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Written in fRoots issue 194/195, 1999


CARLOS NÚÑEZ
Os Amores Libres
RCA Victor (1999)

Carlos Núñez is a musician of immense skill and charm; I’d recommend anyone to see him live with his small touring band. The success of his debut album, Brotherhood Of Stars, helped trigger a huge upsurge of interest in Galician and other north-west Spanish music, particularly within Spain itself. After that hard act to follow it might be feared that his second album would be a lush, star-congested attempt to top it.
      Well, it does indeed have around a hundred guests, but that’s not immediately obvious; the first impression is of a simple bunch of tunes. A reading of the notes shows it to be essaying a whole lot of musical meetings and connections - with Galician music, flamenco, Irish music, European Gypsy music in general, world peace - conceptually biting off more than a single CD can reasonably be expected to make audible.
      There are enough colourful ideas for several albums, with glimpsed contributions that could have done with more room to assert their personalities - a “treboada” drum band from the Portuguese/Galician border, a stick dance done in the studio, melodic bell ringing, the whole of Bagad Kemper, the tambourine and vocal group Xiradela, traditional singer Divina from the Galician mountains of Manzaneda - so many people, so little space. I mean, four people from Tangier just to do a short unison burst of faqír breath-rhythms?
      There’s certainly no doubting the brilliance of Núñez’s playing, be it in the exquisitely melodically inventive recorder playing of Muiñeira de Pontesampaio which begins track seven or the opening track’s accelerating piping scamper from Galician jig into flamenco zapateado. He doesn’t hog the limelight, though, he blends in with his guests - such as Dan Ar Braz, Donal Lunny, Frankie Gavin, Máirtín O’Connor (these two involved in a novel track built around a 78 rpm recording by Sabicas), Derek Bell, Sharon Shannon, Nollaig Casey, Phil Cunningham, Paddy Keenan, Liam O’Flynn - who form a series of ensembles or, in the case of producers such as Simon Emmerson and Hector Zazou shape individual tracks. Featured singers include the splendidly powerful and no-nonsense Carmen Linares, the contrastingly songbird-vibratoed Teresa Salgueiro of Madredeus, Jackson Browne with the Sufi Andalousi Choir of Tangiers, notable Israeli singer Noa brought down mid-song by some leaden percussion programming, a depressingly pitch-uncertain rendition by Liam Ó Maonlaí of Christy Moore’s Viva la Quinta Brigada (accompanied by the Romanian Gypsy Taraf of Caransebes) and a brutal folk-pub-rock thrashing of The Raggle-Taggle Gipsy embarrassingly vocalised by Mike Scott.
      It’s patchy, a thing of short unconnected episodes rather than grand flow, sometimes rather obvious in choice of material, but it’s interesting, varied, unpadded and (despite the surrounding hype-laden blurb) neither smug nor cynical, reflecting Núñez’s obviously genuine and open-minded enthusiasm for musicianly sociability and exploration.
  

© 1999 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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