Javier Ruibal
Take Spain. Franco's demise opened up an exceptional era of artistic creativity, and Spain today presents a surfeit of musical possibility. So it's no surprise that a talented singer-songwriter-guitarist like C�diz native Javier Ruibal has flown under planetary radar until now. Here as elsewhere, world-music purveyors get the commercial jump by traveling for everyone else, and Sahara cherry-picks from Ruibal's two most recent Spanish releases.
Sahara reveals a suave singer, composer and arranger, an impenitent romantic with a fatal attraction for the feminine apparition. Ruibal's stylistic counterparts include artists like Lu�s Delgado, Radio Tarifa and (in a broader musico-philosophical sense) Manu Chao, whose styles variously reflect the hybrid textures of Moorish and Sephardic Iberia, medieval Spain, gypsy Andalusia, North Africa and the Levant. In short, Ruibal's is popular Spanish music with a cosmopolitan ken for the roots and branches of pan-Mediterranean expressive culture and history.
But looking east, Sahara also offers something quite distinctive, the arresting "La Flor de Estambul." Ruibal sets his lyrics to fellow-traveling orientalist Erik Satie's haunting melody, "1�re Gnossienne" (in original conception, an allusion to the wisdom of classical Greece), on a track newly recorded for Ruibal's first sortie into the world-music souk. If he can continue to invoke the wondrous muse of this sort of inspiration, we'll be hearing a lot more of Ruibal. - Michael Stone
Sahara is available from Amazon.com
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