The Musical Threads of the Silk Roads

Hailing from the Basque country and sharing a name with the great 14th-century explorer who travelled from North Africa all over the Middle East and on to China, our modern day Ibantuta is a videographer and fearless traveller who discovered a passion for the oud in Bahrain and spent the next five years studying Arabic modal music. He might have subtitled this album ‘Have Oud, Will Travel’ for it was recorded on a journey eastwards in which he visited 14 countries in 12 months, collaborating with more than 40 musicians along the way and blending the strings of his oud with an astonishingly diverse array of regional instruments. In Kazakhstan he recorded with a bowed qopyz player and an accordionist to create a piece titled ‘ADAI’ which swings wildly between oriental and Celtic modes. On ‘Elma’ his oud melts seamlessly with Indian santoor and with a sarod on ‘Raag Charukesi’. There are tracks featuring a Chinese pipa (‘Flowers in Full Bloom’) and an Afghani rubab (‘Parichehr and Parizad’) while elsewhere we hear kemençe, Azerbaijani chagane and Burmese saung. Remarkably it all comes together with a perfect coherence so that the 12 pieces sound like a genuine suite rather than a disparate collection of inchoate jams. Magical and touched with a wild sort of genius.