TRIBE
I got a couple of interesting CDs this week and I'm just getting my first listen to one of them. Actually there are 2 discs on the album, it's Bruce Parry Presents Amazon Tribe: Songs for Survival. Disc 1 includes songs inspired by issues affecting tribal people and by the recent TV programme, Amazon, and is written and performed by a number of famous names. It was the first track that really attracted me to buy the album as it provided the theme music to the TV show and I just love it, there's something very uplifting yet slightly melancholy to it, it's a feel-good track, makes you feel like you could take on the world in an ambient, mellow kind of way. There's a fair bit of musical variety on the first disc, some tracks I instantly liked on the first listen, others I think will be growers. Interestingly one of the songs on this disk is an Irish folk song, Carrickfergus, sung by Razorlight's Jonny Borrell. Pretty good too, his gravelly voice suits it quite well. The second disc takes recordings of tribal samples collected by Bruce Parry on his travels and creates some pretty funky dance/experimental tracks (one is called Don't Touch the Dusty Fruit - now there's something you didn't think you should take into consideration!) Again I think some will be growers whilst others grab you immediately but it's really cool to hear how they've blended some of the tribes' voices etc into the tracks.

Bruce Parry's TV show was absolutely brilliant. He's such a great presenter, he's just a people-person through and through and a real grafter so no wonder he endears himself to people of all the tribes he visits - he just gets stuck in and is up for anything. There's no way you could be prejudiced towards the people he encountered on his journey, the way that he spent time getting to know loggers and cocaine producers meant that you saw them as human beings trying to survive like anyone else. The only thing I struggled with was how Bruce made himself so vulnerable to pretty scary stuff by seeking out experiences of shamanic rituals. However I think the success of the programme is how it really highlighted some of the big issues affecting not just the survival of tribal peoples along the Amazon but the survival of the planet.

So I'm well pleased with my purchase and what's more all the profits from the album sales go directly to Survival International, a human rights organisation for tribal peoples around the world.

(I'll post on my other CD aquisition another time!)