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Detail from cover of Columbia Russian Records catalogue, 1955.
Detail from cover of Columbia Russian Records catalogue, 1955. Photograph: Dust-to-Digital
Detail from cover of Columbia Russian Records catalogue, 1955. Photograph: Dust-to-Digital

Kyrgyzstan ballads, Okinawa folk, Ugandan hymns … the album rewriting global music history

This article is more than 3 years old

Excavated Shellac rejects the western canon of pop, rock, jazz, classical and more to champion 78rpm gems from overlooked corners of the world – ‘an alternate universe’, according to the man behind it

Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.

These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped. Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the ones here), in which every tune gets discussed – the first is a South African miner’s protest against police brutality, the last a sultry Cuban dance tune whose singers sound like they might have been hitting the rum while recording. This sonic smorgasbord from across the globe lives up to the provocative title, with music from Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico and elsewhere. Ever wondered what the Crimean Tartar Orchestra might sound like? Well, their raucous, minor key, brass party music is fabulous.

Maori Music catalog, Columbia and Parlophone. Photograph: Benno Häupl collection (PA Mss 26), UC Santa Barbara Library

The album is the work of Jonathan Ward, a collector of old 78rpm records who started his website Excavated Shellac in 2007, posting up a recording every day. Avoiding Robert Johnson, Geeshie Wiley and other such blue chip 78-era collectibles, Excavated Shellac focuses on music recorded across the non-Anglo world, offering a glimpse into myriad communities at the dawn of recorded sound. “When people think of early recorded sound – if they ever do – they tend to think of early American jazz music,” Ward says. “We’ve been told for decades that those are the primary performers and performances to revere, but every country had their own roots musicians, their pop bands, their entertainers and troubadours.”

Ward is a Los Angeles-based “metadata tsar” who works in the field of museum documentation. Applying the same scientific rigour to his record collection, he has gained huge amounts of information on recordings where there has often been very little, becoming one of the world’s foremost authorities of the 78rpm era.

“My collection slowly and constantly grows and shrinks,” he says, picking up new finds on travels abroad but more often “through private connections and via the global marketplace, for lack of a better phrase. Maybe all collections are just representations of a collector’s state of mind at any given moment. Mine certainly is. That said, I’m not sure if it takes any real talent to collect – mostly just patience and money.”

Cover of Columbia Bohemian Records catalogue, 1926. Photograph: Benno Häupl Collection, UC Santa Barbara Library

Ward emphasises that record collecting, for him, is not about rarity or value but an opportunity to learn about and engage with other people and cultures. “I don’t own the music or the histories behind it – I’m basically compiling information from wildly disparate and sometimes lesser-known sources into what I hope is something approachable.

“It was very important for me to add as much contextual information as possible,” he says of his Alternate History, “and to remove as much of myself and my own particular opinions from the text as possible. I’m pretty sure the world doesn’t need another white guy record collector waxing rhapsodic about music from cultures that are not his own. I wanted to avoid as best I could all cultural romanticism, tourism, and exoticism, yet also be able to offer interesting and uniquely rare selections.” He has worked closely with Dust-to-Digital on several projects already (Opika Pende: Africa at 78rpm; Excavated Shellac: Strings; Excavated Shellac: Reeds), plus Indian Talking Machine on the Sublime Frequencies label, collating recordings from south Asia.

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The 78, he notes, was invented at the end of the 19th century and remained the recorded music format until the late 1950s (for the US and UK) while continuing in Asia, the Soviet Union, parts of Africa and South America, and several other regions well into the 1960s – to emphasise this, Alternate History features 60s-era 78 recordings from Uzbekistan, Kenya, South Africa and Myanmar. Ward wanted to show off places “most people had no idea a 78rpm record industry existed, like the Persian Gulf, the Okinawa islands, Zanzibar. It’s a humble attempt to make our history of recorded sound more egalitarian, more holistic.”

It is also an audiophile’s dream, despite being transferred not from master tapes but often via the only known copy of a 78 in existence. The electrical era of the 1920s onwards captured dynamic performances created live in a room (prior acoustic recordings admittedly sound thin), and a good-condition 78 played on a decent system – whether an antique wind-up gramophone or an adapted turntable – loudly explodes out of the speakers like no other medium.

A detail from a catalogue of Swiss recordings. Photograph: Dust-to-Digital

“The 78rpm industry was a massive global enterprise that produced hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of individual recordings,” says Ward, and yet only the tiniest fraction have been reissued. “It’s as if it never existed – an alternate universe in a way.”

For listeners who love to travel via music, An Alternate History is the perfect project for our current confinement: here, it says, is humanity at its most creative and playful. “Many people who are not steeped in this subject can be just as fascinated and moved by this music as I am,” Ward says. “They just need an entry point, an on-ramp of sorts. Some of this music might seem alienating, like it dropped down from another planet, but it’s real music by real people, and it’s been right here all along.”

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