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Written in fRoots issue 276, 2006


ARABANDA
Shams
Choux de Bruxelles CHOU 0602 (2006)

I was at the launch gig for this album, at the Theatre Molière in Brussels, and I can report that Arabanda is a splendid live band. Out of the ever-creative Choux de Bruxelles stable of Piet Maris’s projects, it’s a meeting of Belgian-Moroccan singer Laïla Amezian singing traditional Arabo-Andalus songs with the personnel of Jaune Toujours – accordionist-singer Maris with JT’s hot trumpet and reeds section and tight, inventive double-bass and drums unit of Mathieu Verkaeren and Théophane Raballand. Amezian is no aloof diva but a warm communicator, there’s an onstage empathy that embraces the audience, and their show buzzed with character and energy.
      It’s an unusual line-up to be playing this material – Maris doesn’t slither microtonally like an Arabic accordionist would, he makes fat chordal, rhythmic chunks, sometimes emphasised by trumpeter, Maris brother Bart, switching to tuba. Mattias Laga’s clarinet, bass clarinet or soprano sax weave around or in parallel with the trumpet, both occasionally bursting out into inventive, shapely solo breaks. These are musicians widely experienced in Latin, jazz and other musics, and they find a whole set of approaches rhythmically and harmonically that haven’t been applied to North African music before. Like Jaune Toujours, and Mec Yek, the Maris-led band with Slovak Romany singers, it shows again the melting-pot of Brussels evolving a distinctive sound not found elsewhere.
      As mere audio, the album doesn’t quite capture the band’s mighty excellence and spirit. As a record producer years ago said to me, usefully if not entirely accurately, “producing’s just about getting the reverbs right”; here, while the playing and songs are strong, and well recorded, there’s not much use of reverb and delays to smear the sounds of Amezian’s voice and the rest of the band into the joyful whole that it is live, clattering beautifully off the walls. The vocals in particular are rather unflatteringly stranded with nothing to bounce off; it sounds like the final stage of production has been left out.
      The band will be playing some dates in the UK during the summer (see www.choux.net for dates). Go see them – trust me.
      Shams is distributed in the UK by Discovery.


© 2006 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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