Chants Berbères de Kabylie

In the middle part of the 20th century, pioneering poets, writers and singers rediscovered micro¬cosms of traditional culture that had once been treated with contempt by the mainstream cultural establishment in Europe. Marguerite Taos Amrouche lit a torch for the Berber songs and poetry of Kabylie in Algeria, and was fêted by the intellectual elite of the time. Together with her brother, the poet and broadcaster Jean Amrouche, she helped to set a renaissance of Berber culture in motion, turning what had previously been considered backward peasant music into material for concert halls and intellectual salons. Taos and Jean were the talented offspring of the remarkable Fadhma Aït Mansour Amrouche, who began collecting songs from the remote Djurdjura mountains of Kabylie at the beginning of the 20th century. Taos kept this mission alive until her death in 1976. She also wrote several flamboyant novels. This box set gathers together three of Taos Amrouche's classic collections of Berber songs, a live recording made at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris just before her death and a collection of Spanish songs dating from her long song-collecting trips to Estremadura in the early 1940s. The 88-page booklet is deeply informative, if chaotically arranged, and features dedications from André Breton, Jean Giono, Olivier Messiaen and Léopold Senghor.

The musical setting is very simple: a solitary voice with accompaniment from an occasional flute, bendir drum or Spanish guitar. It's a shame that the instruments have aged better than the voice itself. Taos Amrouche was a courageous innovator but she couldn't escape the operatic corset that most concert singers were encouraged to wear at the time. The trills and warbles of her delivery chain her firmly to a time before non-Western songs were allowed to stand outside the Western classical tradition: naked, raw, honest and completely true to themselves.