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Written in fRoots issue 242/243, 2003

NIGEL KENNEDY & THE KROKE BAND
East Meets East
EMI 7243 5 57512 2 5 (2003)

KROKE
Ten Pieces To Save The World
Oriente RIEN CD 45 (2003)

In which the Kennedy now known once more as Nigel makes the Polish trio Kroke into a quartet. It’s been brewing for a while; Kennedy heard a Kroke album, loved it, went to see them live in Penzance, friendship and musical hanging out ensued, and he and his Polish wife now have a house in Kroke’s home city, indeed the source of the band’s name, Kraków.
      The excellent trio and its own albums and even more compelling live shows have been written about several times over the years in fRoots; suffice it here to say that the line-up is, as throughout its ten-year existence, Tomasz Kukurba on viola and violin, accordionist Jerzy Bawol and bassist Tomasz Lato.
      For this album Kukurba sticks to viola, plus some percussion, flute and whistling, leaving the violin range available for Kennedy. The latter has never been afraid of digging in, and there’s absolutely no impression of a classical violinist skating over the surface nor of dressing up the music in a starched shirt; indeed he has probably done more than anyone to break down classical music’s hidebound rituals and stiff relationship with other musical forms (though of course his mentor Yehudi Menuhin did some trailblazing before him). He’s a musician of extreme perceptive skill and he has fine command of the styles involved, never resorting to pastiche nor off-showing, and it all blends into a muscular band sound.
      A proportion of the material here, though re-arranged, will be to a degree familiar from Kroke’s repertoire, though the titles have been changed slightly in view of the fact that all tracks except Ederlezi, a Goran Bregovic number, are for this album designated in the credits as composed or arranged by all four. But it isn’t a case of Kennedy muscling in - even his solo violin piece Lost In Time is also credited to all of them, and in their live performances together he and the band members chat with characteristic Kennedy informality about the material and he’s quick to praise Kroke and give them much credit. For example the one with the ticking clock, recorded by Kroke on their The Sounds Of The Vanishing World CD as Time, is here renamed Time 4 Time (and mercifully spares us the alarm), but in their Hampton Court Palace outdoor concert – one of only three full live shows they’d done together by the time of writing this, though more are arranged - he called it by its original title and made clear that bassist Lato wrote it.
      It’s an album full of memorable tunes. Five of the fourteen are arrangements of traditional themes, including one titled Tribute To Maria Tanase in honour of the Romanian singer of folk songs who became famous from the 1930s to 1950s. This latter is the sort of information you won’t find in the CD booklet notes, though. They’re frustratingly short of information on the material, and largely devoted to a eulogy to Kennedy by his manager. Look, a person reading the notes has normally already bought the CD – why would they need to read the promo blurb? But they might well want to know a bit about the tunes, and about Kroke too, dammit.
      The opening track, Ajde Jano, is untypical of the rest of the album, in that it’s a song, exquisitely sung and spoken in Serbo-Croat by Natacha Atlas, with twists of Greek vocal style and sounding remarkably Balkan.
      At the root of Kroke’s music has always been Klezmer, and that richness, warmth and lyrical melodicism pervades the album. But they rove ever more widely, among Balkan musics and Arabic influences, and in terms of instrumental textures wider still here. One Voice features Arabic violinist Aboud Abdel Al, and extra lushness from string players of Kraków Philharmonic Orchestra. Kennedy’s electric fiddle makes some appearances, principally a fine bit of wild fuzzed guitar-like squee on T4.2, partnered with Kukurba’s high flute in Time 4 Time and in the energetic Balkan-rocking clatter of the final track Kukush.
      It is, to use a Kennedy-ism, ‘proper’, and it’s destined to introduce the more open-eared of his existing audience to Kroke and lead some into the wide world of central and eastern European music.

      Kroke’s own new CD, Ten Pieces To Save The World, successor to 1999’s The Sounds Of The Vanishing World and 1998’s highly recommended Live At The Pit, came out a couple of months before the Kennedy album, and jumped into the World Music European Airplay top ten, but there was no sign of a review copy arriving at fRoots. Now, the East Meets East review complete, one has showed up, just before copy date, from UK distributor Discovery. It makes sense to deal with the two together, so back to the word processor.
      All the ten pieces are by various members of the band this time – no traditional themes. The textures are reliably gorgeous, but this recording is a little thin on the strong, complete melodies they’ve come up with in the past. The first two tracks are mostly pleasant enough extemporising over - in Sun - a Balkan groove with a guest guitar solo, and in Desert a slow shifting pad. The Balkanish tune of Childhood keeps drifting off into insubstantiality. Cave’s slow surging chords move into a flanged rhythm pattern with water drops, piano, and melodic fragments that sound like they’re going to join up but never do. Usual Happiness begins promisingly with a melodic line over a familiar Kroke oompah-ing duple time, but the melody mostly comprises similar phrases repeated on different parts of the scale and doesn’t really take a grip. Take It Easy has a finger-clicking, mouth-whistling, accordion-slithering, viola-floating, scat-singing shuffle like a European light-comedy film theme.
      And so it goes on. Evocative and reflective atmospheres, an interesting variety of rhythms, clever changes, and as always beautiful intelligent playing. But even Light In The Darkness, which is a version of T4.2, with its hummable partly Arabic-flavoured tune, keeps moving in and out of consequentiality, and like a couple of others here it fades out; nothing wrong with the occasional fade when it creates the right picture, or perhaps a kind of musical ellipsis, but…


© 2003 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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