THE SPIRIT OF ROMA (2024): Classical guitar by Simon Thacker, cello by Justyna Jablonska and more

Elsewhere has run literally hundreds of interviews with musicians and over the decades a few stand out: rarely the ones where someone is promoting an album or a tour, but rather those who have an interesting background and stories to tell.

Among that rare company was Simon Thacker, a Scottish-born “guitarist without portfolio” as we called him.

When we spoke in 2015 he told us of his musical journey from a small village outside Edinburgh and through blues, classical music and folk as he found his way to Indian and Spanish music.

In the years since, we have written about the music of his Indian ensemble Svara-Kanti, his recordings with Ritmata which explore Sephardic, Moroccan and flamenco traditions (with a wee dram of Gaelic woven through) and his concert in Auckland.

In 2017 we reviewed his album Karmana with Edinburgh-based Polish cellist Justyna Jablonska (“an album of often breathtaking playing and expansive thinking”) which married the raga and Spanish forms and also included layering of tapes and backward acoustic guitar.

There were Roma pieces included also.

So, a guitarist without portfolio but a briefcase full of possibilities.

His new album Songs of the Roma re-unites him with Jablonska but also brings in the Polish singer/violinist Masha Natanson, Gyula Csík on cimbalon (the Roma/Gypsy dulcimer) and double bassist Gyula Lázár.

This is bold, often busy and emotionally gripping music.

A piece like the remarkable, eight minute-plus original Jolta is not just a tour de force of exemplary playing but the piece itself constantly changes shape and direction, sometimes it is evocative folk and at other times akin to a challenging jazz fusion piece or a contemporary classical composition.

And yet there is space for a romantic interpretation, and the interlocking of guitar, cello and cimbalon is breathtaking.

Thacker also adapts traditional pieces like the playful Niška Banja which is a joyous celebration and in places remarkably close melodically to some Anglofolk songs.

In his extensive liner notes about his journey into the music, the players and commentary of the individual pieces, Thacker describes Ederlezi – perhaps familiar from the film Time of the Gypsies – as one of the most beaustiful songs ever written. For his arrangement he says he listened to as many versions he could find as he sought an elegiac beauty and Natanson's delicate, pensive vocal evokes an ineffible sadness which finds its counterpart in Jablonska's cello.

Sometimes a song's meaning is multilayerd as in La Ciolpani which sounds portentous but the subject is a woman with rather loose morals and the lyrics tell God to punish her.

It's dark stuff, real cabaret-noir but based on an old Romanian folk song.

So here is yet another album from Thacker and his fellow travellers who research deeply, play with intensity but also deliver music which is vibrant, sometimes gripping and at other times eerily quiet.

And Phirado swings . . . then goes somewhere else. 

Once again it is our pleasure to put Simon Thacker's name and music before the discerning Elsewhere audience.

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You can read more about Simon Thacker at his website where you may also order this and other albums.