic Turkish belly dancing music – the kind you’d be likely to hear in any authentic belly dancing nightshow or club in 1969. Turns out the book 1,000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die profiled it a while back:

Put this on, and the first image isn’t of some scantily dressed cosmopolitan housewife of the era sashaying around snapping finger cymbals. It’s more like a public celebration or a scene from a bustling dance hall, where the band is cranking out brisk, precise music that has everybody moving. Built around the wizardry of clarinetist Mustafa Kandıralı, this ensemble slithers and undulates, creating swirling waves of hypnotic rhythm. Several pieces leave room for improvised variations, and that’s where things heat up. Kandıralı and violinist Cevdet ÇaÄŸla keep the dance rhythm going while unspooling extended technically demanding embellishments. Like the swing-era musicians who had more to offer than “In the Mood,” they manage to slip in subversive, jaw-dropping runs without shirking their main responsibility, accompanying dancers.

Here’s the difference: While Chaino was channeling pretty-much-believable African music through a fake African identity, Türkbas put together real Turkish belly dancing ensemble, but packaged it simplistically for an American audience eager to become a bit more cosmo by indulging in harmless middle eastern fantasy. “Oooh, so exotic!” Still, both are in a totally different category from Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, who pretty much faked the whole thing along with the rest of the exotica movement*.

* Don’t mean to dish on Denny here – he’s a hero to me. More on him later.

Big chin wag to Hermenaut #15 – the legendary False Authenticity issue.

