- Cloud Valley Music website -
- Andrew Cronshaw website -
- Andrew Cronshaw Facebook -

- Back to Reviews Introduction page -

Written in fRoots issue 376, Oct 2014


DJIVAN GASPARYAN 
I Will Not Be Sad In This World & Moon Shines At Night 
All Saints WAST048CD (2014)

A double-CD reissue of two albums that brought the gorgeous sound of the Armenian duduk to the wider world. The instrument is also used in Armenia for faster, rhythmic music, but it’s this soft, slow music, its poised, calm passion and yearning tone, waves barely stirring the surface of an evening lake, that seduces.
     I Will Not Be Sad In This World, originally released on USSR state label Melodiya in 1983, has Djivan accompanied just by the traditional drone duduk. He’d been performing around the world since the 1950s, and won four UNESCO competitions, but this release was a revelation outside Armenia.
     It attracted the attention of, among others, Brian Eno, who set up the recording ten years later of the second of these discs, Moon Shines At Night, for his All Saints label. Recorded in three hours in London and at a concert in Tokyo, Eno collaborator Michael Brook took what Djivan was doing anyway and gave it the subtlest of production. Two accompanying duduks, one of them deeper-pitched than the melody duduk, sometimes change drone, imparting an element of moving harmony, and on two tracks Djivan sings, beautifully and with great sensitivity with an unexpectedly high, open-throated voice. It was his big international breakthrough release, and deservedly so; it’s music that changes one’s state of mind.

     http://allsaintsrecords.wordpress.com



© 2014 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.
     For readers/listeners across the Atlantic, 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 -