Saz'iso - At Least Wave Your Handkerchief At Me: The Joys and Sorrows of Southern Albanian Song
SKU
05-GB 053CD
Donika Pecallari: voice
Adrianna Thanou: voice
Robert Tralo: voice
Aurel Qirjo: violin and voice
Telando Feto: clarinet
Agron Murat: llautë (lute)
Agron Nasi: dajre (frame drum)
Pëllumb Meta: fyell (flute) and voice
"Why not give yourself a break from the unending cavalcade of modern high-speed insanity, and rest up with this album of deep soul from Southern Albania."-Ry Cooder
"...the debut of Saz'iso, a group of virtuoso musicians and legendary singers assembled by veteran producer Joe Boyd (Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, ¡Cubanismo!, Songhai) and his co-producers, Edit Pula and Andrea Goertler. The album was recorded live, with no overdubs, by Grammy-winning engineer Jerry Boys (Buena Vista Social Club, Ali Farka Touré, Orchestra Baobab) over three days of October 2016 at the Akademia e Filmit dhe Multimedias Marubi in Tirana, Albania. The music of Southern Albania is iso-polyphonic, which means that it combines at least two melodic vocal lines, a lead (marrës, the "taker") and a second (prerës, the "cutter"), with a multi-voiced drone or iso. When manufactured "tempered" instruments arrived in the region in the late 19th century, Saze ensembles were born; clarinets and violins took on the roles of the lead and second voices while lutes carried the iso. As Vasil S. Tole, Albania's leading expert on iso-polyphony -- and an inspiring advisor to this project -- puts it: "Saze remains to this day the musical language of the cities of Southern Albania, where East and West embraced when European instruments collided with the magic of a cappella iso-polyphony, and where life and death still coexist in a sound that is truly unique."
- LabelGlitterbeat
- UPC4030433605325