Blue Jeans Batang Hari in Tanjungsakti

Location: Tanjungsakti, South Sumatra

Sound: Batang Hari Sembilan (see my earlier post about Batang Hari Sembilan in Pagaralam)

Context: After recording Pak Arman Idris’ tracks at his home the previous day, Jemmie and I continued on towards the village of Tanjungsakti in search of the traditional Besemah flute called serdam. While that search did not end up yielding the results we had hoped for, it did lead us to another great find.

While sitting in a friend of a friend’s house waiting for information on serdam, we asked the locals whether there were any Batang Hari Sembilan players we could meet. They all seemed to agree that that was one man that we had to meet: his name, we were told, was Sepri.

Sepri arrived minutes later, and was instantly handed a guitar. He made a different impression than Pak Arman – while the former had been a seasoned professional who made an effort to put on traditional garb and present himself as the face of the Besemah Batang Hari Sembilan tradition, Ka Sepri (Ka is the preferred Besemah honorific) was more of an everyman, dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt. When asked, he told us he had never performed for an audience, never recorded, and played for personal enjoyment. He seemed a bit perplexed and taken aback that we wanted to record him, but he agreed with a kind of quiet amusement.

When he first began to sing, however, we were blown away, as he had a powerful, unusual voice that seemed to pour heavily from his throat. Sitting in the living room of the house, he played four songs for us, one of which I’ll share with you here. With this song, he told us he couldn’t remember the pantun, so another man in the room, something of an amateur musician as well, wrote down some lines (again in the local language, Bahasa Besemah) from memory. When asked, this man told us he had written the pantun himself, which is fairly unusual in this traditionalist kind of genre.

Thoughts:

Meeting Ka Sepri was an inspiring moment - here was a musician with so much to offer the world in terms of sheer invididualism and talent, but he had probably only performed for a handful of people. It was also a reminder that Batang Hari Sembilan is a very individualistic style, perhaps unlike any other I've experienced in Indonesia in that each individual musician leaves an idiosyncratic, impossible-to-miss mark on the songs he plays.

 Often upon hearing a group or musician play a previously unheard style, I feel the need to mentally check it off this big list of Indonesian Music in my head. However, Ka Sepri reminded me that every individual musician or group has something incredibly unique to offer, and it's absurd to begin to think otherwise. The search is never over - there are always amazing musicians, well-known or obscure, in every corner of the world, just waiting to share their music with the world.

South Sumatra Blues in the Highlands of Pagaralam

Location: Pagaralam, South Sumatra

Sound: Batang Hari Sembilan (Malay for “Nine River Branches’)

 Also called gitar tunggal (Indonesian for “solo guitar”), Batang Hari Sembilan is a genre of solo guitar and vocal music common throughout the Southern reaches of Sumatra. Originating in a genre of oral poetry accompanied by a now extinct local zither, Batang Hari Sembilan evolved to use acoustic guitars, most likely brought by the Portuguese in colonial times centuries ago. The guitar is played in a relatively simple fingerpicked style, with the low strings of the guitar playing a rhythmic drone while an accompanying melody is picked out on the remaining strings.

            The main focus of Batang Hari Sembilan music, however, is the sung oral poetry called pantun, found throughout Indonesia. Many different areas of Indonesia have their own variety of pantun – in these recordings, the pantun is a variety called rejung, sung in the local Besemah language. The addition of multiple pantuns can stretch songs to epic lengths of more than fifteen minutes, alternating repetitively between verse, chorus, and instrumental interludes.

Context: With the help of local musician Jemmie Delvian, I traveled to Pagaralam, a cool city in the Southern reaches of the Bukit Barisan mountains that stretch across the length of Sumatra. Often mentioned as the source of Batang Hari Sembilan, Pagaralam and its surrounding villages are the ancestral homeland of the Besemah people, a so-called “Proto-Malay” ethnic group that is thought to be one of the oldest cultures in all of Sumatra. The area is scattered with ancient, mysterious megaliths which dot the landscape between coffee and tea plantations.

With Jemmie’s help, we headed to the home of Pak Arman Idris, the most well-known guitarist of the area. We set up in a nearby field full of blooming yellow mustard flowers, with Jemmie arranging his professional recording equipment brought from Palembang, microphone cables running to Jemmie’s laptop through the ridges of tilled farmland ((in addition to being a musician, Pak Arman is also a farmer.)

Later, hoping for a quieter recording environment, we set up in Pak Arman’s simple one-room home, where we recorded three more songs with the slightest ambient background of a nearby irrigation stream running beside Pak Arman’s house. After recording, we sat on the floor and ate vegetables, fish and rice together while Pak Arman proudly told us of his trips abroad to share his music, quite a feat for a local musician.

Thoughts: I still remember hearing this music for the first time, on the “Indonesian Guitars” album from the famous Music of Indonesia series put out by Smithsonian Folkways. This was before I moved to Indonesia and became more familiar with its geography and cultures, and I remember hearing the Batang Hari Sembilan songs on the album and feeling perplexed by how unplaceable they are – the fingerpicked guitar often shares the humble feeling of the folk and country music of America, while the vocals are often full of melismatic flourishes that firmly place the music in a land far from there.  Now, having heard this music throughout South Sumatra, it will forever remind me of that place, the people I met, and the experiences I had in those cool mountains and muggy riverbanks.