Give Me Love

2019 repress. Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted: Baghdad, 1925-1929 is the second in Honest Jon's series of albums exploring the earliest 78s held in the EMI Hayes Archive. In the mid-1920s, The Gramophone Company - soon before it became EMI - employed two or three Europeans to criss-cross Iraq. They logged regional demographics, assessed the German competition, and checked out the scores of record shops and hundreds of musical venues. In Kerbala, it's man fearfully disguised himself as an Arab. This was the groundwork for three sessions, conducted in Baghdad in the second half of the decade, which produced nearly 1,000 recordings. Business was good - the first group of records, though deemed aesthetically unsuccessful by the company, immediately produced 12,000 sales through just two outlets in the city. Drawing on the full range of these Baghdad recordings, this is a wondrous, deeply poignant glimpse of social living since obliterated, in which ethnicities, faiths and traditions appear woven richly together, however precariously. There is dance music featuring Arab folk singers from the countryside, backed by professional Jewish musicians in Iraqi styles popularly termed "Egyptian," perfected in nightclubs where the first duty of the secular women singers on this album was prostitution. Also including some Arabic word-play, in a nod to the musical form of the Arabic mawwal, a Hebrew hymn is kick-started with a cry of "Allah!," most likely from one of the Jewish performers. There are pieces from Bahrain and Kuwait, sometimes mixed together in one performance; the different dialects are far-flung. There are beautiful, high, and lonesome Kurdish violin improvisations and some unaccompanied circular breathing on a zourna so unearthly it seems to cross late Coltrane with Sun Ra. All the songs are characterized by searing emotion and crises of feeling, many by erotic urgency. As with the other titles in the series, the recordings have been startlingly restored at Abbey Road; they are presented here with full translations, rare photographs, and notes - including an extensive interview with a citizen of Baghdad throughout this period, who knew many of the musicians here personally. Features: Mulla Abdussaheb, Sayed Abbood, Dahi Ben Walid, Sultana Youssef, Salim Daoud, Khedayer Bin Kessab, Mulla Seoud El Koweity, Said El Kurdi, Siddiqa El Mullaya, Hdhairy Abou Aziz, Kemani Noubar, Badria Anwar, Kementchedji Alecco, Badria Anwar, and Saleh Ibrahim. Gatefold sleeve.