[Note: Piece updated on February 15, 2019 – see special coda at the tail end]
Zero to 180 is intrigued to discover that today’s featured song is the sole composition attributed to Vic Coppersmith-Heaven [whose impressive audio engineering CV includes Cat Stevens, The Rolling Stones, Billy Preston, and even Stanley Kubrick] on Discogs. This entrancing and otherworldly (near) instrumental can only be found on the 1982 double LP anthology Music and Rhythm that features artists who performed in the first World of Music and Dance (WOMAD) festivals in the UK organized by Peter Gabriel, with help from heavy friends. For the 1980s college crowd, Music and Rhythm served as a gateway album of sorts into “Worldbeat” (i.e., music from outside Europe & the US).
The early-to-mid 1980s would find this idealistic, clueless college student in thrall to a cassette mix of The Jam‘s brilliant run of singles (compiled in chronological fashion by Tom Newbold), culminating in their double-A side masterwork “Going Underground” paired with “Dreams of Children.” The single-sentence summary blurb below from Wikipedia very much captures the extent of my knowledge at that time about the engineer/producer with the distinctive name:
Vic Coppersmith-Heaven (born Victor Smith in England) is an English sound engineer and record producer best known for his production work with The Jam.
Japan 45
1980
Italy 45
1980
Produced by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven
Those of us who were initially surprised to see the producer behind The Jam’s finest 45 included in the track listing of Music and Rhythm wondered, therefore, to what degree his preceding work might have informed his musical sensibilities. As it turns out — not in the slightest:
“Pengosekan“
Vic Coppersmith-Heaven (1982)
Preston Hayman: Percussion & Gamelan
Vic Smith: Guitars & Gamelan
Tony Levin: Bass
Paddy Bush: Gengong
Johnny Warman: Voice
Composed & produced by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven.
Recorded at Eel Pie Studios & The Manor – Spring 1982.
Engineered by Richard Manwaring & remixed at Crescent Studios.
Note: “Pengosekan” fades into a short excerpt from The Ramayana Monkey Chant recorded by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven in Bali — February, 1982
Music and Rhythm‘s liner notes, for one thing, were a tip-off that something more “avant-pop” was afoot on this exclusive recording:
Vic is best known as a record producer, and over the last five years he has been associated with some of Britain’s most contemporary and successful groups, notably The Jam.
Besides his production work, Vic spends much time pursuing his passion for Bali and its culture. He visits the country frequently, and has made many field recordings of music traditions in that region. In ‘Pengosekan’, especially recorded for this LP, he uses Balinese orchestral percussion — gamelan — instruments to embellish the rhythm track, and overlays this further with vocal improvisations derived from the Balinese Ketjak [or Kecak] or Monkey chant.
We would like to thank Vic for his enthusiasm and faith in this album project as a whole, and we are also indebted to the Indonesian Embassy, Mr. Suparmin and Mr. Abidin in particular, for their kind co-operation and loan of the gamelan instruments used on this track.
We would like to thank [Pete Townshend-owned] Eel Pie Studios for their kind co-operation in the recording of this track. We would also like to thank the Virgin Manor Studio, and Richard Branson in particular, for their kind donation of free time in completing this track; and for their first-class attention and co-operation on this project.
UbuWeb helpfully elaborates on the history behind this ancient tradition, with this explanatory text that accompanies their streaming audio of a 20-minute field recording from Bali:
Performed by more than 200 men seated in tight concentric circles around a small central space reserved for the chief protagonists, the ketjak (loosely called “Monkey Chant”) was first recorded in Bali by David Lewiston and released by Nonesuch Records in 1969. As a spectacular and alternative performance mode, it has had a germinal influence on western performance and poetics since then.
David Lewiston’s original comments follow:
‘While the ketjak is a creation of this century, it is descended from something much more ancient — the trance dance, the dance of exorcism called sanghjang; its ancestry is clear. Ostensibly, the ketjak is a reenactment of the battle described in the Ramayana epic — in which the monkey hordes came to the aid of Prince Rama in his battle with the evil King Ravana — complete with a chorus imitating monkeys, as they chant the syllable tjak.
