Where the River Bends is Only the Beginning

This is the 12th volume in ten years in Glitterbeat’s Hidden Musics series, all recorded by Ian Brennan in his global search for unknown musicians who deserve a wider audience. This time he took his tape recorder into the Amazonian rainforests of Suriname, where he found brothers Dwight Sampie and Robert Jabini, who perform raw, melodic songs on nylon string guitars and sing them in Saramaccan, a Creole language reportedly spoken by little more than 50,000 people of West African descent. Like all of Brennan’s productions the field recordings that resulted are captured on-the-fly and it’s one of his most captivating projects to date. The tunes of songs such as ‘Some Kind of New Beginning’, ‘Please Save Me’ and ‘Villages Swallowed by the Floods’ (the titles are only given in translation) are gorgeous and sung in wonderfully plaintive cowboy voices without adornment or artifice. Think of some of the 1930s recordings on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and you’re not far off the spirit of what Brennan has captured here, although he prefers the analogy of Merle Haggard transplanted from Bakersfield to the Amazon. Either way, this is folk music of the most profound and genuine kind.