Monday, 8 January 2018

Moinuddin & Aminuddin Dagar - Dhrupads - The Music of India III - LP published around 1966 or 1968 in Germany


We start this year with a series of Dhrupad recordings. We had already posted in the past quite a number of Dhrupad recordings, both vocal and instrumental. Here it will be only vocal recordings. 
We start with perhaps the most outstanding and beautiful recording of Dhrupad ever: a legendary LP by the Senior Dagar Brothers Moinuddin Dagar (1919-1966) and Aminuddin Dagar (1923-2000), published in the famous Unesco Collection "A Musical Anthology of the Orient" as volume 18. The recordings were done during their 1964 European tour (Berlin, Paris, Venice) in Berlin. For me it was the very first vocal Raga music I ever heard. I had listened to it many times in the end of the 1960s at the home of some friends and bought my own copy, the one we post here, in the early 1970s.
In the early 2000s there was a project to republish this whole Unesco series on CD, but unfortunately only very few volumes saw the day. I guess the label - Rounder in the US - gave up the project as the CDs didn't sell as expected. So these recordings were never republished, though there are still many copies around for sale, as one can see for example on Discogs. 
In 2011 we had posted another LP by the Senior Dagar Brothers, the one originally published in India by The Gramophone Company of India in 1965. See here.










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7 comments:

  1. Richard8 January 2018 at 19:23

    Thank you for this! I really love this album.

    My understanding is that the entire series of UNESCO albums - almost 120 of them -- are available for download (mp3 only) from The Smithsonian Institution in the US. They will also make a custom CD. Not sure what the source of that CD would be; whether they would just convert the mp3 files to wav and then burn a CD, or if they have wav files of the transfers (which seems unlikely - I bet the master tapes are long gone either into the trash bin or into the hands of collectors).

    https://folkways.si.edu/unesco

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  2. Rory8 January 2018 at 19:38

    Stunning. I absolutely love the senior Dagar's. Thanks a lot Tawiq.

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  3. Kiran8 January 2018 at 22:12

    This ones a crown jewel Tawfiq Saab. I have never heard a more beautiful Asavari than the one in this album (Now I'll need to go back and listen to Rahimuddin Khansaab's Asavari on the Italian label). I really do hope that someday the remaining unpublished German recordings (Gaud Sarang, Todi, etc) of the Dagars is released to their fans.

    Once again, many many thanks.....

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  4. Tawfiq8 January 2018 at 22:25

    Dear Richard, the Smithsonian Unesco series is the one from the French label Auvidis/Naive including the LP series from Philips (Netherlands) and EMI (Italy).
    But the German Unseco series which is much older and was released by Bärenreiter is not included in the Smithsonian Unesco series. Rounder bought the copyrights but only released perhaps around 10 volumes. As you can easily see if you do research in the internet this volume by the Dagar Brothers was never on CD.

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  5. Tawfiq8 January 2018 at 22:28

    The Smithsonian Unesco series is also available as Flac files.

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  6. Anonymous9 January 2018 at 18:16

    Thanks!

    Guillermo

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  7. Anonymous16 January 2018 at 09:16

    superb thank you!

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