But as perceptive observers have noted, the ketjak is primarily a dance of exorcism. Its connection with the sanghjang remains unbroken. As pointed out by Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete in Dance and Drama in Bali, “Most of the movements are exorcistic in origin and contribute together to produce a tremendous unity of mood … to drive out evil as by an incantation. The cries, the crowding, lifted hands, the devouring of single figures, the broken lines of melody bewildering to butas [demons], who can only move straight ahead, all enhance the exorcistic effect.”‘
Glenn Kotche at University of Maryland
sans crickets
(Photo courtesy of Brandon Wu Photography)
Imagine Zero to 180’s surprise 20+ years later during 2009’s Bang on a Can Festival at University of Maryland’s Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center when [Wilco drummer] Glenn Kotche performed his own interpretation of the Balinese “Monkey Chant,” a composition that not only was included on 2006 solo album, Mobile. but also served as the subject of a 15-minute film by Brendan Canty of DC’s legendary Fugazi [and currently The Messthetics, with bassist Joe Lally and guitarist Anthony Pirog {also of Janel and Anthony}]:
Glenn Kotche – “Monkey Chant“
A Movie by Brendan Canty
In an exclusive exchange facilitated by the filmmaker himself (thank you, Brendan!), Glenn Kotche had this to say in response to Zero to 180’s basic query:
Q: Had you been aware of “Pengosekan” by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven prior to composing “Monkey Chant”?
A: I’m surprised, but I’ve never heard that song before – just heard it for the first time after getting this email! The crickets don’t surprise me though. I included those since all of the recordings that I based my version of the Monkey Chant (Ketjak) on, were recorded outdoors in Bali – so the insect sounds are prevalent and add a really nice atmosphere. Most of those recordings were from the Nonesuch Explorer Series btw. I assume Coppersmith-Heaven noticed that while experiencing it live or was inspired by similar recordings.
1975’s Music of Bali –
2006’s Mobile released on Nonesuch –
Is that ironic?
Coda:
Who Is Walter Spies and Why Are We Talking About Him?
Zero to 180’s eyebrows went up upon receiving this email from Steve Feigenbaum of Cuneiform Records — Silver Spring-based independent label [last celebrated here] that released Janel and Anthony’s Where Is Home in 2012:
I own that Music and Rhythm album and it was a great revelation to me when I first got it when it was released in 1981 or so?
Really like it and really like Vic’s track.
The monkey chant was invented as a tourist kinda thing from ancient, borrowed elements of traditional culture by a German!
Steve’s Wikipedia link immediately brought me to a “Russian-born German primitivist painter” named Walter Spies, who is a “person of interest” in Michael B. Bakan‘s article published in the June, 2009 edition of Ethnomusicology Forum entitled “The Abduction of the Signifying Monkey Chant: Schizophrenic Transmogrifications of Balinese Kecak in Fellini’s Satyricon and the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple,” a scholarly piece that “begins with a historical overview that situates kecak’s own history as a Balinese cultural phenomenon within broader frameworks of hybridity, schizophonic and appropriative processes, and international filmmaking, devoting special attention to the contributions of Walter Spies.”
Walter Spies with Ketut the Cockatoo and Ida Bagus, the Monkey
c. 1935
(photo courtesy of Sotheby’s © Tropical Museum)
Further sleuthing would reveal that — “according to the standard English leaflet text used by many groups all over Bali” (so says Kendra Stepputat in her research piece entitled, “The Genesis of a Dance-Genre: Walter Spies and the Kecak“) —
“Contrary to popular belief the Kecak dance is not particularly old. It was probably first performed in 1930, although the chorus had its origins in a very ancient ritual of the Sanghyang (trance) Dance, which is still performed sometimes in the village.”
Stepputat further elaborates, in “Performing Kecak: A Balinese Dance Tradition Between Daily Routine and Creative Art,” published in 2012’s Yearbook for Traditional Music (Volume 44, pp. 49-70):
“Kecak is one of the most popular dramatic dance forms performed for tourists on Bali. It has been developed cooperatively by Balinese artists and Western expatriates, most prominently I Wayan Limbak and Walter Spies, living on Bali in the 1930s, with the explicit purpose of meeting the tastes and expectations of a Western audience. Driven by economic considerations, in the late 1960s kecak was standardized into the kecak ramayana known today.”
Feigenbaum gets the last word:
That Music and Rhythm record holds up really well, I think. It never came out fully on CD. I still have my truncated CD AND the original vinyl.
I liked it because it cast a very wide net from The Specials to Peter Hammill!
