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however is that, despite the undoubted cali- bre of the musicians involved, the songs keep returning to analogous orchestral refrains based on simple and repetitive engagements with the double harmonic scale.
On top of these scales are built hit and miss things and, for every lute solo, there’s a dubious echoed vocal sample, sustained electric guitar power-chord or cheering crowd sound. MHD is a particularly lame example of this. The effect is a record that wouldn’t go amiss in the background to a computer game about tracking terrorists in some unnamed oil state.
And this is the major issue with Safar. Despite its claims to the contrary, this record sounds, especially post-Arab Spring, like Arab music as imagined by a Hollywood producer. It seems to imagine the ‘Arab world’ as some vast, mysterious mono-culture and doesn’t seem to realise that, even general audiences are, in 2014, well beyond this.
Safar is a record behind the times and anybody with a serious grip on the global musical landscape will see straight through it.
http://safarproject.bandcamp.com/ Liam Thompson
VARIOUS ARTISTS
Rough Guide to Psychedelic Bollywood World Music Network RGNET1302CD
Bollywood is renowned for its stars and burn- outs. Thanks to over-committing, composers on a treadmill were not unknown to plagia- rise, as if original creativity and copyright were, at best, hazy concepts. In the long term it was how ‘music directors’ – composers – stole that will determine how posterity will judge their ‘creativity’. DJ Ritu, the compiler of this excellent set, ducks such issues but they hover over this anthology.
It might sound like heresy but the brother partnership of Kalyanji / Anandji’s opening two tracks – Lata Mangeshkar Asha Bhosle & Mahendra Kapoor singing Pyar Zingagi Hai and a piece of instrumental ‘cabaret music’ (a Bollywood genre) – are pure, unalloyed sound- alike pastiche. Their sound-alike elements summon memories of a shameful period in Bollywood history when the town blanked RD Burman (the subject of DJ Ritu’s bonus disc selection) by undercutting and undermining him. Their Yeh Mera Dil… (track six, from the film Don) feels like somebody’s throwing up into an RD Burman bucket, despite it being his second wife Asha Bhosle singing.
Psychedelia Burman-fashion got far weirder than anything on either disc. From frustrating, personal experiences though, licensing from Indian record companies is like Cream’s Disraeli Gears where “tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers”. Psychotropic Psychedelic Bollywood isn’t but it is mind-altering music that gets trippy like light refracted through a distorting Indian prism. Choosing so many instrumentals – six out of fifteen tracks – is inspired.
www.worldmusic.net Ken Hunt
REMI HARRIS Ninick Big Bear Records BEARCD 53
If you like gypsy-jazz, then this album is a gem you should own. Remi Harris deploys his prodigious technique with quiet confidence, wit and imagination. He includes Django’s Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (sometimes known as Django’s Waltz), which is some- thing of a technical test piece. He passes with distinction. Just to make sure you under- stand, he also plays Charlie Parker’s Donna Lee at terrifying speed.
But it’s the music that’s most important
and there’s a relaxed, confident ease about its execution. There’s some quirky material including Lady Madonna, and George Ben- son’s funky blues, The Man From Toledo. There are some unexpected tone colours; Ben Cummings’ trumpet features on two tracks, and the reliably inventive technical mastery of Alan Barnes’ saxophones on three others. Remi also writes a good tune. One of these is the title track Ninick, which is dedi- cated to his late mother.
For the record, Remi Harris happens to be from England and is only 25 years old, but it’s definitely the music that’s most important, and it’s very good indeed.
www.remiharris.co.uk Jon Moore
MAYRA ANDRADE Lovely Difficult Sterns Music STCD1123
“I wanted to make a poppier album,” Andrade relates, or as the promo one-sheet has it, something “decidedly and unashamed- ly international.” Well then, Lovely Difficult it is, a plausible extension of Andrade’s preced- ing release, Studio 105, whose Lennon- McCartney and Serge Gainsbourg covers, and a flagrantly poppy duet with Hugh Coltman signalled things to come.
