Had a great chance, this weekend, to catch up with the other two legs of the “Geckito” trio I so miss about my time in Colorado, and somewhere in there we said we’d send each other a few links to some of the stuff we’ve been listening to lately. There are obviously a lot of entries here at Craftygrass (the on the player category is kinda built for it) that would fit that bill, but a curated roundup seems both to fit the spirit and to be a fun exercise.
The oud
I seem to have developed a taste for the timbre of the oud specifically, especially as contained within distinctly “mutt” small ensembles. This all started a number of years ago now, when one of Cathy’s earliest Pandora stations, seeded on the bluegrass(ish) act Cadillac Sky song “Never Been So Blue”, had been playing logically related stuff for a while, but then suddenly threw this out:
“Holy cow, Cathy, what is that?”
And that was how I found out about the great Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen. For the Continuo record, the oud on “Nu Nu” was clearly a guest instrument on a song that doesn’t really need one, but still: oh, that sound! (Although not strictly the subject here, it’s worth checking out “Nu Nu” live as a piano trio–especially in the back half, after the piano solo, when Cohen and drummer Mark Giuliana kinda Do A Thing.)
Through a series of other connected events, I then came across Tunisian oud player and composer Anouar Brahem, and was blown away by his patient mood-making on pieces like “The Astounding Eyes of Rita“. I particularly love the instrumentation of this group, in which the lead instruments are oud and bass clarinet, with a conventional electric bass and hand drums for percussion.
For me, this is music I can get right into the middle of, or it can play in the background all day long while I’m working.
And it was via Brahem that I then discovered Dhafer Youssef–also Tunisian, oddly–who is probably my current favorite. It started with this amazingly spacious, ambient, and yet insistent eleven:
And then oh boy, did it go beyond that. As I heard more, I was regularly inspired not just to listen but to write about it. This post in particular curates three pretty wildly different examples of the directions Youssef can go, including a treatment of (get this) an “Aranjuez” excerpt from Sketches of Spain. (His chameleonic adventuring actually reminds me sometimes of John Zorn.)
At this point, if someone were to ask me to declare a single answer to “what concert do you most wish you could have been in the room for?”, I would have a hard time coming up with a better answer than this night on Youssef’s Divine Shadows tour.
There are several YouTube clips of that night around (I bookmarked a couple of them here) and the story is the same: absolute mood, driven by pure joy (just look at him!), ranging from quiet ambience to full-on rock show.
Of course I do hear other oud players as well, but most aren’t quite as experimental as Brahem and Youssef. One tune in particular that keeps coming back around to me, that just really has a killer oud sound to it, is this one:
I actually kinda love how that breaks down at the end. I mean, it’s horrible…but they’re grooving so hard it almost hurts; how else are you gonna break out of that?
Steve Tibbetts
Yeah, this guy–a 12-string neo-ambient nerd with a great deal of “eastern”-for-lack-of-a-better-term aesthetic to him–gets his own section. I found him, ironically, from my Dhafer Youssef station, and I can’t seem to get enough of him on Pandora. He’s got a mojo all his own, and it gets to me almost entirely without flash. There are not a lot of YouTube clips of his stuff, but he’s got quite a lot at Pandora. This is…somewhat representative:
Worth checking out.
Those modern cellists…
Another happy accident, in which a friend introduced me to the West African kora, brought me my first taste of what looks to be a crop of modern cellists who are not afraid to do things with the instrument that they probably didn’t learn, ah, formally. And so, following kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko, I got introduced to French cellist Vincent Ségal. I find their collaboration just delightfully fresh-sounding.
Ségal, then, led on to other cellists like Rufus Cappadocia‘s moody noodles:
…and Erik Friedlander and his playfulness.
There is a good deal of richness to this cello music, with or without other instrumentation, and again a lot of it can be either right up in the head or way back into the background.
Bonus mentions
What came up on the call this weekend regarding my listening, mostly centered on the oud, and these nouveau cellists, but a couple other things rate specific mention too.
First: I can remember years ago now, hearing Dave and Nathan discussing Tool, but not having any context myself. Well, for me that world blew open right at the very end of 2019, and although it still seems weird that I went so long before my own awakening, it’s probably just a case of “it just didn’t happen until I was ready”. Anyway, I went on record about “Fear Inoculum”, in specific, shortly after it became obvious that a goodly portion of the world’s population was just going to fully commit to losing its mind over fear. (A year later, “7empest” seems at least as appropriate as “Fear Inoculum” for much of the same territory, and of course other examples from Tool’s back catalog would seem to fit with minimal stretching as well.) I’ve become pretty shameless in my admiration, and they’re pretty much alone at the top of the heap for me, for non-improvising groups.
I’m also still pretty tickled about getting my very first dose of new music from my girls. This was very recent, and I’m still listening with interest to Trench by twenty øne piløts.
Finally, to wrap it up (you know I could go on, and usually do…), I thought I’d leave with a reference that still makes me laugh; in particular I think Nathan will probably find this funny.
Craftygrass 