What happens to be common to all of them is a desire to blur the boundaries between genres. Towner, with his solo guitar, straddles classical and jazz. Trygve Seim and his jazzband explore territory connecting jazz and folk. Jon Balke and Amina Alaoui offer an adventurous combination of Western baroque music and Arab-Andalusian songs from the Muslim period. And all of them flirt with the boundaries between the written and the improvised.
Siwan is likely the most tantalising project of them all, emerging from an eclectic literary and musical constellation. Amina Alaoui is a formidable scholar and artist, and one of the most gifted interpreters of the Gharnati tradition: the songs that survived at the Granada court, the last holdout against the Reconquista, and have survived centuries through oral transmission. Jon Balke is a Norwegian composer and jazz, folk and fusion pianist who won fame with his Magnetic North Orchestra. It is Balke who composed the music for the Siwan album, with Alaoui stepping in for poem adaptation and melodic co-composition. Jon Hassell is an American experimental trumpetist. Kheir Eddine M'Kachiche is an Algerian violinist and long-time accompanist of Amina Alaoui.They are backed up by a full-fledged baroque ensemble led by Bjarte Eike. Moorish and Iberian poets from the turbulent 11th and 12th centuries offer the literary raw material for Alaoui's songs. There are two excursions to 16th century Spain with Lope de Vega and St John of the Cross, the mystic who established the order of the barefoot Carmelites.
The journey starts with a purely instrumental invocation led by Kheir Eddine's mysterious violin. The following, short song O Andalusin connects most poignantly. Richly harmonised it opens a vast and colourful panorama on a world that was on the verge of disappearing. Alaoui's voice is powerful and strikingly husky. The unfolding music is generally in a slow tempo, mournful (Ondas do mar de Vigo), longing or pensive (Ashiyin Raïqin) in tone , with discrete ostinato percussion sometimes lending an air of inevitability (Itimad). There are more lively intermezzos too with songs that sound strikingly contemporary (Jadwa, A la dina dana). Alaoui switches from Arabic to Spanish and Portuguese with admirable facility. The unfamiliar blend of sonorities (baroque orchestra with harpsichord, lute, theorbo and recorder, Balke's synths, Hassel's nasal trumpet, oriental percussion) works wonderfully well. The hypnotic finale is built around two long extemporations (10 and 12 minutes long, respectively): Thulâthiyat ('trilogy') is based on a poem by the great Sufi mystic Husayn Mansour Al-Hallaj (857-922) that describes the stages of the ascetic's path. Alaoui writes in the liner notes: "At first the consciousness remains external to the essence of ecstasy. It becomes an astonished spectator, then becomes disoriented, and finally joins the paroxysm, dispossessed by the ego in ecstasy: a ceaseless transformation through vital alternation without ever achieving permanent stability." The song opens with a percussion-underpinned recitation and steadily gathers momentum to a hypnotic climax.
Toda ciencia trascendiendo is based on a gentle, sombre march rhythm wrapped in adventurously modulating unisono strings and M'Kachiche's melancholy violin. Alaoui recites in an almost matter of fact way St John's Couplets written in a state of transcendental contemplation in which he gives an account of how he found his way to a 'perfect realm of holiness and peace (...) beyond all science'. Only in the final line of each couplet, 'toda ciencia transcendiendo', Alaoui lets the voice soar to spine-tingling effect. A lively instrumental coda with Hassel's stratospheric trumpet hovering over insistent percussion, brings the album to an end.
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