The Rough Guide series of world-music samplers now numbers over 125 titles, and the releases seem to get better all the time. The Rough Guide to the Music of China (World Music Network) overflows with the unexpected. The last significant anthology of Chinese music was 1998's three-CD China: Time to Listen from the Ellipsis Arts label, populated mainly by folkies and classically trained musicians performing scholarly versions of folk music. Rough Guide's China is more adventurous. It kicks off with a cut that might have you simultaneously cheering and grimacing, as Beijing rockers Cui Jian drill deep into "Yi Wu Suo You" ("Nothing to My Name") with a Seventies glam aesthetic built around electric guitar, synthesizer, yearning vocals, and a sax solo straight out of Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street." On the one hand its blatantly Western format is depressing. On the other hand this exuberant song carves out a small Sino-European territory all its own.
Female vocalist Urna floats her acrobatic vocal on "Silaihuar" over a drone instrument in a lovely if excessively polished pop take on a traditional Mongolian ditty that might make you long for the contrasting grit of local throat-singing styles. The instrumental "Jiu Kuang" ("The Drinking Song") evokes a helping of Delta blues guitar as Yao Gongbai plucks and slides the 1700-year-old melody on the guqin seven-string zither. If these first three songs threaten an overly sedate disc, Bai Hong shakes things up with a jaw-dropping piece of prerevolutionary fluff that probably originates from the late Thirties. "Wo Yao Hui Jia" weds the clip-clop hooves of horses, an American cowpoke-style tune, and a full Western orchestral arrangement with a bouncy Chinese-language vocal. The campy excess of this slab of memorabilia could compete with the glitziest Bollywood offering. Even more of a jolt is "Hong Niang Hui Zhang Sheng," an all-too-brief excerpt from an unnamed Cantonese opera performed by Zheng Jun Mian and Li Hong. The clattering percussion, expressionist vocals, birdlike flute accompaniment, and apparent chaos come across as deliciously avant-garde, even though the style dates back to the eighth-century Tang dynasty.
The Rough Guide to the Music of Thailand has an opening track sequence curiously similar to that of the China CD. A rock number is first out of the gate, followed by a romantic female vocal, then a solo fling on a stringed instrument. If these are the first signs of a Rough Guide rut, the songs themselves feel significantly fresher here. The "Motorbike Man" Motorgai likes to be photographed with plaster on his permanently broken nose to foster his macho image, but his effervescent disc opener, "Hae Nang Maew," packs about as much testosterone as a Michael Jackson ballad. The rippling electric phin lute lines, staccato vocals, and ample good humor peg the infectious piece as Thai lukthung country music mixed with the dominant morlam pop style from the northern Thai-Laotian border region of Isaan.
Morlam hasn't surfaced in the States since the British-based GlobeStyle label released Isan Slété's The Flower of Isan way back in 1989, which showcased a rootsier form built around the ancient fourteen-tube bamboo mouth pipe called the khaen, the granddaddy of the modern accordion. Mike Piromporn gets funky with the venerable khaen in his morlam-derived "Lerk Dai Lerm Bor Dai," which quickly overpowers the bamboo puffs with a wailing saxophone. Sao Somparn takes Seventies California rock to Bangkok on "Katikar Huajai," a chunky guitar version of the so-called "cha-cha-cha'' lukthung style that'll keep you straining to hear even a single "cha." And just to prove that the squeaky hip-hop mutant China Dolls on the appropriately named "Oh Oh Oh" aren't part of a totally alien species, pachyderm members of the Thai Elephant Orchestra from the Thai Elephant Conservation Center whack playfully away at drums, gongs, and big string instruments specially designed for them by Dave Soldier and Richard Lair on the oddly affecting "An Elephant's Swan Song." You might even mistake their results for children jamming on Thai temple instruments.
The elephants are the only performers from the China or Thailand anthologies to have a CD released here -- two of them, in fact -- on Soldier's Mulatta Records label. That's a shame because their track is one of the least accessible compositions on a pair of highly listenable if not downright welcoming samplers.
