What's Up?
Over 50 years ago Martin Koenig embarked on a trip to the Balkans that would transform his life. Armed with a letter of introduction from Margaret Mead, Koenig went to learn more about the Balkan folk dances that he loved. However, his mission changed when he found a society in rapid transition, and he soon felt compelled to document the disappearing agrarian life-style and village culture.
In this initial trip and on almost a dozen additional trips made between 1966 and 1987, Koenig worked in villages throughout the different areas of the Balkans filming, recording, and photographing the traditional music, dance, and ceremonies. These historic, black and white and color photographs memorialize a way of village life that has since been transformed by modernization, globalization, and imigration.
Life & Work
Bio:
Martin was founder/director of the Balkan Arts Center
(later the Ethnic Folk Arts Center, today the Center for Traditional Music and Dance) in New York City. Still an active member of this non-profit's Board of Directors, he remains a dedicated advocate for community-based traditional artists, especially those active in urban immigrant ethnic enclaves throughout the United States.
His interests extend to all facets of ethnic music and musicians: he has produced recordings, films and videos, and curated concerts and festivals. His ethnographic photographs have been widely published in periodicals, newspapers, magazines, and professional journals.
Between 1966 and 1994, he conducted fieldwork that included audio recording, film and photography in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the United States, and Canada.
Publications:
VOICES & IMAGES FROM BULGARIA
ГЛАСОВЕ И ОБРАЗИ ОТ БЪЛГАРИЯ
Voices & Images From Bulgaria is a collection of photographs and musical sound recordings taken between between 1966 and 1979.
After my first visit, I felt an urgency to preserve the music and dance traditions that were disappearing throughout the country. I was driven by the goal of documenting and recording the traditional music and dance of each place I visited, by permanently memorializing them with photographs, audiotape, and 16 mm film stock.
I originally came to Bulgaria to learn dances, my goal soon shifted to documenting village culture, and always, whatever else I might be doing, I would have at least one SLR camera slung across my chest to capture any special moment that might occur.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).