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Written in fRoots issue 358, April 2013


ANA ALCAIDE
La Cantiga Del Fuego
ARC EUCD 2417 (2012)

This came out in Spain early in 2012, and by August was up to number three in the WMCE European world music radio play chart. It’s recently risen again to the top ten, presumably because now it’s been given wider release via ARC.
     Ana Alcaide is a singer and instrumentalist from Toledo, with a particular interest in Sephardic music. Her prime instrument is nyckelharpa, which she came across while studying botany at Lund University in Sweden; subsequently she went back to learn more about it, and did a degree at Malmö Academy of Music.
     Her singing has a light, airy sweetness that could have become cloying or wifty in the wrong production hands, but there’s mature elegance in the arrangements and production, which are both by Alcaide herself joined by a small, flexible team of musicians, particularly the adaptable Bill Cooley on santur psaltery, ud, lute and tar and Jaime Muñoz’s traditional reeds and flutes. The final couple of tracks feature the singing of Iranian musician Reza Shayasteh of Malmö’s World Mix Orchestra. The material, which she sees as being strongly related to the old cultural mix of Toledo, draws primarily on Judeo-Spanish musical and lyrical traditions and her own composition, with some Persian and Bulgarian influences.
     Her 2007 second album Como La Luna Y El Sol had good ideas but, I reckoned perhaps because of over-adherence to click-tracks, it plodded somewhat. With this one Alcaide enters a much more fluent, world-class league.

www.arcmusic.co.uk


© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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