To quote Keanu Reeves, “Whoa.”
Take some jazz scatting, add a sitar, a drum circle, a steel guitar, and a few other nontraditional instruments, and you probably wouldn’t be able to make anything like this. These guys can. This is some really great stuff.
So “world music” is usually either of the hard-core variety (meaning actual traditional pieces made by really old guys or people pretending to be really old guys) or the really boring elevator/hold music variety. This falls so far outside either of those categories that it becomes something new. Yeah, it sort of sounds like Middle Eastern dance music for a minute, but then you find yourself wondering where the blues guitar and jazz scatting came from. These guys from Malaysia took the word fusion and, in the realm of music, redefined it. I say that they redefined it, but they honestly just owned the original definition. Most of the crap that passed as fusion before is now totally irrelevant. The bar has been reset.
Final judgment: Definitely check these guys out. Fusion-y world music is not one of my favorite genres, but I love this. It’s probably going to be your only chance to see them in any sort of intimate setting here in the United States.
0 comments:
Post a Comment