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Munir Bashir
Mesopotamia
$36.99
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There was a time when life (and music criticism) was a lot easier. In our ignorance and welcoming embrace of the foreign and new, it was possible to extol the average. A critic could inflate his or her passing knowledge into authority. It still happens (no doubt). The difference is that now the critical ear can combine enthusiasm, passion and a better informed knowledge of faraway music in its cultural context. One can still bust a plastic blood vessel in the process, but that is as it ever was, a constant or continuity in a time of change. The Iraqi oud player Munir Bashir, and his Mesopotamia, a double CD with extensive notes in French and English, conjures that other important element. And that is simply that he reminds the listener why their initial, uninformed, partially formed or well-informed instincts were spot-on when they heard his playing. Imagine hearing Davey Graham or Sandy Bull playing oud for the first time. Up that to the fifth power. Then imagine upping that appreciation, the way it happened with Hamza El Din, because that is how it is with Munir Bashir.
This music is a picture book of images. Munir Bashir creates visual images galore with his playing. The two shortest tracks are about eight-and-a-half minutes in length, the longest (a garland of maqams, the Iraqi equivalent of the Indian subcontinent's ragas) just over 30 minutes. These are a series of modally-based, melodic templates or mini-worlds. He extemporises using these as launch pads for improvisation. Laurent Aubert asks him (in Delia Morris's excellent translation) in the illuminating booklet, whether he is inşuenced by any other musicians or music, prompting the candid reply, "Of course I am! I can't tell you exactly how this takes place, but as a human being, I live with other people, I travel, I'm not in a prison so I meet lots of people and I listen to other musicians and other music. Obviously something from all this must rub off on me, even if subconsciously." The upshot is a music that communicates. As to the technical bit, Bashir performs solo (apart from the eighth, the valedictory track, Arabesque) and interprets Segah, Hanan, Taratil, Hikmah al Kebir, Nesemat and Nakhil. The mental applications from these 1987 recordings for listeners, forget guitar players, are stupendous. - Ken Hunt, fRoots |
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