phenomeNEWS - This Month's Music Review

This Month's Music Review
by Greg Ozimek

The Breathing of the World
Rob Silvan

In The Breathing of the World, Rob Silvan has gathered together some of the world’s great sacred poetry and personalized them by creating song settings for each.

The poems are diverse: Emily Dickinson’s words about hope inspire a jazz feeling; WB Yeats beloved poem about the Lake Isle of Innisfree with lone male voice and piano is reminiscent of Ireland. Flute and cello adorn the Sufi poetry of Rumi and Kabir and Hafiz that is brought to song-life by Megan Sullivan and Michael Crouch.

The instrumentation gathers around the soothing piano of Rob Silvan. Bass and drums, percussion, saxophones, flute and cello lend an expanded ethereal feeling that always supports the words of these transcendent poems.
There are vocal harmony and extended flute and cello passages, all meant to convey these healing words more deeply into the heart.

Gypsy Moon, DIVA Priyo, Sounds True

Sultry flamenco guitar and African drums combine in a groove that is hot on the underground dance scene from Deva Priyo in his new solo album, Gypsy Moon.

Deva Priyo also provides the musical direction for the electronica band One At Last, which is creating its own waves in dance clubs all across the West Coast, in Hawaii and Australia.
Priyo himself is a multi-talented musical virtuoso known for his signature trance sound that combines passionate, fiery guitar work and deep, rootsy Afro-trance.

He was born in Sicily and steeped in music since before his birth – both of his parents were professional opera singers. He has spent his entire life exploring the traditions and frontiers of music.

Gypsy Moon is an easily listened to album of exotic and enticing sounds sure to take you away to ride the wave long.

The Shape of Light, Jeff Ball, Four Winds Trading Company
www.fourwinds-trading.com

Jeff Ball and his native American wooden flutes, along with his collection of band members, have introduced his seventh album and a new instrument.

The Shape of Light is a fresh departure from Ball’s other albums which combined contemporary instruments. An all acoustic album, plus the fretless electric bass, with the “hang” (pronounced like “gong” but with an “h.”) There is no drum kit on this album, however the hang can be heard to fill-in since it is both a melodic and a rhythmic instrument.

The “hang” is two joined shells of steel with thumb-sized indentations that represent seven to nine notes harmonically-tuned around a deep root not that emanates from a small dome in the top center. The “hang” looks like a small UFO.

Very few hangs have been are manufactured and each one is unique.

So far, hangs have been designed with more than 45 different musical scales – scales from western music and other cultures.

Played with both hands in a rhythmic fashion like a hand-drum, the hang makes bell-like sounds similar to the Caribbean steel drum with specific notes so that chords and melodies can be created.

“We don’t play traditional American Indian songs,” Jeff says. “When the Indians first started making flutes hundreds of years ago, they were only used by young men for courting. They would go out into the woods and listen to the wind in the trees or the birds singing; and each flute-player came up with his own music to play for the woman of his choice.”

Ball continued, “That individuality is the tradition I am following. There is no point in copying what others are doing. We want to create a new path in our genre. This isn’t our ancestor’s flute music. This is American wood-flute music for the modern age.”

In the past few years The Jeff Ball Band has performed at many festivals and powwows, often large outdoor concerts. They regularly incorporate Native American dancers into their shows. In addition, the band has performed on stage with Mary Youngblood, Bill Miller, Arvel Bird and Gilbert Levy and Suzanne Teng. Heff has also played live with R. Carlos Nakai.