The singer’s Cape Verdean roots have not entirely gone missing here, as the copy- writer is at pains to assert (eg, Ilha De Santia- go, A-mi N Kre-u Txeu and, one might even argue, the laid-back morna-reggae-ska lilt and sway of songs like Les Mots D’Amour). But there’s no anxiety of influence, reflecting a childhood spent between Cuba, Cape Verde, Senegal, Angola and Germany, per- haps, ultimately landing in Paris, so many lit- tle flavours assimilated, jazz, rock, chanson, strings, blended and blurred along the way.
The redeeming element is Andrade’s capacity to ramble through it all with a winning ease, as on her composition Téra Lonji, a per- sonal testament: “I come from a faraway land / I have walked the earth / But I never found such a lovely place… Cape Verde, Cape Verde.” In the most haunting of tracks, Simplement, Andrade’s smoldering langue-et-parole slithers around a rooted bass line and an endlessly looping minor three-chord acoustic guitar vamp, an evocative manifesto of less as more.
www.sternsmusic.com Michael Stone
HANNAH SHIRA NAIMAN Tether My Heart Merriweather MH 131
From Canada, let me introduce a young excit- ing talent. Think Diana Jones, think Gillian Welch. Hannah has a relaxing voice that she accompanies on this recording with tasty old- time banjo. The songs, all original, could easily be taken as being traditional, such is her mas- tery of the genre. Right from opening Mar- ried Soldier I was captivated. Moving through a minor key ballad, Looking For My Own, to the bouncy and jaunty Same Old Song to the unaccompanied I’m Going To Find My Joy the music never lacks variety. Another song, Wil- low, has a fine three-part harmony on the chorus, and is supported throughout by excel- lent fiddle, banjo and guitar, and is shortly fol- lowed by The Way To Go Home which bor- rows the chorus of the well-known song to construct another first class original song. There is not a weak moment on this recording which never strays too far from the traditions of old-time country music. Well recorded, with vocals up front and exactly the right amount of instrumental support.
www.hannahshiranaiman.com John Atkins
Mayra Andrade PAUL & LIZ DAVENPORT
Wait For No Man Hallamshire Traditions HATRCD09
Hull-born and now based in South Yorkshire, Paul and Liz have lately been growing their profile and solid reputation much further afield, both as fine singers and as keenly expert researchers and song-carriers. Their three CDs have typically delivered traditional material (often in less familiar versions, care- fully chosen and intelligently arranged) alongside new songs by Paul himself, com- posed very much within the tradition, and Wait For No Man sees no reason to depart significantly from that winning formula.
The couple’s singing voices are quite unmistakable, of distinctive timbre, sturdy and forthright, with a confident full-throated delivery yet not without expressive variation in dynamics. Just under half of the CD’s seven teen songs are performed a cappella, the remainder accompanied by Paul on duet concertina. Most are sung by both voices in unison, although Liz and Paul also perform solo.
The songs all have a temporal reference, whether to the passage of time through the progress of the seasons or merely the time of day as the protagonists wait and hope; many also take the sea as a sub-theme. While not wishing to underplay the Davenports’ enter- prise in reworking (or accessing unusual ver- sions of) traditional material, it’s Paul’s own compositions that provide the highlights, not least because they have the true ring of tradi- tion while seeming familiar. The opener Come, See The Boys Go Round, for example, which describes the longsword dance; the unsettling, not-exactly-lullaby Iron Angels; the trawlerman’s lament Silver In The Pocket; and the ‘lost town’ yarn Ravenser Odd. Paul also provides a suitably plaintive musical set- ting for Housman’s poem The Lads That Will Never Be Old.
The purely traditional selections include several with a Yorkshire or Humberside con- nection, also an interesting conflation of Cruel Sister (words and tune elements) with the French song The Scent Of Lilies. We’re also treated to two compositions by present-day folk songmakers: the catchy, entertaining Boggle Hole Pirates, by Rotherham’s inim- itable Roy Blackman, and Old Billy Blue (the tale of William Cornwallis, unsung hero of the Napoleonic Wars) by The Keelers’ Pete Wood.
Altogether, Wait For No Man is a worthy successor to the Davenports’ earlier CDs.
www.hallamtrads.co.uk David Kidman
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