About Scot Hacker

Scot Hacker is a web developer, teacher, and blogger living in Northern California. He is the author of Can You Get to That? The Cosmology of P-Funk and Understanding Liberace: Grooving With The Fey Heckler. He works by day as webmaster at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Knight Digital Media Center, and runs Birdhouse Web and Mail Hosting on the side. Hacker is the author of The BeOS Bible and MP3: The Definitive Guide, and posts near-daily on random stuff at Scot Hacker's foobar blog. He's ecstatic that we're sitting on 100 years of recorded music history. How I Got Stuck When was the last time you bought a record because of the cover? 25 years before MP3s, I used to make a weekly pilgrimage to Cheap Thrills in San Luis Obispo with friends, where we'd surf through dusty wooden bins, de-flowering ourselves in a mist of vinyl, grabbing piles of cut-outs about which we knew virtually nothing. Junior Samples, Temple City Kazoo Orchestra, The Buggles, Paul Desmond, Instant Chic, Smithsonian collections, Robert Moog, Dream Syndicate... didn't matter. If the cover was cool, we assumed there was a good chance the music would turn us on. And we were often right. In that humongous wooden warehouse, between around 1977 and 1984, my musical universe bloomed. There were also duds - dumptruck loads of duds. The lesson that a great cover doesn't tell you jack about the music inside was a long time coming (the inverse correlation - that great music was often hidden behind terrible artwork - came much later). But it didn't matter, because cut-outs never cost more than a couple-three bucks, and all the good shit we uncovered made it worthwhile. In high school, I (for the most part) ignored the music going on around me. The jocks and aggies could keep their Rick Springfield and their Jefferson Starship - we were folding papers after school to The Roches and Zappa and Talking Heads and PiL. But inevitably, some of the spirit of that time stuck with me. ELO and McCartney wormed their way (perhaps undeservedly) into my heart. No one escapes high school without an indelible tattoo on their soul describing the music of that time. When I went away to college, the alt/grunge scene was being born, and getting chicks required familiarity with The Pixies and Porno for Pyros. I couldn't quite figure how these bands were supposed to be as interesting as Meat Puppets or Cecil Taylor or Syd Barrett, but I went along for the ride for a while, best I could. But I never quite "got" alt-rock. Never understood why The Pixies were elevated in the public imagination over a thousand bands I thought were so much more inventive / rocking / interesting. What exactly was Frank Black offering the world that Lou Reed had not? In general, I like music carved in bold strokes - extremely rockin', or extremely beautiful, or extremely weird... I like artists that have a unique sound, something I can hang my hat on. I love Mission of Burma and The Slits and The American Anthology of Folk Music and Devendra Banhart and Bowie and Nick Drake and Eric Dolphy and Ali Farka Toure and Marvin Pontiac. If you were to ask me who was the last great rock and roll band, I'd be likely to answer "The Minutemen." I know it's not true, but I'd say it anyway. And yet, in a weird way, I totally believe it. Today while jogging, I listened to a long interpretation by the Unknown Instructors: "Punk Is Whatever We Made It To Be" - half-spoken / half-sung sonic collage of some of D. Boon's best stanzas. Boon's powerful words rained like hammers and I felt like I was back in 1980, careening down the highway in a green VW bug with The Stooges blasting. It was that spirit of amazement that I used to live for - the one I never got from the 90s indie scene. And then, just as quickly, I thought "God, I'm living in the past. I suck." I'm stuck. I have vast collections of LPs, CDs, and MP3s. I listen to music for hours each day, and yet I'm completely out of it, musically speaking. I confess -- I've never listened to Guns-n-Roses or Pearl Jam or Prince, and I've only recently heard "Nevermind" in its entirety. If it weren't for Twitter, I wouldn't even know Lady Gaga existed. I'm oblivious to the stuff that supposedly matters to "music people." It's not like I'm totally unaware of pop music. I just have a finely tuned ability to tune out whatever doesn't interest me. I don't quite know how to explain it. I can only say that my friends register shock when they learn that I've never heard of Elliot Smith. And yet I do not feel thirsty. I'm always open to being turned on. But I learned long ago that, unfortunately, you can't trust beautiful cover art to promise great music, and you can't always trust your friends to push your music buttons. I'm happy to listen to damn near anything. And every now and then, that "anything" will turn into something that will become important to me over time. Something that will last. I like music with staying power. Belle and Sebastien have a certain appeal, but I don't think they're going to occupy even the tiniest slot in my consciousness in 20 years. But the power and inventiveness of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Fahey, Robert Wyatt, Can, The Carter Family, The Clash, will never dissipate. I have little interest in the "new" factor. I could not care less whether this year's model is the baddest thing going on in Atlanta or a rare gem rescued from 78 rpm oblivion by Robert Crumb. It's all the same to me. Just squeeze my lemon / 'till the juice runs down my leg. Please. A friend once said that he felt lucky to have been born so late in history, because the later you're born, the more history you have to work with. I don't think I really understood what he was saying until I was about 40. It's not about being born late, it's about this massive archive we're sitting on - the entire history of recorded music under our butts, which we can either choose to ignore or to mine for all it's worth. Every hour I spend checking out the flavor of the month is an hour I haven't spent with David Thomas or Richard Hell or Shuggie Otis. Life's too short. I'm going to use this site to drift back and forth through musical history, modernity be damned. You turn me on, I'm a radio. Let me know what I'm missing. shacker's station at last.fm

2 thoughts on “Chaino and Türkbas: False Ethnography for Hi-Fi Travelers

  1. Great post. Chaino was an authentic Chicagoan with authentic percussion skills, and that’s good enough for me. I love the Turkish record, but not seeing it as that different. In both cases, the record company’s marketers decided that padding the image with some “exotic” element would help sales.

    I’m too much of a former Boy Scout to condone the invented biography. But if we judged artists on their truth-telling, the list could get pretty short. I remember reading about how folk archivists wanted Leadbelly to sing about prison and tone down his familiarity with “white” music. Beethoven’s dad allegedly lied about the age of his young piano prodigy, hoping that he’d be considered the next Mozart.

  2. That’s fascinating about Leadbelly (Huddy Ledbetter?) I think we could have a field day on invented biographies and false authenticity/ethnography.

    Come on Donny Osmond – what’s your *real* story?

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