Music of Makoran


Allow me to unload one small bone of contention. I am no fan of fusion music. For that matter, when I tell the world I dig ethnic music the most, I specifically disregard the flavoured rock 'n roll, which takes up most of the Roots/World Music section in my local HMV. Equally, I find little to crow about in the smoothly seductive soulful sounds, which are all I ever seem to pick up when I tune in to BBC Radio 3's Late Junction. In short, as far as studio engineered syntheses are concerned, if they don’t exist in the realworld, they don’t exist in mine.

Consultation of Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta failed to add much to this description. Neither repository mentions Makran. However, between them, they both amended and expanded the booklet impressions of the political and physical geography of Balochistan. From these sources, Balochistan should be described primarily as an administrative province of Pakistan, with parts of it sprawling into southeastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. It is for the most part, an arid, rocky, mountain plateau, practically devoid of soil and rainfall and natural vegetation, and possessed of a fiercely intemperate climate. Roads and wheeled traffic are scarce, as are life forms - animal or human. Indeed, the few people who live in the place are mostly nomadic pastoralists - goat and sheep herders - and simple agriculturalists. Neither encyclopedia broached the subject of music, although Britannica did have something to say about the karez. This is an underground irrigation system, which permits water to drain from the foothills into the few urban settlements, via a network of tunnels and galleries. It seems to have been brought into Balochistan from China, at some unspecified time in the past, by migratory Buddhist monks.

I am not sure how significant this intelligence is, for I have scarcely a nodding acquaintance with Chinese music. Also, I am left in the dark, as to how much and, in what ways, the music of Makran differs from the rest of Balochistan. Anderson Bakewell, the disc’s compiler, does specify a number of influences on Makranian music. These apparently arose from trade and transmigration along the coastal region. I am not clear, however, as to whether any of them made their way into the hinterland, or vice versa. I can only report that, if those who influenced the irrigation systems of Balochistan, left a similar impression on the music of any part of this province, then that impression was lost on me.

Nevertheless, the parable of the karez highlights an important feature of the region’s history. It is that Balochistan generally is open to absorption of a wide variety of exterior cultural forms. Such absorption, however, takes place over long periods of time. Thus, the region appears to have been a slow melting pot for the absorption of music traditions from other parts of the globe. To illustrate this, the booklet supplements that thumbnail geography, with a potted history of the previous millennium. From these, the region emerges as simultaneously central and inaccessible. Many of history’s great land migrations, military and mercantile, hinged around it. For that matter, the Arabs were famous maritime traders. Makran, situated on the Arabian Sea, must have been a staging post for traffickers all over the Middle East, and farther afield. It is no surprise then that the influences Anderson Bakewell speaks of, stem from the Middle East, from the rest of the Indian sub-continent, and from Africa. Also, visual evidence shows that the twentieth century did not entirely overlook the region. In the back cover photograph of this booklet, one can see an idiomatic lute, some extravagant looking beakers, and a monophonic portable radio/cassette player.


Geographical location notwithstanding, however, sheer impenetrability made sure that Makran was no easy touch in terms of musical cross-fertilisation. Indeed, the booklet hints that local politics were a further source of hindrance, both to the visiting ethnomusicologist, and to the migrant musical influence. Therefore, integration and incorporation of disparate cultural elements has been a slow and ongoing process, ever since the Baloch people of northern Iran settled the region around a thousand years ago. We are not talking of a fusion cooked up within the time scale of a recording studio allocation. We are talking of a compounding of ingredients which has been centuries in the making.


Thus, the music of Makran is terra incognita to the visitor, to the record collector, and to the reviewer. Nevertheless, the image of inhospitable isolation left me somewhat surprised at how familiar this music sounds. The whole disc feels like a selective migration from that other opulent outlet in Topic’s World Series; Music in the World of Islam. There is no reason why it shouldn’t. First of all, the inhabitants of Balochistan are followers of Islam, even if they adhere to the unorthodox Zigir sect. Moreover, it seems to me that musical change, over the whole of the Middle East and south Asia, proceeds at a fairly similar rate to our present model. In that part of the world, inhospitable environments are scarcely a monopoly preserve of the Makranians. Therefore, we can expect the music, which the Balochs originally carried from Iran into Balochistan, to bear a significant resemblance to the present day musics of both these regions. Certainly, any aural similarity between this and the World of Islam set has to derive from migration and cross-fertilisation, rather than from similar recording locations. Of the seventy-four tracks, which made up the World of Islam set, I could only identify two which were recorded in Balochistan. It is not clear, from Jean Jenkins’ sketchy notes, whether that means Makran.


Let us not ponder the question to excess. The disc we are here to review specifies the recording locations, even if the booklet does not contain a decent map to show where they are. Six localities are identified, but we are told nothing about them. Neither are we told much about the musicians, beyond their names and the instruments they play. Detailed information, human and geographical, is important, if we are to understand the contexts in which this music is performed. In this instance, given that the populace is largely migratory, does that mean the musicians are also migratory? Alternatively, are the recording locations also the urban settlements of Makran?


Lack of information worries me. Therefore, while browsing Britannica and Encarta, I took a look at the New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians. It was not much more helpful than the other sources. However, it did tell me that the musicians of Balochistan are nearly all itinerant professionals, with a big repertoire of wedding songs. The CD booklet appears to concur with the first part of this information, telling us that musicianship is strongly associated with caste membership. Fine, but does that mean music is a hereditary profession? Is it a trade automatically entered into by specific individuals, as a specific consequence of caste membership? I suspect not, because I was interested to note that at least two of the performers here are blind. As observers of other traditions may have noted - pre-famine Ireland and twentieth century Black America are examples - music is a profession which is often resorted to by the blind and the crippled. That is precisely because they are unable to earn a living by any other means. Such people often lead fairly miserable existences. They eke out a living on the margins of their own communities, disdained by those who enjoy their services. I do not know if this is the case in Makran, because the booklet does not discuss the status of musician-hood there. It does however devote a sizable section to the musical instruments of the region. Not for the first time, I find myself exasperated by an ethnomusicologist, who reports extensively on the artifacts of music, and says next to nothing about the people who play the artifacts. Yes, I know the instruments will be unfamiliar to Westerners. Therefore, space given to their description is entirely justified. But the musicians are equally unfamiliar, and it is not just a question of asking whether it is more politically correct to emphasise musical instruments or human beings. The more we know about the social culture of any human aggregate, the more readily we can empathise with its music.


Thereby hangs a tale. The reason why roots music is more successful than ethnic music, commercially speaking that is, is precisely because roots never entirely succumbs to the exotic. It always keeps one foot firmly within the familiar currents of western popular music. Thereby hangs an audience, an audience which doesn’t need to abandon its preconceptions as to what music should sound like.

FPRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=makran"


Thereby also hangs the problem of encapsulation, for our perception of music is defined by what we know and recognise. Thus, listeners who are attuned to the short regular geometric patterns of European melody, may be forgiven for wondering what to make of this stuff. If you are one of the uninitiated, how do I explain what happens when the musicians of Makran pick up their axes and blow? How do I convey, in earth-bound phrases and cyberspatial soundclips, the feelings of exaltation when this magic carpet of music starts to lift off? Just for once, I’m not going to kick up at the fact that these are mere excerpts of much longer performances, or that they show no more than a tiny part of the overall edifice. They do leave me feeling like a one-eyed intermediary between the blind man and the Picasso, but that is a reflection of the present day limitations of western technology. In the absence of anything approaching virtual reality, though, I did find Anderson Bakewell’s elegant prose somewhat less than helpful. Consider the following paragraph.