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Written in fRoots issue 335, 2011
 

XOSÉ MANUEL BUDIÑO
Volta
Falcatruada FAL-691 (2010)

Over the years since his innovative and beautifully-judged 1997 debut album Paralaia, Galician piper Xosé Manuel Budiño has taken things onward and bigger, in a way that doesn’t really exist in Britain. In Spain, with its more reliably clement weather and night-time paseo socialising, outdoor music shows in the main square of a city are common, and quite a few folk-rooted bands, particularly in Galicia and its north-coast neighbours, enlarge what they do to suit a big stage with high-powered sound and lights. Small-scale subtlety doesn’t work well for an outdoor, standing crowd who could be in the bars behind them; big, loud, energetic with flashing, scanning lights does.
     Volta is a CD and DVD made largely at one such show in Galicia, not actually in a plaza but at the big Festival Internacional Do Mundo Celta in Ortigueira in 2009. Drawing mainly on material from his three studio albums, Budiño fields an eight-piece band of fiddler Alfonso Merino, guitarist Miguel Seoane, keyboardist (and Mercedes Peón’s long-time co-producer) Nacho Muñoz, and a wall of five percussionists. One of the latter stands in as a male dep for Mercedes Peón performing the songs she sang on Paralaia, another comes up front for a couple of bursts of rap. Budiño bestrides the stage, rock moves and all, before a seething, acclaiming audience.
     As Mercedes Peón, whose first appearance on a commercially distributed CD was on Paralaia, says in one of the DVD’s rather unnecessary tribute clips made by musicians Budiño has worked with, he’s “a tremendous gaiteiro and a tremendous composer”. So he is, and while there’s a strong feeling of the big sell here (Spanish ways being rather different from our more northern European sensibilities) he’s deeply and modestly steeped in traditional music and, well, it’s good to see him having so much fun and being a bit of a star; how many bagpipers get the chance? A piece of folk/rock-stagery indeed, but it’s an exciting show to watch; for pure audio pleasure, though, I still find myself turning back to the freshness, melodiousness and variety of Paralaia.

www.xosemanuelbudino.com

© 2011 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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