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Written in fRoots issue 357, March 2013


ALE MÖLLER BAND
Argai
Playground Music PGMLCD 125 (2012)

In the five years since the magnificent Djef Djel Ale Möller’s international band has been getting on with things, and now, with the same sextet line-up, comes Argai, in which the traditions and creativity of its members are even more interwoven so that it’s hard to pin down which of them is dominant for more than a few moments before it gives way to another.
      The language is mostly Wolof or Greek, the native tongues of those who do most of the lead singing - Mamadou Sene from the village of Djourbel in Senegal and Maria Stellas from Thessaloniki - but often each is singing to a melody from the other’s tradition, from those of Sweden, or a Möller composition that doesn’t just reflect his Swedishness but wells up from his deep and wide-world musical awareness. All of them pitch in on strong harmonising vocals.
      The instrumentation, too, is a beautifully integrated whole made up of just some of Möller’s armoury - mandola, whistles, shawm, accordion and harmonica – with Sene’s riti, Magnus Stinnerbom’s fiddles, mandolin and dobro, Québecois Sébastien Dubé’s double bass, Mexican Rafael Sida Huizar’s hand-drums and other percussion. And five of them twang jew’s-harps for Doli, in which “A jaws harp quintet and a nursery rhyme from Senegal is mixed with a bass solo from Sébastien”.
      This is a band where no-one is anonymous; each person’s strengths are given rein. Result: vivid, energised, constantly colour-changing music the like of which has never been heard before in any of its constituent traditions. Not fusion; it’s playing with the neighbours, a spark-gap made by musical and personal friendship and wide-thinking intelligence.

www.alemoller.se



© 2013 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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