Diego Amador's piano flamenco
Diego Amador
Piano Jondo
World Village (www.worldvillagemusic.com)
The piano is hardly the first instrument you'd associate with flamenco, but Seville-based Diego Amador has the chops and vision to shake up conventional thinking on the matter. If you want to put it in simplest terms, call this a flamenco album that puts piano where guitar ought to be. It's not mere supplanting, though. There are tracks in which Amador sweetens the piano with guitar and mandola in order to assist its twisting and turning through the flamenco styles covered here, as well as some clear stretching of flamenco's possibilities. A foundation of upright bass and percussion (mostly cajon) frames
arrangements that often ease into jazzy interaction (as on the lengthy "Vivan los Gitanos," and the too-short Jaco Pastorius cover "Continuum") without dropping the Iberian grandeur. The masterful way Amador tickles the ivories can truly take on the feel of guitar picking and strumming, but he also utilizes the piano's decidedly non-guitar timbres to bring his own freshness to the proceedings. Though not as radical as what some of his fellow Spaniards are doing with flamenco, Amador still makes Piano Jondo thoroughly enjoyable. - Tom Orr
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cdRootsLabels: flamenco spain, World Music
Belgium's Aurélia take a musical voyage
Aurélia
Hypnogol, Journal d'un capitaine
Homerecords.be (www.homerecords.be)
Aurélia continue their unconventional journey in the musical seas with this concept album subtitled "journal of a captain." As they explain their concept, a captain who considers himself an outstanding singer organises a concert on his ship to show off his skills. It is an unconditional disaster. Distraught after his failure, he begins to navigate the canals and rivers alone, which leads to his hallucinating. The resulting mumblings are archived in his log.
Equally built on the pillars of humor, trance, jazz and at times eastern rhythms, Hypnogol is everything mainstream music is not in 2007. Taking cues from psychoanalysis (hypnogol is a play on hypnagogia, the term for the state where one is just before plunging into sleep and Gogol, the Russian writer), this is music of a complexity and depth not easily found. Hypnogol succeeds because it is fascinating and funny, but also challenging, a record that the listener might unlock only after repeated listening, much in the same way one understands auteur cinema.
Musically, the trio uses a diverse set of tools - violins, guitars, daf, tapan, vibraphone and gongs - to illustrate the captain's journey into the unknown. They sing in German, English and French to document the paranoid undertones of the captain's malfunctioning logic. Taking their vanguard ideals a step further, between November 2007 and May 2008, Aurélia will board a real barge, Aureliaferia, and give concerts on it in Belgium and France.
For anyone interested in challenging, entertaining concept albums, Hypnogol could be the record of the year. For the rest of us, this is a record that camouflages its complexity and challenges under a continental cosmopolitan spirit that describes uniquely the miracle of major blunders. If you think this is a subject that is out of step with our times, think of every misinformed Pop Idol contestant, every Britney comeback strategy, every high-spirited entrepreneur whose venture misfires spectacularly, every political undertaking that ends in misery. Hypnogol could work as the soundtrack for any flight of fancy that ends in tears and, hopefully, self-awareness; a true record for our times. - Nondas Kitsos
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Galeazzi's La Tarantella: Back in stock at last!
Lucilla Galeazzi, Marco Beasley,L'Arpeggiata and Christina Pluhar
La Tarantella: Antidotum Tarantulae (Alpha Productions)
A fascinating, original crossover of folk and classical, with the musicians of the early music ensemble L’Arpeggiata joining the illustrious singers Galeazzi and Beasley, performed on modern and ancient instruments including chitarra battente, lutes, harp, psaltry. It's a mix of traditional songs and composed works form the 17th century, which gives it a unique and uncompromising quality.
With Alfio Antico, Eero Palviainen, Marcello Vitale and many other fine musicians. Includes detailed notes in French and English.
Listen:
Lamento dei mendicanti (trad)
Tarantella Napoleanata (Tono Hypodorico)
Lu Gatta la sonora la zampogna (Ninna nanna) (trad)
The rhythms of Curaçao - Riba Dempel
VA
Riba Dempel: Popular Dance Music of Curaçao 1950-1954
Otrabanda (www.otrabandarecords.nl)
The cultural and commercial crossroads of Riba Dempel, Curaçao's riverside central market place, gives its name to this superb compilation of early 1950s Dutch Antilles song. Sitting off the Venezuelan coast, Curaçao was open to musical influences from across the Caribbean, accessible via radio, recordings, and touring bands, with Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela at the fore. Booming with postwar oil development and the Shell refinery's economic presence, Curaçao took it all in, and the enthusiasm of a handful of local businessmen for Papiamento music (after the Dutch Creole language of the so-called ABC islands) gave rise to a vigorous hometown recording industry.
Working from rescued 78 rpm discs originally produced by the Hoyco and Musika labels, Tim De Wolf painstakingly restored and digitized the music, while producer Scott Rollins compiled the fascinating and extensive documentation that rounds out this package, with period photos, transcribed lyrics in English and Papiamento, personnel listings, and recording information. Working at times from multiple copies of the original 78s, De Wolf and Rollins lovingly pieced together two dozen illuminating examples of Curaçao reinterpretations of the bolero, guaracha, meringue, son montuno, and pambiche styles from abroad, as well as local waltzes, danzas, and tumba.
All this is not just resurrection for resurrection's sake, either. More than a half-century later, the arrangements hold their own, the vocals are powerful, and the musicianship remains top-notch. Every would-be historical compiler could learn something by delving into this stellar tribute to the roots of Curaçao's contemporary music. Best of all, perhaps, De Wolf and Rollins are currently at work on comparable compilations from the 1960s and 1970s. Stay tuned! - Michael Stone
Listen to Tipico Moderna's guaracha "Hunga Rol"
http://www.rootsworld.com/audio/ribadempel.html
CD available from cdRoots
http://www.cdroots.com/st-otb-03.html
Ale Möller Band - from Sweden to the World
Ale Möller Band
Djef Djel
Amigo Musik
Swedish bouzouki player Möller has been a musical voyager since the '70s, when he began studying bouzouki at its source, in Greece. This release is an ecstatic mix of Swedish dance music, Greek rebetiko, and Senegalese traditional song. With dynamic Greek singer Maria Stellas and Senegalese singer and dancer Mamadou Sene figuring prominently in the proceedings, the music is all over the map. There's surprisingly little in the way of cultural clash on the CD, with most of the segues being pretty seamless. What there is, however, is a lack of center. The individual elements are brilliantly performed and arranged, but the listener is often left with a sense of directionlessness. The best way to approach it is with no expectations, as one might listen to a "world music" compilation. Möller and crew carom wildly from the dusky exoticism of the Greek traditional song "Yati" to the earthy "Riti" a Sene composition using the one-stringed fiddle of the title. The effect can be jarring at times. That said, some of the most interesting and satisfying moments are medleys that move from Swedish to Greek to Senegalese sounds. These often have a cohesive flow and a nice build to them. The medley "Zenith," for example, starts with the Arabic-tinged "Ali Mullah (which gets its title from Möller's Arabic nickname)," moves into the Möller-Sene collaboration "Zenith," then goes into the Jiannis Dragatsis composition "Kamomatou" before circling back to the beginning. The whole thing has an epic quality to it. Djef Djel is a grand experiment that for the most part pays off. - Peggy Latkovich
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