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His songs are about darkness and depres- sion and drinking and disillusion and desper- ation and many other things beginning with D but, delivering consistently telling lyrics with the emotional honesty of a soul singer amid melodies that imperceptibly seep into his bones, his songs leave you uplifted rather than suicidal. Yes, they are infused with the dissonance of the radical folk tradition, but the influence of blues, reggae and even hip hop – both in the way he constructs songs and performs them – contributes equally to their overall power and strength. You couldn’t imagine anyone else coming up with the thrillingly brutal maze of styles he effort- lessly exudes on Patience, part-rap, part- gospel, part-R&B; or applying such tender bit- terness to a song about suicide as he does on Chris & Stevie; or bringing such evocative humanity into a song reflecting on Ireland’s troubled history as he brilliantly weaves into the fierce Colony.
Erdal Erzincan
ERDAL ERZINCAN Bag
˘lama Orkestrasi Kalan CD609
Erdal Erzincan (pronounced air-zin-djan) is a name who many have come to know through his ECM duos with Kayhan Kalhor. He is one of Turkey’s foremost baglama sazı players who, from the time of his classic showcase piece Bag˘ lama Üvertürü on his 1996 Garip album, has made it his aim to take a seeming- ly humble instrument with an ancient ances- try to incredible heights of artistry, belying the divide between folk and classical music. In Turkey the 42-year-old Erzincan’s music is enjoyed by village folk and urban sophisti- cates alike.
Bag˘ lama Orkestrası is an impressive and unique album that takes this crafting of the ba˘
glama sound to a new and long-dreamt-of pinnacle. Conceived in 2004, the project as the title indicates creates a ba˘
of 20 top-class young players on various sizes of Turkey’s national instrument. The result is a strange and wonderful creature, sounding something like a multi-headed harpsichord on speed. The music is profuse, grand and elaborately baroque, taking delightful sud- den twists and turns of rhythm and tempi, but touching base with a number of songs, sung sometimes in the typical charged declamatory style, by both male and female orchestra members, and in chorus.
These songs are rooted in various regions
of Turkey or come from the Alevi tradition of spiritual song. The tight togetherness of the playing is joyful in the extreme; one can feel the sheer pleasure of the ensemble playing, the results of many hours of shared practice and centuries of shared culture. The orchestra includes both men and women, some of whom Erzincan allows to shine as soloists alongside himself, demonstrating how the instrument has moved from its historically male domain, and also showing a renewed interest in traditional music amongst Turkey’s youth, many of whom have an impressive dedication to musical skill.
The key to understanding the album is
the ¸selpe technique pioneered by Erzincan and others of his generation in the 1990s. This involves tapping the long low-tension strings (also plucked and played flamenco- style). As the string is not plucked in ¸selpe this creates a softer tone than the harpsichord and the fingers can fly at breakneck speed over the thin neck of the instrument divided into tones and quarter-tones by nylon ties. Ba˘
glamak means ‘to tie’ in Turkish – hence
the instrument’s name. The strings are in courses of two or three strings together pro- viding resonant depth to what would other- wise be a fragile sound.
One of only two criticisms is not musical and a standard when it comes to Kalan CDs, something we have learnt to live with: no English notes for the international market. One can only gaze at the flowery-looking words with the same wonder as at the intri- cacy of the music. The other is a slight nag- ging doubt about the use of the bass ba˘glama. Traditionally the very long divan sazı has provided the lowest notes in Turkish folk music. The bass ba˘glama has been devised, laudably, to avoid the bass guitar, but it still stands out slightly as somewhat alien. On the other hand, who are we to argue with the arrangements of maybe the instrument’s greatest master?
glama orchestra amongst ba˘
This album will be a future classic glama enthusiasts and the
arrangements will be studied learnt by ba˘
glama students the world over including in some of the many saz schools in London. Oth- ers will sit this CD proudly and equally appro- priately either next to the guitar fest that is Saturday Night In San Francisco or to their favourite Scarlatti sonatas.
kalan.com Sebastian Merrick DAMIEN DEMPSEY
It’s All Good: The Best Of Damien Dempsey Clear Records IRL080
Ordinarily we’d dispatch a Greatest Hits com- pilation into the And The Rest section but lis- tening to this stuff anew it reminds you with a jolt that Dempsey is such a uniquely distinc- tive talent he thoroughly merits new inspec- tion or introduction to those who’ve previ- ously managed to avoid him.
Music hacks, bless them, tended to com- partmentalise him as a Christy Moore ‘me 2’ (or in one shameful case of lazy journalism, “the Bob Marley of Ireland”) when he first emerged with the extraordinary They Don’t Teach This Shit In School album fourteen years ago. Yet, while there are certainly reso- nances of Christy in both political standpoint and his pure approach to singing, and while Damien is very much part of a modern Irish folk tradition that also encompasses the likes of Luke Kelly, Liam Clancy and Shane Mac- Gowan, he’s made a highly individual mark firmly entrenched in the badlands of Dublin.
As anyone who’s seen the way his raw power turns his concerts into devotional events will tell you, Dempsey wears his heart on his sleeve… and many other parts of his body; yet among all that naked emotion there’s plenty of intelligence, subtle ty and guile to disarm you. You just try not to dance when he launches into full reggae mode belt- ing out the brilliantly defiant Negative Vibes. Go on, just try. His own freely admitted bat- tles with ‘the black dog’ somehow seem to make every song seem heroic and give him more humanity than most.
This lavishly packed 29-track two-disc compilation covers his entire fifteen-year career, including a smattering of traditional songs like Rocky Road To Dublin and Kelly From Killan, a passable stab at Shane Mac- Gowan’s A Rainy Night In Soho, guest vocals from Sinead O’Connor and Glen Hansard (on the Irish hit version of the old prison standard The Auld Triangle) and two fine previously unreleased tracks, the frantically buoyant Happy Days and St Patrick’s Brave Brigade, another in a proud canon of songs celebrat- ing the St Patricio soldiers who crossed the Rio Grande to desert the US army and fight for the Mexicans.
The title’s not wrong…
www.damiendempsey.com
Colin Irwin
URBAN FOLK QUARTET UFQ Live II SAE Records. SAECD10
Don’t you just hate a show off? If I didn’t know Joe Broughton and his merry band of envelope /barrier pushers better, I’d swear they were doing this just to confirm that they’ve the fastest fingers in the universe with the ability to improvise on the kitchen kettle for ten minutes etc. But I do know them and there isn’t one iota of ‘look at me,’ or ‘aren’t we great?’ about them. What they are in truth is a collection of dazzling musi- cians who just want to entertain and play party hearty. If that’s the ambition then, this snap in time (May 2013 if you want to know,) has them firing in all directions, raising the roof at venues in Birmingham and London, whooping an audience to the point of frenzy. Not only do Joe and his fiddling parallel Palo- ma Trigás run through what seem like sixteen different time signatures in one track, but there’s even a triangle solo – yes you read right – a bloody triangle solo, and damn me it’s brilliant!
Maybe I should have guessed, having been at a radio session with them a few days before these recordings where Mr B gave forth, and I quote, “we’re going to play this tune, it hasn’t got a title yet and we’ve never played it in public before, however we think it’s groovy”. They played it like a piece of jazz, knocking spots off and daring each
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