Jaume Compte Nafas Ensemble
Tariq
ARC Music Productions (48 mins)
So, here’s another album aiming to draw comparisons between Iberian, Arabic and other Mediterranean music using fusion. Ho hum. But wait! In Tariq, multi-instrumentalist Jaume Compte and the Nafas Ensemble have made an album that doesn’t abide by the same overused template of flamenco plus oud and darbuka. Instead, they use the various genres from around the Mediterranean as a starting point to making a style that is their own, and end up with some beautiful art music.
The album’s sound is mostly based around Western strings, which take in the Arabic, Spanish and Greek influences together with a Western classical sensibility and put out a beautiful, effortless blend of it all. These strings provide the base upon which different flavours are variously added – accordeon, Iranian kamancheh, Spanish and Catalan vocals, glimpses of Indian music and breezes of Balkan – while Compte adds guitars, oud, bouzouki and all manner of percussion and ambient sound effects to round off the textures. These interchanging layers give each piece its own identity and create what feels like a story that flows through the whole album.
It’s so refreshing to hear an album that approaches the Iberio-Arab fusion with sensitivity, class and originality. At a time when this sort of fusion seems to be very much in vogue, it is for these very reasons that Tariq and the Jaume Compte Nafas Ensemble stand out from the crowd.