Search - Various Artists :: Bridges: The Echoes Living Room Concerts Volume 9

We call this edition of the Echoes Living Room Concert series "Bridges" because it represents a music that crosses between countries and time, ancient music and modern technology, cultures from Asia and Africa to Native America. There are voices singing in ancient Aramaic and musicians mixing eastern and western modalities. The disc is bookended by the extremes of the Echoes soundscape, beginning with a solo acoustic guitar performance by the legendary Pat Metheny and ending with a classic synthesizer excursion from Redshift. In between is a web of world fusions and electro-acoustic formulations that are distinctly a product of a modern, trans-global landscape.It's modern, even when it's ancient. That's the case with two selections from the heart of Texas. The eight singers of SAVAE, the San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble, sing in Aramaic and Hebrew in their living room, playing instruments from well before the turn of the last millennium. Up the road in Austin, we caught the Mundi Ensemble, a group that plays Medieaval compositions and originals in that mode, but with a distinctly modern, minimalist spin and a hint of Duane Eddy guitar. East-West sounds abound on Bridges. Michael Mandrell and Benjy Wertheimer offer a sublime meditation for acoustic guitar and Indian esraj while Drala forges a global fusion of bansuri flute, tabla drums, guitar and bass. But some fusions go American West to Middle east. That's the case with Autumn's Child who brings the Native American flute of Mark Holland into a global chamber music setting. Several artists articulate forward looking designs. Guitarist Michael Hewett processes his acoustic guitar into an electric chamber music and Norway's Erik Wøllo, in an unreleased work, creates an electronic fantasy for guitar and synthesizer. An Echoes LRC disc wouldn't be complete without some solo guitar and piano. Bridges has both with Michael Gulezian's open-plains slide guitar on "Tumbledweeb." Pianist Barbara Higbie's piano solo cascades in liquid glass fragments on "True Story."Bridges contains the essence of Echoes, distilled into 11 live performances, sequenced into an Echoes soundscape.