RESURRECTION ALLEY / Stuart Munro

 A Column on the Rescued and Reissued

From There to Here, and Here to There, Funny Things Are Everywhere, Round 2

As promised, a little travel abroad this time around.

"From the center of the world in the holy land...there's a special band, known by the name of the Soul Messengers." So the Soul Messengers announce in "Equilibrium," one of the tracks on Soul Messages From Dimona, yet another stunning resurrection from Numero Group. The center of the world referenced in the song is Dimona, Israel, but while the Soul Messengers and their music were from there, they weren't always of there. In fact, they started out playing in Chicago, and via membership in the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, who began a return to the holy land in 1969, ended up in Dimona, and where they've been, more or less, ever since. So they were soul messengers in a twofold sense, bringing a soul message to a locale where it was all but unknown, and using soul music as the vehicle to convey their message about their God.

The Numero Group offering compiles the Soul Messengers and its offshoots, the gospel singing group The Spirit of Israel and Motown-esque kid group Tonistics, as well as another group that grew out of the return, the Sons of the Kingdom. The result: lots of straight up funk, a track ("Go to Proclaim") that sounds like Al Green gone Hebrew, a marvelous rendition of the old spiritual "Daniel" with reggae touches from the Spirit of Israel, some sweet soul from the Tonistics on another shout-out to their place in the world ["Dimona (the Spiritual Capital of the World)"], and an astonishing song ("Modernization") from the Sons of the Kingdom that calls down the wrath of God upon the West ("almighty God, the cry goes out to you, if you don't stop modernization, civilization is through / hurry, hurry Father, we don't have a lot of time, destroy their institutions and the scientific mind!").

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The funk shows up elsewhere far-flung from its origins, as the compilation Polish Funk 3, from Polskie Nagrania, attests. It comes complete with a subtitle in the Polish variant of Engrish --"the unique selection of rare grooves from Poland of the 70s." Some of it sounds like the musical equivalent of Engrish, too, or the soundtrack for the Festrunk brothers (and yeah, I know, they were Czechs, not Poles), and a lot of it sounds like the 70s. Stan Gorys' "I'm Looking For a Friend" would have served perfectly as the theme for Mannix, while "Crowd" by the Alex Band and "Funky for Franka" by Laboratium recall that the fusion of that era. And if "Strit" reminds you of the stuff you worked up in your high school jazz ensemble, that's because it's performed by the high school graduates who made up Poznan's Light Music Orchestra.

Here and there, the definition of funk gets stretched: Alibabki's "Once Was a Couple" sounds closer to the Fifth Dimension than anything funky, and with the atmospheric strings, jazzy guitar, and deep Polish voice of Bogdan Gajkowski, "I Don't Regret Those Days" is pure slow jam. All of this is of variable quality and appeal; the album's most interesting and strangest moments arrive with "Return," with its big band hipster jazz and Andrzej Dabrowksi's beatnik spoken-word lyrics, and with "Discoland," by Chorus & Disco Company ("among the band's unbearable melodies we found a gem," the liner notes inform us), a seven-minute disco-funk mélange of horns, strings and synths and the briefest of lyrics--"discoland, disco"--repeated ad infinitum. Those are the only two words of English on the album, and they turn out to be even stranger than its various approximations of funk wedded to Polish lyrics.

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The steel guitar seems to show up in some unexpected places, too (check out the Sacred Steel gospel tradition, which came to the attention of the wider world a few years ago, for example). Bollywood Steel Guitar, from Sublime Frequencies, chronicles the role it has played in the popular music of India. This is "Bollywood" steel because the origin of the music collected here is in film soundtracks. As the comp's liner notes explain, "in India film music has become an industry unto itself...The music is just as important as the film and lives on long after the film has left the theatres. These songs are, for the most part, the pop music of India."

The comp samples instrumental versions of those songs -- what the notes label, in turn, "the elevator music of India"-- that feature the steel guitar, apparently the most popular instrument in such covers. It showcases seven different steel players doing hits drawn from films made between 1962 and 1986 (the liners list the film in which each song originally appeared). Who knows what these songs sounded like in their original context, but the steel-ified versions are all over the place. Some --"Chahe Mujhe Koi Junglee Kahe," with Van Shipley on steel, or "Ajhoon Na Aye," where Sunil Ganguly's steel sinuates its way amidst sitar and drums -- sound like straight-up Indian music (or what sounds straight-up to these uneducated ears). But "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu" has the unhinged of Hank Penny's western swing, and "Mast Baharon Ka" sounds like Spade Cooley gone Bolly, using strings, accordion, clarinet and steel to mix Indian flavor into a western swing sound. Kazi Aniruddha gives "Piay Tu Ab To Aja" a spaghetti western vibe, Charanjit Singh weds his fuzzed up steel to horns and a bluesy beat on "Manje Re," and Kazi Arindam's version of "Mere Liye Too Bani" verges on disco, with some sitar thrown in for good measure. It's not simply strange, but strangely familiar.

Stuart Munro moved to Massachusetts from the Great White North over 20 years ago. He still likes living in America, where people continue to tell him that he seems familiar, yet somehow strange. A tip of the hat to the fine folks at Miles of Music (www.milesofmusic.com) for allowing him to resurrect the title of this column.