

Ease Down the Road

ESTA PÁGINA CUMPLE UNA DOBLE FUNCIÓN: HOMENAJEAR AL GAUCHO DAVID, GENIO PRIMIGENIO QUE DIÓ ORIGEN A LA TIENDA DE DISCOS USADOS A LA CUAL LE COPIAMOS EL NOMBRE, Y DIFUNDIR ALGUNAS DE LAS MÚSICAS QUE ME RESULTAN GRATAS



The role of the Arabic, lute-like, stringed instrument, the oud, has been revolutionalized through the playing of Anouar Brahem. While used in the past to accompany vocalists, the oud is used by Brahem as an imaginative solo instrument. In 1988, Tunisian newspaper, "Tunis-Hebdo", wrote, "If we had to elect the musician of the 80s, we would have, without the least hesitation, chosen Anouar Brahem". The British daily newspaper, "The Guardian", that Brahem was "at the forefront of jazz because he is far beyond it". 


The Astounding Eyes of Rita (ECM) is the title of the new album by T
unisian world jazz musician Anouar Brahem. The recording features Anouar Brahem on oud, Klaus Gesing on bass clarinet, Björn Meyer on bass, and Khaled Yassine on darbuka and bendir.
There has long been a balance between Western and Eastern components in Anouar Brahem’s work. “I need both elements”, he says, but ratios change with
each project. His early discs (such asBarzakh and Conte de l'Incroyable Amour ) carry a strong sense of traditions - including Brahem’s own - while his last two recordings, Le Voyage de Sahar (2005) and Le Pas Du Chat Noir (2001) found him at the center of a trio oriented more towards Eurocentric chamber music. With The Astounding Eyes of Rita there is a sense of coming full circle. Brahem introduces a new gr
oup in a sinuous dance of dark sounds (oud, bass clarinet, bass guitar and hand drums), strong melodies, and earthy textures.
Born in Halfawine (Halfaouine), Tunisia in 1957, Brahem is regarded as his country’s most innovative oud player. As a former pupil of oud master Ali Sriti, he is thoroughly steeped in the secrets and subtleties of Arab classical music. He has absorbed this information and, armed with it, gone out to meet the world, a contemporary musician of profoun
d historical knowledge.
“When I write music”, he explains, “my focus is simply on the melodic universe. Ideas for instrumentation come later.” Perhaps significantly, the music for Rita was composed on the oud, where the Pas de chat noir concep
t had been sketched and shaped from the piano. The new music modulates between the disciplines, as befits a line-up pooling payers from Tunisia, Germany, Sweden and Lebanon. “As the new work developed I thought about traditional players and perhaps using more middle-eastern instrumentation but there were also pieces of a different character emerging. I knew I needed darbuka [the goblet-drum of Arab tradition], for instance, and I thought about bass. It took quite a while to find the right combination of instruments and personalities. While I can easily find fantastic traditional players in my region, I often miss qualities specific to European jazz players, a certain open-mindedness in approaches to improvising, aspects to do with freedom”.
Producer Manfred Eicher helped bring Brahem together with German bass clarinetist Klaus Gesing and Swedish bassist Björn Meyer, players heard on ECM in, respectively, the groups of Norma Winstone and Nik Bärtsch. “Manfred knew, from our experiences with John Surman [see the Thimar album of 1997] that I liked very much the combination of bass clarinet with the oud: the instruments just seem to belong together. In Klaus’s playing on Norma’s album (Di
stances), I thought I could hear ways in which we might work together. Manfred helped to set up rehearsals, with just Klaus and myself, in Udine. The potential was there, I felt. But we really came together as a band during the record production – until that point, I’d played only separately with each of the musicians.”
Björn Meyer and Klaus Gesing share Brahem’s interest in a broad range of musical expression. The classically-trained Gesing has been extensively involved also with East European musics and with jazz, while Meyer grew up listening to Cuban music, and played flamenco before diving deep into Swedish folk. He also plays music influenced by Persian tradition in groups with harpist Asita Hamidi and his bass often serves as a lyrical lead voice in the throbbing cellular music of Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (ECM albums: Stoa and Holon).
The band’s fourth member, Lebanese percussionist Khaled Yassine, was brought to Brahem’s attention by his sister-in-law, choreographer Nawel Skandrani. Khaled’s experience of working with dancers helps to give this music its gently insinuating, swaying pulses. “Khaled’s a very interesting player. He is deeply grounded in the traditional music, but also very
open-minded: he plays in a lot of different contexts, is very informed. There is a new generation of musicians emerging in countries like Lebanon.” Anouar suggests that these are players of broader vision.
After a highly-productive recording session in Udine’s Artesuono studio, Anouar Brahem brought the new band to Tunisia where they played to enthusiastic audiences in Carthage. The musicians are currently preparing for international performances. A first European tour is scheduled in October, November and December with concerts in Austria, Bosnia, Germany and France, climaxing at Paris’s Salle Pleyel.
