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Itinerant musicians who play simple, almost instantly recognizable tunes on four-string fiddles, chickens running in the yard, and some strong homemade drink nearby to match the homemade music. These images, surprisingly, come from both Virginia and . . . Nepal. The people of the Appalachian and Himalayan ranges have rarely been depicted as comparable, but their lives and music are compared and intersect in "The Mountain Music Project," a film released in July on DVD, with a set of related intercontinental musical collaborations released on CD under the same title.
The film and album were the result of encounters in Katmandu between two traditional musicians from Virginia—Tara Linhardt and Danny Knicely—and such rural Nepali musicians relocated to that capital city as Buddhiman Gandharba, a maker and player of the eye- and ear-catching homemade Nepali fiddle called the sarangi. (His surname, Gandharba, is that of his caste; the Gandharba are a longstanding class of performers traditionally avoided by others in Nepal except when they need adept musicians for a wedding or other event.)
Ms. Linhardt recalled, in a recent phone interview, the first time she and Mr. Knicely heard Buddhiman and some of his friends play: "We got together with him at an evening party they have where tourists can see them, and we found they were playing music that sounded just like our old-time fiddle music. On a tape Danny made, we noticed something that sounded just like part of the old American tune 'Sally Ann' played between the verses of their song 'Resham Firiri.' So we went back the next night and played 'Sally Ann' and they said 'You know our song,' and I answered 'No, dude, this is Appalachian music.' His jaw dropped. India, next door, has that amazingly different-sounding music, with sitars and a totally different scale, but in Nepal they're making and playing four-string fiddles and play and sing them in the same scale as ours."
With a stream of surprising, entertaining scenes and with no heavy-handed anthropological commentary, the film cuts back and forth between the Virginia hills and the rural mountainsides of Nepal, showing the lives and music-making of some of the top musicians in each, and the joint musical encounters that ensued. The infectious CD includes later contributions by noted bluegrass musicians further embellishing the tracks cut by the Nepali in Katmandu.
"They were village musicians who had never been in a studio," Ms. Linhardt said of the Nepali players. "They weren't used to having to summon up the music with no one there to clap, and—just as with old-time musicians here—it could take awhile into the tune before they really get it cranked up and could cruise. They're not used to starting and stopping on a dime, or getting it 'perfect' because someone will be listening late and doing a lot of takes. It was like when Appalachian musicians were first recorded in the 1920s."
The parallels to the first American "hillbilly" recording era grow all the more marked and poignant as the film shows how changing times have led to less work for the Gandharba in their rural home territories and forced many to leave their subsistence farms for the city, looking for what urban jobs they can get. Younger urban Nepalis have proved more interested in the American music they know—the global pop of Michael Jackson or Britney Spears—so the relocated musicians face the conundrum of preserving their music while adapting and making a living in this new world.
One Appalachian music master who appears in the film is bluegrass innovator Sammy Shelor, who turns 50 this autumn. He's the winner of this past year's $50,000 award from Steve Martin for excellence in bluegrass banjo; members of his family were part of country music's foundation-setting Bristol sessions in 1927. Struck by the potential applicability of the musical parallels, he noted, in a separate interview: "I'm one of the older cats now, but back when I was growing up we didn't have a lot of entertainment, either. There was time to concentrate on music and learn—with the music right around you the most accessible thing to you, and the music passed down through families. You learn to strike a balance—to preserve the music but also to come up with your own ideas, interpretations and presentations."
The musicians," Ms. Linhart says, "asked us for ideas, and we took models from our past; we told them about fiddlers' conventions and the Bristol Sessions, hillbilly marketing and bluegrass, about big white Stetson hats and Nudie suits—and we helped them to start a festival called 'Sarangi Day' in Katmandu, which has run for a few years now. They'll find their own ways to do these things. One Nepali band, Kutukmba, is already taking their folk music and marketing it internationally. One of my hopes is that people everywhere will want to go to Nepal not just for the mountain challenge, or the physical beauty, but for the culture."
Those involved in the Mountain Music Project share an admirable reluctance to leap to easy answers to the question the film inevitably raises—how, and whether, the parallel Himalayan and Appalachian experiences portrayed led to the surprising similarity of sounds. Bluegrass and folk-music veteran Tim O'Brien, who is prominent on the CD, suggests: "The similarity may be coincidental, but it's also true that whenever I listen to ethnic music, and don't understand the language, I hear things in common. They all sing the blues; artists world-wide tell you what everybody's experiencing—though when I saw this film footage, I was blown away by all those chickens."
Mr. Shelor adds: "Bill Monroe always said he never wrote a song; they just came from the air, and there's something about that mountain air, I believe, for the Europeans, the Africans, for Himalayans and all over the world. The music doesn't just happen; it exists somewhere, and then it comes out through certain people."
Mr. Mazor writes about country and roots music for the Journal. 08/13/12
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