The nostalgia in the hearts of Spanish musicians, writers and intellectuals for that gilded age of tolerance that was Moorish Spain seems inexhaustible. It's little wonder then that the whitewashed dreamscapes of old Tangiers, situated just across the straits in full view of the Andalusian coast, exert such a magnetic influence on Spain's creative imagination.
Last in a long line of virtuosi who have taken the ferry out of Algeciras in search of the magic that nurtures ‘the peace and comprehension between the people' comes oud (Arabic lute) player Luis Delgado.
His live collaboration with one of Tangier's foremost exponents of the classical Andalusian style, El Arabi Serghini Mohamed, manages to bring a musical tradition that is so often neutered by the chastity belt of academia back to hot-blooded and pulsating life.
In the hallowed halls of the Lorin Foundation, which once housed the ancient synagogue of Ets Haim, deep in the Zocco Chico near Calle de Los Christianos, Delgado and his cohorts turned nostalgia into surging, yearning music, recreating all the colours and moods that make Tangiers such a mesmerising place. The concert was deftly recorded by Hugo Westerdahl under the expert direction of Manuel Domínguez, head honcho of the tirelessly innovative Spanish imprint Nubenegra, to create one of the most satisfying Arabo-Hispanic releases in years. In this blood wedding of emotion and virtuosity, ancient poems by the likes of Ibn Sara Santarini and Ibn Al-Zaqqaq are resuscitated to prove that time changes everything and nothing. And with 200 dead in Madrid, and bodies still regularly washing up on the beaches of southern Spain, these wonderful recordings reaffirm with utmost eloquence that tolerance is as urgently desirable now as it was in 1492. - Andy Morgan in Songlines, May, 2005
Luis Delgado