- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw MySpace -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in Folk Roots issue 180, 1998

GAITEIROS DE LISBOA
Bocas Do Inferno
Farol FAR 00016 (1997)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Music From The Edge Of Europe - Portugal
EMI Hemisphere 7243 8 59270 2 7 (1997)

Gaiteiros de Lisboa is, I reckon, currently by far the most exciting, innovative, quirky non-fado new-roots band in Portugal. Bocas Do Inferno builds on the exploratory momentum of the previous album, Invasões Bárbaras.
      Despite the name, the bagpipes - gaitas de fole and Galician gaitas - are just one aspect of this five-piece. Dominant are male voices chanting, grunting, muttering and drawing on the Alentejo tradition of gritty vocal harmonising (in one piece featuring guest Jerôme Casalonga’s soaring tenor lead in a link with Corsican tradition) with powerful deep real-skin thundering and clattering on bombos and other percussion. Added to that are the glorious gaitas and a whole lot of other strong-textured wind instruments from Portugal, China and elsewhere, including brass, various single and double-reed instruments, ocarinas, a keyed plumbing-tube square construction called Serafina and a mouth-blown pipe organ even more felicitously called an orgáz (whose wheezy tones meet panpipes at the heart of a witty rendition of Sousa’s Wash Post). About half the raw material is traditional Portuguese, the rest new-made by the band’s Carlos Guerreiro and José M. David.

      Gaiteiros de Lisboa hasn’t recorded for an EMI associated label, so doesn’t appear on the Hemisphere Portuguese compilation, but a lot of other leading performers have and do, including the queen of fado Amália Rodriguez and the doyen of players of fado on guitarra Carlos Paredes. It isn’t a complete overview of Portugal, but it’s a well-sequenced set of elegant music rich with soaring, hovering, yearning singing and a lyrical, dreamy musical flow. Among its 18 tracks there’s the band Madredeus, Né Ladeiras with two songs from her album of songs from the Tras Os Montes region of north Portugal, a tantalising drifting single track from the vocal group Lua Extravagante followed by the misty vocal over Diva’s rhythm and strings of Natália Casanova, and a couple of Vitorino’s Alentejo-rooted literary chansonnier songs with intriguing titles; one here is Bolero Of The Sensitive Colonel Who Made Love in Monsanto. We don’t get his All Men Are Sissies When They Have The Flu, though.
     

© 1998 Andrew Cronshaw
 

You're welcome to quote from reviews on this site, but please credit the writer and fRoots.

Links:
fRoots - The feature and review-packed UK-based monthly world roots music magazine in which these reviews were published, and by whose permission they're reproduced here.

It's not practical to give, and keep up to date, current contact details and sales sources for all the artists and labels in these reviews, but try Googling for them, and where possible buy direct from the artists.
CDRoots.com in the USA, run by Cliff Furnald, is a reliable and independent online retail source, with reviews, of many of the CDs in these reviews; it's connected to his excellent online magazine Rootsworld.com 

For more reviews click on the regions below

NORDIC        BALTIC        IBERIA (& islands)   

CENTRAL & EASTERN EUROPE, & CAUCASUS   

OTHER EUROPEAN        AMERICAS        OTHER, AND WORLD IN GENERAL

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -