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Written in fRoots issue 377, Nov 2014


ROSS DALY
The Other Side
Own label, no number (2014)

This is the sort of album that, if it’s on while friends are round, after a while as it sinks in is likely to evoke the reaction, “What are we listening to? It’s lovely!”.
Ross Daly (see the fR piece about his musical centre Labyrinth in fR 373) is a central musical figure in Crete, not just for Labyrinth and for playing Cretan music but for enriching it with his compositions, which draw on his deep experience and stringed-instrumental skill in the wider geography of modal musics beyond Crete and Greece.
     The album opens slow and stately, moving gradually and naturally to breathless peaks of fast-bowing, thrumming high energy. Winding, long-phrased tunes full of subtleties of pitch and rhythm in which Daly’s lyra, tarhu, rabab or saz curl and keen. He’s joined by an array of top players (including partner Kelly Thoma and others interviewed or mentioned in the fR feature) on lyra, laouto, ney, hurdy-gurdy, oud, double bass and percussion often playing unison, octaves or complementary lines over the slap and snap of tar and tombak.
     All the compositions are his own, but have the richness and associations of ages, rich with the twists and intrigue that make traditional musics so capable of endless exploration, just as the appearance and misty, aching, sympathetic-stringed sound of the tarhu, while it’s a new development, fit and enhance the old musical forms like it’s always been there.

www.rossdaly.gr/en



© 2014 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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