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Written in Folk Roots issue 181, 1998

PACO DÍEZ
Más Que Un Oficio
Several SRD-201

There’s an uncalculating, unpretentious enjoyment of the music about Paco Díez’s recordings. Musicians pass through Valladolid and play with him, and it gets recorded; no fusion masterplan, no targeting a market, just music with strong Spanish traditional roots and whatever ideas occur.
      Díez himself plays Galician gaita and sings with a rich voice that somehow goes with his moustache. The majority of the source material here has been collected, most of it by Díez over the past thirty years, in the Valladolid-Zamora-León area, while the origins of the collaborating musicians are further-flung. There’s a huge number, but each makes a specific contribution; this isn’t a cram-in-the-names star project. A sampling: Galicia’s great singer Uxía, the harps and pipes of Breton band An Triskell, piper Marcos Barcena and clarinettist Kate Gass of Cantabrian band Luétiga, the Bulgarian Nikolay Yordanov Group, hurdy-gurdy and sax from French band Yole, voices of the Peruvian band Alturas, and Senegalese percussionist Ass El Hadgi Samba Ndiaye.
      The result isn’t a lurching between superficial slices of a patchwork of traditions, nor an elegant, smoothed-out production, but a strong affirmation of the musical culture of Castilla and León, full of life, melody and, well, heart.
     

© 1998 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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