Cover of the original cassette.
Here another very beautiful cassette from pre-Taliban times by the great Hamidullah Charikari together with his older brother Ismail. I'm not sure if they are really brothers or just come both from Chakri near Kabul. We posted in 2011 already two cassettes by
Hamidullah, together with the great Bilton.
I still don't know if it is proper to name this music Logari Music. In 2013 we posted a cassette by
Ustad Doray Logari, who is said to have brought Logari music to Kabul and was recorded a lot by the radio back then. This is the way, one says, how Logari music became popular over all of Afghanistan. He was called the father of Logari music. It is also said that Ustad Doray Logari was the main teacher of
Bilton, the most famous singer of this tradition, though there exists also the information that his teacher was Salam Logari, the son of Ustad Doray Logari. But as they are both more or less of the same age, or Bilton is even older than Salam Logari, as I think, I doubt this. Bilton was raised and spend most of his life in the Logar Valley. The music of the two singers here is definitely of the same tradtion, though these two musicians are not from Logar. It could be that the music which Ustad Doray brought to Kabul had such an effect that a new, quite sophisticated Afghan folk music evolved out of it. There are many other singers widely known in Afghanistan who sing and play a similar music, like
Zaman Shawqi, Haji Saifuddin (whose music is clearly named "Logari music") and younger ones like Faiz Karizi (born 1953). If anybody can help to clarify this subject, it would be very appreciated. What I found in the literature - I must confess that I have only very few books on Afghan music - doesn't really answer my questions. As so often, what is described in the books and what one can hear in recordings doesn't fit always together.
Anyway, this is a very fine and very fascinating folk music tradition performed by excellent professional musicians and it was and still seems to be today very popular in Afghanistan and the Afghan community in the West. Though in Afghanistan and in the West traditional Afghan music seems to be completly neglected nowadays as far as available recordings are concerned. When I started to look for Afghan recordings (CDs and cassettes) in the Afghan shops in Germany, especially in Hamburg, there were still a lot of recordings of traditional music available. That was in the 1980s and early and mid 1990s. But already about 10 years later this music had vanished completely from the shelfs of the shops.
In the West never a CD was published by a Western label by any of these singers and musicians. I think this is one of the big missed chances. Now it is too late for well-known reasons. In a recording done in the West one could have insisted on leaving out the Harmonium, about which the Afghan music specialist John Baily already complained several times. Then one would have had a beautiful recording of good singing with an ensemble of Rabab, Tambur, Sarinda and Dhol. The interaction between the musicians is always fascinating.
Our friend KF made years ago a CD out of this cassette and created the covers. Many thanks to him.
