The Song Of Many Tongues

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1986-01

Label: Redgold Records

The Grand Union Orchestra was formed in 1984, taking its present shape to perform ‘The Song Of Many Tongues’ as part of Alternative Arts Music Festival in September; in this form it toured widely in 1985.

The Orchestra is made up of musicians from Ghana, South Africa, Chile, Trinidad and the USA, together with musicians from the British Isles, and it is their ‘tongues’ – languages, musical cultures, individual voices, and above all their experience – which gives the music its flavour. The music however is not ‘ethnic’ butoriginal and belongs within the broad tradition of jazz, celebrating the richness and diversity of musical and other cultures which make up today’s multi-racial Britain; it expresses too the depth of the collective feeling of those who perform it.

‘I Live In The City’ is based on a poem by New York schoolchildren, an innocent observation of the mixture of people who live and work in that city. ‘By The Waters Of Babylon’ is a setting of the great Biblical lament of enslaved people. Two different songs of exile follow, both nostalgic for a childhood home: ‘Guinea Corn’ based on an African/Caribbean work song, evokes joyful memories; then ‘Dolce Catalunya’ – the yearning of a people separated from a homeland they may never see again.

‘The Ballad of William L. Moore’, based on a poem by Wolf Biermann, describes the touching but ultimately tragic one-man crusade of a white Baltimore postman against segregation in the South. It is transformed into first ‘Hymn For The Homelands’, a lament and funeral march for all victims of racial oppression; then into a song of liberation and unity, ‘Spidertown’, which draws on West African chants. ‘Love That Day, a simple call for love, peace and justice, closes the set.