Hugh Tracey, 1903 - 1977

Hugh Tracey recorded extensively from the Sudan border down to the Cape of Good Hope. A whole sub-continent, a life's work! He was one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology and was responsible more than anybody else for 'putting African music on the map'. Indeed, if you put your finger almost anywhere on a map of that half of Africa, you will find a closely corresponding recording in Tracey's vast output. Most important of all, many of his recordings are the only recordings of certain musics which have long since disappeared.

As a young farmer at Gutu, in then Southern Rhodesia, he learned to sing along with his Karanga co-workers in the tobacco fields, but soon found out that no one in authority had the slightest interest in the music that he was discovering. In fact he was often labelled as a kind of traitor by his fellow whites at the time, for taking African music seriously at all – 'that man Hugh Tracey!'

His first recordings were made with a clockwork-powered machine that ploughed a groove into an aluminium disc. In a meeting at the Royal College of Music in London in 1931 he was encouraged by composers Ralph Vaughn Williams and Gustav Holst to 'discover & record, discover & record'! But it was after the advent of magnetic tape in 1949 that he made the majority of his recordings. They are of exceptional technical quality for that era and moreover, with his hand-held microphone technique, he often moved around recording each instrument of an ensemble at close quarters, achieving a remarkable clarity. HT always saw to it that he had state-of-the-art recording equipment and was quite a fanatic when it came to getting the best possible recording in every situation. He was an exceptional recordist.

In 1954 he founded the International Library of African Music (ILAM), which published his major academic work 'The Sound of Africa' series of 210 lps, which was acquired by a few university libraries but which remained inaccessible to the greater public. The first release of his recordings, however, was his 'Music of Africa' series on 12-inch records by the Decca/London label, including his famous narrated introductions. Gallo Records later re-released this more populist series, minus the introductions, on 19 lps.

So, without any training except a love for music and for his fellow man, he succeeded, eventually, in building up an archive that far exceeded that of any other researcher in Africa and will always stand as a benchmark for historians and social scientists, and as an inspiration for musicians.

'Historical Recordings by Hugh Tracey' is a new series, not a re-release of selected previous lp albums on cd. It also includes many tracks never published before, and all previously released items can be heard in their unexpurgated entirety for the first time – you will find no fade-ins or outs made by producer Michael Baird in this series. Working from the original field tapes as much as possible, every track has been digitally remastered with great care and in 'good taste' – meaning here going as far as necessary in cleaning up old mono recordings, and making them more suitable for the digital medium 'compact disc', without losing the authenticity of the recorded moment. Today's computer technology can be very seductive, but one must always remain focused on the matter at hand: the emotion in the music.

The sad conclusion after compiling this series is that so much music recorded by HT has since disappeared – within the space of fifty years. This is something HT foresaw and why he spent most of his life recording this music for posterity. In so many cases we are lucky to have his recordings of amazing musicians – no one else recorded them. As on the final 3 albums, with the dynamite August Musarurwa and the unknown saxophonist of the Umtali Chipisa Band on SWP 032, the thum wizard Daudi Otuoma on SWP 030, the Dar-es-Salaam Jazz Band on SWP 031, and also the magical drummer Sehene on SWP 007, royal harpist Temusewo Mukasa with his precision timing on SWP 008, the timeless flautist Katsuba Mwongolo on SWP 009, and so many others on every album in this series, it was not so much Tracey's 'knack' of being at the right place at the right time, but his awareness and vision coupled with organisation and his tremendous energy which give us the opportunity to listen to them today. In this series we are able to present many of the foremost musicians of the 20th century from this part of Africa – and that is a gift. It is especially a gift to the peoples involved, for the legacy as played by their forebears belongs to them.