Northern Rhapsody
Eishan Ensemble
Hamed Sadeghi and ACEL Productions.
★★★★
Composer and bandleader Hamed Sadeghi’s connection with the landscape’s unique physical beauty delivers music that sidesteps the mechanical rigidity of overly technical composition, opting for an emotional resonance that pulses through each track like a well-timed heartbeat. Using an unconventional configuration of instruments – tar, saxophone, double bass and percussion – Sadeghi’s compositions bridge East and West, embellished by his musicians, who bestow individual and artistic delicate interplay, among the many highlights throughout the album. On a favourite track, ‘Redfern’, Alducca’s bass playing stabilises the affair with quiet authority, combining limber support from Sadeghi’s tar.
Adem Yilmez’s percussion provides just enough propulsion to keep things lively without being overwhelming. It is a balancing act worthy of a tightrope walker, and Sadeghi navigates it with the ease of a man who knows his way around a tar and a clever idea. But what stands out most is Sadeghi’s refusal to let the music calcify into predictable patterns on tracks like ‘Towards The North’, which shimmers with its world fusion flair emanating from Alducca’s arco bass playing, contrasted with Sadeghi’s agile voicings and melodic intervals on tar, and later Avgenicos’s saxophone, allowing the composition to unfold with a pastoral grace. This recording is a bold declaration from an artist who prefers feeling over formula and intuition over instruction.
Reviewed by Barry O’Sullivan