‘Aotearoa Welcomes You’

Te Ao Hou, March 1964, Page 57

‘Aotearoa Welcomes You’ Viking VP 74 12 inch. 33⅓ LP. It is good to see youth groups making recordings. This record is by the Motuiti Maori Youth Club, a fifty-strong Ngati Raukawa party under the leadership of Teira Hemara. Two-thirds of the members are teenagers and obviously from this record, they enjoy performing their items mightily. There is considerable variety on the disc. Unfortunately, it starts badly for me with a jazzed-up version of ‘Au e Ihu’ accompanied by guitar. Fortunately the remainder of the items are more conveniently—and competently—performed. This however is another of those discs, periodically deprecated by your reviewer, which advertises itself as ‘actually recorded at a Maori concert’. Thus there is the usual chorus of coughs and snuffles punctuating most items, and performers doing more yip-yipping than actual words in the haka. ‘Ringa Pakia’ is particularly bad, with frequent pauses for audience laughter. Haka taparahi are a message of the soul—an expression of the corporate voice of a warrior people. Any attempt to make them into burlesques for the sake of audience belly laughs is to be deplored. Despite the tendency for the microphones to pick up individual voices as performers move about, the quality of this recording is better than most ‘live’ performances. It is performed with zest and should prove enjoyable to the tourist for whom it is obviously principally intended.