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Written in fRoots issue 225, 2002


SUSANA SEIVANE
Alma De Buxo
Boa Do Fol 10002028 (2001)

After the freshness of Susana Seivane’s first CD, the thick steaming diddly-diddly onslaught of Alma De Buxo’s first track, a set of a pasacorredoiras and two polcas, raises fears of second album pile-it-on syndrome. But she and Rodrigo Romaní, who also produced her first album, can be trusted, and as things proceed the texture opens out in a work which has plenty of light and shade and interesting developments.
      For instance, there’s a novel but successful pairing of her gaita with the agile brass and flute band Agrupación Musical Harmonía in a springy, parade-style arrangement, by the band’s director, of a rumba. And this time Seivane takes a lead vocal, in the romantic Roseiras De Abril, for which she wrote the tune and well-known Galician singer Uxía Senlle the lyrics. Later, for Muiñeira De Alén, in tribute to the strong role of women in the Galician song tradition, Susana and Uxía form the acapella pandeiretera septet Sete Saias with five other female singers including Chouteira’s Uxía Pedreira, Berrogüetto’s Guadi Galego and long-time Seivane ally Sonia Lebedynski.
      A further tribute is to her grandfather, Xosé Manuel Seivane, his pipe-making, teaching, and the transmission of music from generation to generation. He gets a solo track to himself, playing at a family party two muiñeiras he taught Susana as a child, Chao and Curuxeiras. On the following track Susana renders them in her own way, accompanied by some of the album’s core musical group: Brais Maceiras’ diatonic accordion, Xurxo Iglesias’ bouzouki and Iván Laxe’s bass, with Susana not only on gaita but showing her command of the instrument’s traditional accompanists, the bombo (bass drum), tamboril (snare drum) and pandeireta (tambourine).
      Romaní, who recently left Milladoiro and recorded the interesting solo album reviewed in FR 218/219, makes quite a few contributions on harp, such as the latin-style intro to the rumba Na Terra De Trasancos, which also features Euskal guest Kepa Junkera, and forming a delicate trio of gaita, harp and the piano of Roberto Grandal in the romantic Seivane/Grandal composition Ti E Máis Eu.
      The final track is a marcha procesional, a tune form which might for some be a vehicle for an all-onstage-together rouser, but Seivane takes it as a gaita solo. It’s a satisfying, focusing closer to an album (whose title means “soul of boxwood”) from a musician “born amongst bagpipes” who is dynamic proof of the fresh, rich music still to be found and still being created at the heart of the living Galician piping and vocal tradition. As she said in fRoots issue 201, “We play music from before but speaking of now”.


© 2001 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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