1001 More Albums To Listen To Before You Die (1)

A few months ago I was looking at the ‘1001 albums to hear before you die’ book and, for no apparent reason, I decided not to trust the guy who compiled it and began a search for albums that aren’t in the book that I found interesting, perhaps less obvious as well. Whenever I see best album lists, whether it is Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or any other, almost everything is based on music of the West (not Western music!) but there is so much more out there that I am not exposed to so have to go searching for it. There are also some genres that are generally excluded as well. 

I’ve listened to several hundred albums to get to the first 100 of ‘1001 other albums to hear before you die’ starting in 1950 and I guess the place to start this new list is with the first album. It’s by Yma Sumac and it’s called Voice of the Xtabay.

Yma Sumac (or Imma Sumack), was a Peruvian-born American-naturalised vocalist, composer, producer, actress and model. She won a Guinness World Record for the Greatest Range of Musical Value in 1956. "Ima sumaq" means "how beautiful" in Quechua. She has also been called Queen of Exotica and is considered a pioneer of world music. Her debut album, Voice of the Xtabay (1950), peaked at number one in the Billboard 200, selling a million copies in the United States, and its single, "Virgin of the Sun God (Taita Inty)", reached number one on the UK Singles Chart, becoming an international success in the 1950s.

It is strangely beautiful music where Sumac displays her full vocal range. It does, to me, feel very much of the period and should be judged as such. So much music has been created in the intervening years with improved technology, production techniques and music fashions that an album such as this would be unlikely to achieve the volume of sales now it did nearly 75 years ago, but I sense there is a modern familial connection to back then with what I hear when I listen to “Dead Can Dance”. Now this is entirely imaginary on my part of course and I have no evidence whatsoever to support such a statement, I feel it though. Sumac adding her vocals to “The Host of Seraphim” would be quite the listening experience.