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Written in Folk Roots issue 173, 1997

XOSÉ MANUEL BUDIÑO
Paralaia
Bolobolo BL 596

This album, which found its way to Folk Roots via a gig in Köln at which he was playing with the magnificent Galician singer Uxía, is the one destined, I think, to establish Galician piper, Uilleann piper and whistle player Budiño’s prominence on the leading edge of the new surge of energy sweeping along the north coast of Spain.
      The cover photo might give the impression that this is simply a set of pipe tunes - not so. With a nucleus of fiddler Jacky Molard, singer Mercedes Peón, guitarist Soïg Siberil and trikitilaria Kepa Junkera in a set of tunes largely by Budiño, and songs largely either written or found by Peón (it would be worth having even just for her singing, captured on record at last), it’s richly varied, full of ideas, energy, immensely tight playing and constantly refreshed by light and shade.
      There’s no sense here of a bunch of hot session musicians just doing a workaday job with tunes they met as they walked into the studio - all pull their weight, getting right inside the material. There’s bass, played by Xan Hernández, and Leandro Deltell’s robust percussion, and it gets pretty hefty sometimes, but never leaden. Budiño’s tunes are intricate, developing on traditional forms but never losing sight of a shapely melody in a style which, while drawing on styles and musicians from other cultures, is very clearly Galician; it seems that, while undoubtedly encouraged by the lingering kiss with Irish music, Galician-rooted music is now emerging with a new vision.
     

© 1997 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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