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Africa, home of Negro music, has been a favorite field for melody-hunting anthropologists. There are more than 1,100 primitive African records scattered through U. S. institutions. Chicago's Laura Boulton has collected about 500; Northwestern University has about 300, all made by Anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. Softspoken, Budapest-born George Herzog of Columbia University has 300. Other important U. S. collections are in University of Pennsylvania and Manhattan's Museum of Natural History.
While collectors of primitive recordings rejoiced last week in their new African find, swarthy, supple-limbed Uday Shan-Kar, appearing in Manhattan on what is expected to be his final U. S. tour, released an album of five discs devoted to Hindu music as played by the performers of his company (Victor: Musical Masterpiece Series, price $9). Preserved in wax were the most striking musical accompaniments and interludes of the famed Shan-Kar performances, including lean Vishnudass Shirali's incredible solo on twelve drums.
Up to now exotic music fans have depended on various sources for their Oriental records. Most comprehensive of these has been Decca's repressing of Parlophone's compact anthology, Music of the Orient, which includes one or more records apiece from Japan, China, Persia, Egypt, Java, Siam, Tunis and Lower India, and several brilliant, ringing examples of Bali's gamelan music. Hindu recordings have also been issued by suave, scholarly Brahmin Sarat Lahiri. who runs a Manhattan restaurant (The Bengal Tiger). The larger recording companies, who make thousands of records annually in odd parts of the world strictly for local consumption, do not sell these records in the U. S. Many of them are imported and sold, however, by small record shops throughout the U. S.
*By Manhattan's Reeves Sound Studios, Inc.; $10 for an album of six discs.