The album’s unusual title references the poetry of Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008, to whom the disc is dedicated. A hugely-influential figure in the Arabic world, Darwish wrote more than 20 volumes of poetry, and his readings frequently commanded audiences of thousands. When he died in 2008 he was honored with three days of national mourning and a state funeral in Palestine.
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Since her second offering, the self-issued Drag Queens in Limousines in 1999, and continuing through the stellar Filth & Fire in 2002, Texas singer/songwriter Mary Gauthier has quietly and consistently raised the aesthetic bar for herself. She has been favorably (and accurately) compared to Townes Van Zandt for her literate American gothic songs about wasted lives, desolate characters who roam the highways like ghosts, shattered dreams, and frustrated expectations. But Gauthier never exploits her characters; she views them with a piercing tenderness and empathy, painting them with dignity and humanity. OnMercy Now, Gauthier digs a little deeper; she comes down on the side of the song itself. The protagonists whose tales she relates are given rich musical voices, adding depth, dimension, and flesh and blood as related by her keen-eyed observations, unflinching poetic language, and willingness to be subtle and not intrude. Her razor-wire, weatherbeaten, loving kindness digs deep as it pleads for release on "Falling Out of Love," which opens the record. With her acoustic guitar in minor mode, a deep, lonesome harmonica, hollow, sparse percussion, and producer Gurf Morlix's trademark slow-wrangle slide, she sings and even becomes the voice of the broken-hearted blues. There is no sentimentality in her view, just the taut edginess that is so wearying and anxious about trying to get past the addiction to a memory seared with every breath. On the title track, Gauthier's guitar and voice offer a gritty, moving meditation on compassion, invoking mercy for all those who suffer, from family to church and country to those who are nameless and faceless. There is nothing facile in Gauthier's words, nothing remotely trite or ordinary about the weariness in the grain of her voice, as Brian Standefer's cello and Morlix's lap steel fill the center and carry the message to the heavens humbly, slowly, purposefully. "Wheel Inside the Wheel," written for the late Dave Carter, is a spooky rolling and choogling banjo/guitar extravaganza. It features characters from Gauthier's New Orleans Mardis Gras: Louis Armstrong, Marie Laveau, the Krewes, etc. -- all of them metaphors for the transmigration of souls. Her cover of Harlan Howard's "Just Say She's a Rhymer" is as back porch as it gets, dressed in fiddle, steel, strummed six-strings, and plodding bass. Her delivery comes out of time and space and rests fully in this moment. Gauthier inhabits the song as if it were her own. The set closes with the punchy, electric "It Ain't the Wind, It's the Rain." A Hammond B-3 carries the tune from underneath as stinging guitars, throbbing basslines, and Gauthier's clear, prophetic voice rings over it all. What a finish; what a record. Mercy Nowcuts deep into the heart -- it showcases not only Gauthier's prowess with the poetry and craft of song, but her humility and wisdom as she digs further into its chamber of secrets.
Rock & roll lifers that they are, Wilco knows the implications of a self-titled album, how any record bearing an eponymous name is bound to be seen as a reintroduction. That's why they puncture Wilco (The Album) with a parenthetical aside, a slyly ironic joke that deflates the notion that Wilco is returning to its roots while signaling that the band is finally lightening up again, a notion reinforced by the llama birthday party on the cover. And, to be fair, "reintroduction" is indeed too strong a term for a band that never went away, they merely spent a decade-and-a-half on a walkabout, consuming anything that came their way, changing their tone and tenor from record to record. Wilco (The Album) finds Wilco the band happily returning from the wilderness, taking stock of where they've been and consolidating all they've learned into one tight, likeable record. (The Album) never veers too far into the experimental — nor does it dabble in country-rock, a sound that's largely remained verboten in Wilco ever since their debut — but the reverberations of the Jay Bennett era can be heard in how "Bull Black Nova" builds to a shuddering, noise-filled coda, or the band's general mastery of varying degrees of light and shade. All this studio texture is not the focal point, it's the coloring on a collection of straight-ahead rock and pop songs, tunes that are generally soft, sunny, and hazy — quite exquisitely so on the '70s George Harrison pastiche "You Never Know" and the nearly Baroque "Deeper Down" — but also jangly and sparkly, as on "Sonny Feeling," or that have some measure of backbone, as on the spiky "I'll Fight" and the cool shuffle of "Wilco (The Song)." If Wilco (The Album) as a whole is considerably less ambitious than its predecessors, it compensates with its easy confidence and craft: it's the work of a band that knows their strengths and knows what they're all about, and it's ready to settle into an agreeably comfortable groove.
French Suite, for keyboard No. 1 in D minor, BWV 812 (BC L19)