Al Andalus

This is a strange and frustrating disc. It’s a digital remastering of an analogue recording first issued more than 30 years ago. Gregorio Paniagua is part of a Spanish musical dynasty that has cornered the market in early medieval music from the Iberian peninsula. I recommended his younger brother Eduardo’s album Morada del Corazon in the ‘Guide to Sephardic Music’ in Songlines #65 to those with a taste for the minimal. Al Andalus strips things back even further. The liner notes mention ‘the taste for beauty that pervaded Arab-Andalusian life’ but what we get are a couple of string instruments, a flute or two and some rather crude percussion instruments. There are also dripping water effects and what sounds like someone dropping small change. The tempi are plodding, regular and mostly unvaried and the playing lacks the variety and colour of Eduardo’s Ladino album. To learn anything about the repertoire, you must download a PDF from the website and struggle with three pages of clotted Frenglish musicology. You will search in vain for the musical equivalent of the grave beauty of the Cordoba Mesquita or the Alhambra. As it has the field largely to itself, it is a useful research tool, but I fear its home is on the archival shelves rather than the iPod.