On An Overgrown Path

In a 2011 radio interview Jordi Savall explained to me why he started his own record label Alia Vox - "Ten years ago we started to feel that when working with the major companies, it was impossible to create innovative projects that introduced the risks associated with unknown repertoire. This convinced us that we had to be free to make our own decisions, and had to be free to give decisions about the music priority over commercial decisions". To date Alia Vox has been a Savall family label , with Jordi and his greatly-missed wife Montserrat Figueras as the constants, supplemented by their two children Arianna and Ferran . But now, eighteen very successful years and more than one hundred CDs later, Alia Vox has become an extended family label with the launch of Alia Vox Diversa. This will release recordings made by the pool of talented musicians who are long-term collaborators with Jordi Savall, and the mission of the label is to give the music priority over commercial im...

East-West music fusions are currently hot properties, and the danger of these exercises in musical bridge building is that they can come over as being more about the media coverage than the music making. But one recent east-west fusion release has returned repeatedly to my CD player, and that is a good reason for sharing it with you. Catalan viol player Jordi Savall will need little introduction, and his musical roots are in the only European country to have been part of Islam for an extended period. Du temps & de l’instant (Moments in time) is a Savall family jam session with Montserrat Figueras (Mrs Savall) vocals, and the multi-talented Arianna and Ferran Savall (the Savall children) singing and contributing harp and théorbe respectively. And just to avoid charges of nepotism the incomparable Pedro Estevan adds the percussion line. This is one of those ‘it isn’t early music, it isn’t improvisation, it isn’t jazz, it isn’t World Music, and it doesn’t matter’ discs, and it...

' Els Segadors is not just an anthem, it is above all a song that talks about and condemns injustice. I sing these little-known verses because they speak directly of people's suffering, and the helplessness of the victims of all conflicts. It is therefore a lament, a song of grief that cries out and demands that such suffering is never repeated.' These are the words of Ferran Savall writing in the sleeve notes for his first solo album. Mireu el nostre mar is part of the new wave of music making that transcends all established categories and ditches marketing hype in favour of letting the music speak for itself. Ferran's roots are in early music as a théorbe player with his father Jordi Savall's ensembles. But he is equally as home jamming in the jazz and folk clubs of Barcelona and other European cities, and the accompanying photos from the CD sleeve show him well and truly unplugged from early music. Mireu el nostre mar has its roots in folk music, and Ferr...

Peasant girl turned warrior who became folk heroine of France and a Catholic saint – the story of Joan of Arc is common knowledge. But two other aspects of the Maid of Orleans, her supernatural powers and her appropriation by the French political right, have long fascinated me, and both feature in Jordi Savall’s CD-book Jeanne d’Arc – Batailles & Prisons . In this newly released double CD Jordi Savall uses music to evoke three contrasting sides of Joan’s character - her peasant origins are represented by popular tunes of the time by Dufay and others, her military vocation by Jordi Savall’s own development of the melody L’homme armé , and her divine voices by Dufay’s Veni Sancte Spiritus . When the young Joan first heard voices and apparitions in 1425, she was inspired to be pious and charitable, and was also motivated to go into battle to save the “holy kingdom of France”. A central dogma of the Catholic Church is that it is the sole intermediary between God and believers, and ...

Just as Decca is known as the label that lost the Beatles , ECM could have been known as the label that lost John Adams. But, other than triggering Adams' defection to Nonesuch , Manfred Eicher's decision not to travel to San Francisco for ECM's pioneering 1984 recording of Harmonium seems to have done his fiercely independent label very little harm. While other record companies are cutting staff , orchestras are cutting pay , and radio stations are cutting quality , ECM remains in rude health; despite not a single appearance of the highly fashionable word download on its website , and despite not a single appearance by a young female (or male) violinst clad in a wet T-shirt on its sleeve artwork. While others flounder ECM sticks to the knitting, and this autumn the label celebrates its 40th birthday with a range of releases that stand head and shoulders above the musical equivalent of airport fiction that is now the bread and butter of the corporate classical labels. Kei...

Pärt, Byrd, Mussorgsky, Reger, de Falla, Milhaud, Garcia Lorca and anon are a pretty remarkable mix for any playlist. They are even more remarkable as the tracklisting for a CD by stereotyped 'early music specialists' Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras . Their 2002 album Ninna Nanna was linked from yesterday's post and that prompted me to listen to it again last night. (With Petreoc Trelawny fronting the BBC Prom on Radio 3 , Figueras and Savall followed by silence was a no brainer.) That composer line up is pretty special, and the fact that two of the Arvo Pärt pieces were commissioned for the album makes it even more special. But what is equally noteworthy is the discrete cultural activism of a disc that presents lullabies from across the cultures that developed under the three great monotheistic traditions. Yet another example of the Savall family rearranging the geometry of heaven . * Dedicated Savall watchers should note the performance of Elogie de la folie: E...

