Ask Your Heart

Oud player Mehmet Polat leads the way on this second album from his trio, although Sinan Arat's ney (Middle Eastern flute) often soars melodically above, and Dymphi Peeters occasionally punctuates the arrangements with spiky kora solos. Polat's modified oud, with its extra bass strings, sometimes sounds like an upright bass playing syncopated Latin lines combined with Balkan rhythms on the track ‘Dance it Out’ or even reggae in the case of ‘Neşet’.
Being two thirds oud and ney, and one third kora, the ensemble's compass points mainly to the East and the balance of sound is heavily weighted with a maqam modality. These quarter-tones jar pleasantly with the more Western-tempered kora in ‘Evening Prayer’ – a ghazal (improvised song) from Polat's hometown of Urfa in Turkey. Given the kora's adaptability regarding tuning, it almost seems negligent that Peeters hasn't retuned her instrument to match the tonality of Polat's singing – until, that is, you reach the other ghazal, ‘Mardin’, in which the kora's altered tuning can be heard distinctly. Such considered deliberate decisions about when to blend tunings and when to juxtapose them, mark this out as a carefully crafted work of sensitive collaboration.