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homes, streets, bars and fiestas before big stages and amplification.
Only now, after gigging around Galicia and abroad for some nine years, has the duo committed to CD and, as with Mercedes’s debut, it releases a pent-up force of rich material, powerfully sung and played, han- dled beautifully by up-front, non-studio- timid production.
Quique and Xurxo are joined by accordeonist Xan Pampin, violinist Nikolay Velikov and Pedro Lamas on gaitas, soprano sax, dulzaina and other reeds, adding in a bunch of other thumpy and clattery tradi- tional percussion and sounds of the street, bars, vehicles, voices, cowboy-film gunshots and exuberant shouts and cackles of alegría carrying the music along in a rich, engaging, vivid stream.
It’s mostly Galician traditional music, but also has exotic touches from the ‘café aman’ mix of Sephardic and Ottoman musics that Xurxo focuses on in another project, Jako El Muzikante, while Ándele Imende lurches happily in a Mexican cantina direction com- plete with spaghetti-Western gunshots.
Magnificent, huge fun. Straight to the heart of Galician music, and onto my ‘all-time favourites’ shelf, alongside Mercedes’s Isué.
www.folmusica.com Andrew Cronshaw
AMADOU DIAGNE YakarWaulk Records WAULK 06
SIMO LAGNAWI Gnawa LondonWaulk Records WAULK 05
Like all the best albums, Amadou Diagne’s latest sets the tone from the get go: plaintive,
acoustic and brimming with an unhurried assurance. This is the second album from Bath-based Senegalese singer-guitarist Diagne, following a perfectly decent debut on Riverboat Records last year, which all but got lost in the flood of major West African releases put out at about the same time. No danger of that happening with Yakar which features Diagne with violinist/producer Griselda Sanderson and occasional contribu- tions from Alloune Samb on keyboards, gui- tar and bass, guitarist Louis Bingham, bass player Pete Josef and Moroccan gnawa Simo Lagnawi on vocals. Ten originals, plus three
Amadou Diagne (with a blurry Griselda)
traditional tunes, all imaginatively arranged and all featuring Diagne’s honey-smoked vocals. Griselda Sanderson has got previous when it comes to this sort of thing, having collaborated with Juldeh Camara on the estimable Julaba Kinda project a couple of years back. But however good that was (and it was) I think Yakar is even better and Sanderson’s sympathetic playing is a major contributor. It’s becoming something of a cliché to compare every interesting new acoustic West African album to Baaba Maal’s classic Djam Leelii, but sometimes only a cliché will do!
Simo Lagnawi gets his own Sanderson- produced album all to himself. And it really is all to himself, just the gnawa man about Lon- don town (he plays in all kinds of settings, including Anglo-Moroccan psychedelic wig- out merchants Electric Jalaba) on vocals, per- cussion and the gumbri lute, multi-tracked so as to sound like a full ensemble (a one-man gnawa band) with the crack of krakeb (the big metal castanets that are said to send the listener into a trance), the thump of the gum- bri and overlapping vocal chants. Like Diagne’s album, Gnawa London was beauti- fully recorded at Manor Studios, with a lovely intimate sound, but this is a much more straight-ahead album, none the worse for it and very appealing if you’re in the mood for a bit of acoustic Moroccan trance bliss-out, which quite often of an evening, I find I am.
www.waulkmusic.co.uk Jamie Renton
ROUND MOUNTAIN The Goat Red Shield Music (no cat. no)
The fourth album from Santa Fe, New Mexico-based Round Mountain finds them mixing and matching music from quite a few different cultures (some of them within the United States). In less talented hands that could immediately spell disaster, but the brothers Rothschild keep a deliciously light touch on their origi- nal material. Coffee/Doppio Macchiato, for instance, sounds as if Simon & Garfunkel (or possibly a less rootsy Everly Brothers) had team up with a Balkan brass band on a song that works far better than the elements suggest. Everyone’s darling-of-the-moment, Anaïs Mitchell, brings her lovely voice to Alight, the unmistakeable Andy Irvine leads on One More Dream To Find, while Appear
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