Emptiness is at the heart of the great perennial traditions . Sufi rituals are a journey from form to the formless . In Buddhism the Heart Sutra describes how: 'So in emptiness there is no form/ no sensation, conception/ discrimination, awareness. Alexander Benzin explains the Buddhist concept of voidness as a total absence of the strange, impossible, ways of existence that we fantasize and project onto our experiences. While Lama Yeshe described the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tantra as dissolving our ordinary perceptions of ourselves and creating an empty space for the essential clarity of our deepest being. Unlike its Western counterpart, Eastern art music relies on improvisation - using voidness to bridge form and the formless. The Savall family has a long tradition of uniting East and West , and Impro , Ferran Savall 's second solo album, documents the evolution of his unique style of improvisation over the last decade. For the thirteen untitled improvisations Ferra...

The musical exploits of the Savall family quite justifiably receive high praise On An Overgrown Path . Two years ago I enthused over daughter Arianna Savall's CD Bella Terra , and that particular album has been a long term favourite on my iPod. So it is disappointing to give a thumbs-down to Arianna's newly released Peiwoh , despite its stellar line-up of musicians which includes Pedro Estevan and brother Ferran, whose gritty album Mireu el nostre mar was one of the highlights of last year's new releases . In the notes for Peiwoh Arianna Savall acknowledges the influence of the Canadian harpist and singer Loreena McKennitt, whose music I am not familiar with, although I understand she sells shed-loads of records. But having listened to some samples on Ms. McKennitt's website I have a fair idea where this album went wrong. There are some beautiful sounds on Peiwoh , but it lacks the edge and musical development that I need. But if you like your Bach to come complet...

The first regular coach service from Europe to Asia started in 1957. For almost a decade the ‘ Indiaman ’ made the 10,000-kilometre journey from King’s Cross in London to Bombay and Calcutta. It was soon joined by the legendary ‘Magic Bus’ , leaving from Dam Square in Amsterdam, and by other coaches running from the Porte d’Italie in Paris via Frankfurt, Munich and Salzburg and across the Middle East to India. In the 1960s and 70s these transcontinental coaches provided the route to the Orient for a new generation of independent travellers who were variously called the Beats, Intrepids and Hippies. There were two main motivations for these 20th-century Intrepids to undertake the long and sometimes hazardous overland journey to India: the first was a growing disenchantment with Western values; the second was a fascination with the spiritual traditions of the East. One of the legacies that the Intrepids left was musical, with Bob Dylan, the Byrds, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead amon...

Unsurprisingly, I listened to more Bach than anything else in 2008. Raphaël Imbert's Bach/Coltrane CD for the Zig-Zag Territoires label captivated me, and judging by the emails it generated, it captivated many readers as well. Linn Records' one-to-a-part eight voice recording of the 1742 final performing edition of Bach's Matthew Passion was a new release, and it was, for me, one of the best new recordings of the year. An article about it waits in the upload queue, delayed by the sheer volume of wonderful music I have heard in the year. Also missing from my posts was the extraordinary Alpha Productions CD of parodies and transcriptions of music by Bach for organ and violin, played by Raphaël Oleg and Vincent Dubois. An endlessly fascinating disc that is also a wonderful example of the art of the balance engineer. A very welcome female interloper in a predominantly male profession, engineer Aline Blondiau achieves the impossible and produces a demonstration quality bal...

A young Berber nomad is tending his family's camels as they graze on scrubland in Tamraght, Morocco in the photo above. It was taken by me in 2011 and two years later I described how that very spot was being torn up by mechanical diggers to create the Hyatt Place Golf Hotel, part of the ‘new generation' Taghazout Bay 'destination resort' which combines high-end residential accommodation, boutiques and sports activities for 7000 tourists. Now the One Year One World website has posted an update on the Taghazout Bay development. It describes how the nomadic Berbers (Amazigh) have been forced out of the area. One of the Berbers laments: 'Before all this was nature. Now all they think about are walls'. This statement is vividly reinforced by the photo of the new development, which accompanies the One Year One World report. The walls between cultures and countries are being built higher and higher. My wife and I have just received our tourist visas fo...

When I was writing about Jordi Savall's epic new project Jerusalem I quoted Timothy Leary's observation that 'thinking is the best way to travel' . Over the past four years I have wandered as far as Asia and Africa as well as across a lot of Europe. But, increasingly, my travels have shifted from macro to micro. Travelling short distances on the ground, but great distances in the head, is also the theme of an extraordinary work of literature that has recently become available in English translation. Julio Cortázar's Argentian father managed family business interests in Belgium, and the author was born in Brussels a few days after the German invasion of the country in 1914. As the conflict spread the Cortázar family moved first to Switzerland and then to Spain, before returning to Argentina. Despite not completing his degree in philosophy and languages at the University of Buenos Aires, Cortázar became professor of French literature at the Univeristy of Cuyo in A...