Female Vocals: Stunning Recordings You Love

[bluefuzz]

I've recently been taking a deep dive into the wonderful and frightening world of Mary Ocher. True greatness ...

Yellow Modulations:

On the streets of hard labour:

Stinky Snifflez

 

[JustAnandaDourEyedDude]

Nahal Ladani covers Shervin Hajipour's song Baraye

Soprano Manuela Dumfart in Linz, Austria, covers Baraye. Such power in this performance, and such commitment to sound natural in the pronunciation:

Manuela Dumfart is beside herself with joy in presenting her version of the Flower Duet from Lakme:

ifa (group? singer?) cover Baraye in a no-holds-barred Metal version:

Unnamed musicians on the YouTube channel "D.R.A.M.A." with a mesmerizing interpretation of Shervin Hajipour's moving song "Baraye". The close-miked singer's voice and delivery are spellbinding. Wish I knew her name so I could listen to every song she has ever recorded.

For an English translation of the lyrics, see for example my post of Shervin's original song on page 8 of the "Male Vocals" thread on ASR:
Shervin Hajipour singing his song Baraye

 

[JustAnandaDourEyedDude]

The singer Gita sings Gole Sangam (Persian song). It has been covered by many singers, but I find most versions to be labored or oversung. The nostalgic video clip from some classic Iranian movie gives this video the edge over a YT video with just a static image of Gita. If you do not understand Persian (I do not), if you look up a translation of the lyrics online, it is a song of unrequited love, with the feelings of "duende" in Spanish.

 

[TimF]

This thread in this website is all by itself worth the price of admission. I spent nearly the entire night going through the numbers. Thanks to all that posted.

 

[JustAnandaDourEyedDude]

Can you recommend more Persian music?

Apologies for the (very!) late reply. Life intervened, and will apparently continue to do so. I am no expert on Persian music, nor do I understand Farsi. Over the years I have occasionally bought CDs of Persian music, thus expanding my familiarity with it. The YouTube recommendation engine is pretty good, and one can discover much previously unfamiliar music with it. Many notable Persian singers have been cited in this ASR thread, including the Vadat sisters. In this couple of posts, I will mention a couple of singers that I do not recall have been mentioned on ASR. The first is Darya Dadvar, who was born and grew up in Iran, but immigrated to France at an early point in her career (thus the nigh perfect French accent). I was fortunate to buy her three CDs of Live recordings off Amazon back when CDBaby still pressed CDs, and have listened to them repeatedly over the years. She sings Persian folk songs with her operatically trained creamy soprano voice but with jazz arrangements with super jazz accompanists. Here is a Persian folk song titled "Mikham beram kooh":

Here is a remarkable version of Autumn Leaves that uses three languages, French, English and Farsi (the previous record was held by Kishi Yoko with a mixed Japanese and French version):

Here is possibly the loveliest folk/pop/jazz song I have heard in many a year, titled Navaee:

Here is the traditional song Tabe Banafsheh, but Darya's rendition is spellbinding; listen all the way through to the end:

Here, Darya covers the mixed French-Persian language song Yade Man Kon made famous by much earlier and stellar Persian singer Bahare Delkash (dominant theme: it is madness that he said these beautiful words to love to me, yet he did not take his own life when in spite of his love he left me ...):

Here is the song (of Afghan origin) Sarzamin-e-Man:

Darya does not rest on her laurels. Here is a recent refined expression of her mature period:

Here is another recent superlative expression presumably titled Oun Vaghta:

 

[JustAnandaDourEyedDude]

Can you recommend more Persian music?

In September of 2017 the following extraordinary CD album appeared on Amazon, during my routine weekend check for new music. I bought it sight unseen, and have never regretted the decision. The album is titled "tar-o-pood", which translates to "Warp and Weft", and is subtitled "a musical adaptation of nezami's epic love poem Khosrow and Shirin", the adaptation seemingly by Setar maestro hamid motebassem. The principal singer is Mahdieh Mohammad-khani. The album consists of ten tracks:

The following tracks are highlights, but really the entire album is an outstanding artistic achievement, and is best listened to from beginning to end, when it is stupefying in its beauty.

