Drumming Up Help for ‘Endangered’ Sounds

Mickey Hart may be best known to the wider pop music audience for his polyrhythmic participation in the tandem drumming of the long-running musical expedition known as the Grateful Dead. But for most of this decade, he has been equally passionate about his exploration, production and promotion of world music.

“As the world has become smaller, the world music sector has started to become the largest growing sector in the music stores,” he says in an interview tied to the release of the 19th and 20th entries in his “World” series for Rykodisc. “And that’s because there’s more to music than [classical] music and rock ‘n’ roll.”

The new albums--”The Discoteca Collection: Missao de Pesquisas Folcloricas” and “L.H. Correa de Azevedo: Music of Ceara and Minas Gerais”--include selections from two important pre-World War II collections of field recordings from Brazil, and represent the latest efforts in Hart’s ongoing work at the Library of Congress to produce a collection of recordings titled “Endangered Music Project.”

“People think of endangered forests and endangered cultures,” says Hart, “but they don’t think about the music that is a part of those cultures. And music is a very large part of their history because they kept their histories in their songs.

“There are 50,000-plus recordings in the archives of the Library of Congress. This is an amazing legacy that has been given to us--thousands of years of instrument-making, thousands of years of playing the instruments, telling the stories, passing them down in front of the fire. Freeing these voices, preserving them in quality recordings has been an adventure, sort of like musical archeology with an activist bent.”

Hart says that every society has its own unique form of musical expression, and that one of the most effective ways to gain insights into another culture is through its music.

“When you hear the music of Nicaragua or New Guinea or the rain forest,” he continues, “you begin to understand the people, you realize that they’re spiritually inclined, they’re not savages howling at the moon. And all of a sudden those distant places aren’t so far away, and we’re not all that different from little Tahili, who is singing with the birds and the singing stones by the waterfall. We’re not that different, because we’re all searching for something and that spiritual quest is right there in the music.”

In 1991, Hart’s “Planet Drum” album received the first Grammy ever awarded in the best world music album category. He also has written about the history of rhythm in two books: “Drumming at the Edge of Magic” and “Planet Drum” (both from Harper San Francisco).

Still, despite his enthusiasm, why all this effort to preserve what might seem, to some, to be relatively obscure sounds?

“Because this is the roots of our music,” says Hart, “of the Grateful Dead music, of the music that we all listen to on the radio. This is the roots of the roots, this is where the blues came from, baby, this is rock ‘n’ roll.”

Healing Music: For thousands of years, traditional Chinese medicine has used music as one of the intrinsic elements in a holistic web of healing elements. Each note of the five-tone pentatonic scale that is elemental to Chinese music corresponds to specific organs, as well as to emotions, elements, seasons, etc. All of these factors are employed by Chinese physicians in an effort to remove blockages from the movement of chi, or vital energy, throughout the body.

Taiwan’s Wind Records, available in the U.S. since 1995, has an extensive catalog of CDs, many collected in series with titles such as “Five Tones Healing Music,” “Chinese Medical Psychosomatic Music Therapy” and “Yi-Ching Music for Health.” Individual albums are fashioned to deal with specific ailments, such as sleep disorders. And the titles in “Chinese Feng Shui Music” include pieces that circulate chi within a living environment. (The albums are distributed by Wind Records, P.O. Box 7309, Alhambra, Calif. 91802.)

White Christmas: Once again, there are plenty of opportunities to celebrate the holiday season with world music sounds. Among the more attractive albums: “Celtic Christmas III” (Windham Hill), the third annual collection of music by such Irish artists as Maighread and Triona Ni Dhomhnaill and the group Nightnoise; trumpeter Bobby Rodriguez’s “A Latin Jazz Christmas” (JVC Records), which features appealing renderings of familiar Christmas tunes set to Latin rhythms; “A Celtic Christmas” (Narada), which offers a unique blend of Celtic and baroque holiday sounds from the Irish all-female band Dordan; and Kitaro’s “Peace on Earth” (Domo), where the artist is joined by the International Peace Choir of children on a lush, New Age-tinged set of traditional carols. (Kitaro performs the program live at the Universal Amphitheatre on Wednesday.)