Live at the Bimhuis

Arifa are a band that are hard to define – four musicians from Turkey, Romania, Greece and Germany, resident in Holland. The band make a cohesive sound from their diverse backgrounds, and it seems an interesting idea to bring in three female guests from China, Iran and Bulgaria, each playing a similar small bowed string instrument: erhu, kamancheh and gadulka respectively. Along with the percussion, clarinet, tarhu (a bowed hybrid of Iranian tar lute and Chinese erhu) and piano, this could be the perfect example of an album for our globalised world.

The opening track, ‘Silk Road Journey’, starts with the distinctively Chinese sound of the erhu, but is then joined by busy piano figurations and Bulgarian vocals from Vanya Valkova. It sounds a bit of a mess, frankly. Things don’t improve on subsequent tracks, featuring Niusha Barimani and Xiaoxu Meng. It would probably have been a much better album if they’d just demonstrated their instrumental skills and not been asked to sing. There are some beautiful instrumental moments, such as the minimalist passage in ‘Arifa Alchemy’ with plucked strings, delicate percussion and splashes of piano and clarinet. Too often, however, the music is spoiled by busy jazz piano from Franz von Chossy. The most successful tracks are ‘Dacian Call’, from Alex Simu on clarinet, and ‘Anatolian Sorcery’, a percussion solo from Sjahin During. It will be interesting to see how the project works live.