Hekayat

Shirin

Rooz

the climactic Pood

If you search YouTube for "Mahdieh Mohammadkhani", you will see that she has become a force majeure in Persian music despite having to work within the confines of being a female singer in present-day Iran. A huge body of outstanding musicianship, including her work with the Dastan and Mahbanoo ensembles.

 

[Multicore]

I've recently been taking a deep dive into the wonderful and frightening world of Mary Ocher.

The album The West Against the People has contributions from the inestimable Die Tödliche Doris (so good I did a radio special about them years ago. didn't know they were active still/again) and from the incalculable Felix Kubin (friend and early Gas Giants guest).

 

[marcus_ec]

 

[Palmspar]

 

[Robbo99999]

I absolutely love everything about Aurora. Heard this for the first time today:

Martin

Yeah, that's awesome, that was the first time I heard her, that video - I first saw that video sometime in 2021 & then I bought all her albumns since. Some of the albumns are better than others, but there's always some good tracks on there - fantastic voice, bit of an unusual persona, but I like her but don't buy into the crazy fandom. I really like the Electronica side & soundscape that is often created in her recordings along with her voice - I think they do some high quality recordings in general on a technical level too. Yeah, so that video, I was a Massive Attack fan & then I saw that vid & I thought that's better than the original, absolutely fantastic, gave me goosebumps the first time I listened to it, and once in while since then!

 

[Martin]

Yeah, that's awesome, that was the first time I heard her, that video - I first saw that video sometime in 2021 & then I bought all her albumns since. Some of the albumns are better than others, but there's always some good tracks on there - fantastic voice, bit of an unusual persona, but I like her but don't buy into the crazy fandom. I really like the Electronica side & soundscape that is often created in her recordings along with her voice - I think they do some high quality recordings in general on a technical level too. Yeah, so that video, I was a Massive Attack fan & then I saw that vid & I thought that's better than the original, absolutely fantastic, gave me goosebumps the first time I listened to it, and once in while since then!

This YouTube video is how I discovered Aurora. I've bought everything she has released since. She is a unique individual with a heavenly voice and an interesting musical style. Billie Eilish has credited her seeing Aurora's Runaway video when she was 11 or 12 as an inspiration to her becoming a musician.

Martin

 

[Martin]

Someone on here turned me onto I'm With Her a while ago. This is an excellent video of one of their performances:

If you like that check out this on the Internet Archive recorded at DelFest in my adoptive hometown of Cumberland, MD: https://archive.org/details/ImWithHer20190525T11

Martin

 

[Robbo99999]

This YouTube video is how I discovered Aurora. I've bought everything she has released since. She is a unique individual with a heavenly voice and an interesting musical style. Billie Eilish has credited her seeing Aurora's Runaway video when she was 11 or 12 as an inspiration to her becoming a musician.

Martin

Yep, I remember seeing that one, good performance!

 

[Robbo99999]

Someone on here turned me onto I'm With Her a while ago. This is an excellent video of one of their performances:

If you like that check out this on the Internet Archive recorded at DelFest in my adoptive hometown of Cumberland, MD: https://archive.org/details/ImWithHer20190525T11

Martin

That's a good performance, and they perform really well together & they feel it, and a couple of those tracks were pretty emotional, they're a bit too country for me though, I enjoyed playing through it though.

 

[Ralph_Cramden]

 

[gene_stl]

Light in Babylon Official Website

www.lightinbabylon.com

Light in Babylon - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Light in Babylon

Praised by fRoots Magazine as "A celebration of the cosmopolitan traditions of both Istanbul and the Sephardic Jewish community and another example of the great music that is coming out of the Eastern Mediterranean right now", Light in Babylon brought to the world scene their first official...

www.youtube.com

 

[Ralph_Cramden]

 

[drewdawg999]

Love this recording, a Barry Gibb tune leftover from the Guilty sessions with Barbra Streisand.

 

[Ralph_Cramden]

 

[Ken1951]