Graham Reid | | 1 min read
Dancing Under the Meteorites
It has been almost 20 years since we first wrote about Tunisian oud player Brahem (the ECM album Le Voyage de Sahar) whose subsequent albums have always been worth hearing.
Oddly enough although we heard them we only ever wrote about one other.
That said, he hasn't recorded that much since Sahar, just three albums under his own name prior to this one.
We therefore welcome the opportunity to bring him to attention again on this album with pianist Django Bates, bassist Dave Holland and Anja Lechner on violoncello.
This is a quartet which knows each other – and each other's music – well: Bates and Holland have been in Brahem's touring group for many years, Lechner has performed his music on her own albums.
Given the times we live in, it is hardly surprising there is a deep melancholy here.
The title comes from lines by poet Mahmoud Darwish (“Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?”) which also gave title to Jerusalem-born Palestinian writer/musician Edward Said's 1986 book about memory and exile.
The penultimate piece is Edward Said's Reverie, a weightless three minute meditation with piano and cello prominent.
The quartet however don't milk the mood but rather weave their way into a place where the mood establishes itself (Awake) and sometimes the effect is a touch away from romantic, dream-like optimism (The Sweet Oranges of Jaffa).
Evocative and perhaps even exotic, but always deeply moving in ways which defy easy explanation.
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You can hear this album at Spotify here
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