Mulo Francel: Saxophone, Klarinetten; D.D. Lowka: Kontrabass, Perkussion; Andreas Hinterseher: Akkordeon, Vibrandoneon, Bandoneon; Evelyn Huber: Harfe, Salterio; Chris Gall: Piano.
Quadro Nuevo is the European answer to the Argentine Tango. Arabesques, Balkan swing, ballads, daring improvisations, melodies from the old Europe and Mediterranean lightness are condensed into fairytale sound fables. These tell of the vagabond life, the experiences and encounters on the great journey of life, the small coincidences and the great moments, delicacy and wild temperament, always driven between easterly and westerly winds, between consuming desire and enjoyable fulfillment - between the bitter and the sweet.
Quadro Nuevo has been touring the countries of the world since 1996, giving over 3000 concerts: Sydney, Montreal, Ottawa, Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, New York, New Orleans, Mexico City, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Tunis, Tel Aviv. From contemplative Upper Bavaria over the Alps to Porto, from Denmark via the Balkans to Ukraine across Europe. Always on the road, the instrumental quartet has developed a very special language of sound poetry, apart from the usual genre-drawers. It is characterized by the passionate love for the instrument and the greatest joy of playing. The secret is dedication: Rarely has it been experienced that music is presented to foreign cultures with so much excitement, verve and empathy. The venues of the four musicians are as diverse as the roots of their music: Quadro Nuevo is not only a guest in concert halls and at festivals. The playful virtuosos also travel as street musicians through southern cities and demand dance as a nocturnal tango band, performing in jazz clubs and New York's Carnegie Hall. (Translated from German.)
Quadro Nuevo has been touring the countries of the world since 1996, giving over 3000 concerts: Sydney, Montreal, Ottawa, Kuala Lumpur, Istanbul, New York, New Orleans, Mexico City, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, Tunis, Tel Aviv. From contemplative Upper Bavaria over the Alps to Porto, from Denmark via the Balkans to Ukraine across Europe. Always on the road, the instrumental quartet has developed a very special language of sound poetry, apart from the usual genre-drawers. It is characterized by the passionate love for the instrument and the greatest joy of playing. The secret is dedication: Rarely has it been experienced that music is presented to foreign cultures with so much excitement, verve and empathy. The venues of the four musicians are as diverse as the roots of their music: Quadro Nuevo is not only a guest in concert halls and at festivals. The playful virtuosos also travel as street musicians through southern cities and demand dance as a nocturnal tango band, performing in jazz clubs and New York's Carnegie Hall. (Translated from German.)
Album: Impala Pt. 1
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 76:58
Size: 176.2 MB
Styles: Swing
Year: 2012
Art: Front
[3:10] 1. Luna Rossa
[2:09] 2. Nature Boy
[3:08] 3. Kommissar Maigret
[4:03] 4. Te Reto A Ser Mi Amante
[4:50] 5. Für Pauline
[4:10] 6. Our Spanish Love Song
[4:22] 7. Tango
[3:27] 8. Valse Lento
[1:57] 9. Valse Vivace
[3:11] 10. Bonsoir Juliette
[3:54] 11. Bei Dir War Es Immer So Schön
[3:58] 12. Il Sorriso D'amor
[4:04] 13. Flor De La Noche
[2:33] 14. El Paño Moruno
[1:54] 15. Susannata
[3:11] 16. Gracias A La Vida
[3:35] 17. Allez, Glissez !
[3:11] 18. Roma Nun Fà La Stupida Stasera
[3:55] 19. Tu Vuo' Fa' L'americano
[4:29] 20. La Luna Si Veste D'argento
[4:11] 21. Chitarra Romana
[3:26] 22. Serenata Celeste
Album: Impala Pt. 2
Bitrate: MP3@320K/s
Time: 100:11
Size: 229.4 MB
Styles: Swing
Year: 2012
Art: Front
[4:39] 1. Canzone Della Strada
[4:56] 2. Valzer Dottore
[3:46] 3. Tango Del Mare
[3:48] 4. Firenze Sogna
[4:26] 5. Arrivederci Roma
[4:47] 6. Tarantella
[4:23] 7. Per Il Mio Amore
[3:03] 8. Arriverderci
[4:41] 9. Miserlou
[4:08] 10. O Sarracino
[4:30] 11. El Choclo
[4:21] 12. Sultana
[5:15] 13. Mocca Swing
[5:45] 14. Giovanni Tranquillo
[4:06] 15. Penta
[4:48] 16. Quiereme
[5:58] 17. Bei Mir Bist Du Scheen
[4:44] 18. Jakob Elija
[5:29] 19. Tango Gosselin
[4:26] 20. Fiera Triste
[4:12] 21. Café Europa
[3:51] 22. El Sospiro Del Moro
Impala Part 1,Part 2
How can these guys be so consistently good, one number after another? I’m glad I guessed right and downloaded this one, since it’s totally to my taste – the musicianship is top-rate, that goes without saying, but, equally important, it’s intelligent, it’s wittily ironic. But, mind you, this is not for everyone. If you happen to be impatient with anything less genius-y than Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Bird, do not bother here. This is for people with a weak spot for the tawdry glamour (or could it be I mean just the heartbreaking – but twinkling – tawdriness?) of those old dancehalls where lonely aging lads (with oily comb-overs) went to meet lonely aging gals (with … well, let’s not get too literary here), and vice versa – think Ettore Scola’s great movie Le Bal, for example. (I admit it, I like palm court music too. But palm court and dancehall, both relatively marginal, and even frivolous, genres, though related, are distinct. Palm court is elitist and combines with Earl Grey tea and crumpets typically at around 5 in the afternoon; dancehall/bal musette is popular, i.e., “working class,” and combines with pernod or “pression” – I mean that as the French “pression” – or beer or other local spirits elsewhere than in France, typically on Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. I suppose it might be said, then, that Quadro Nuevo’s work has a “social-climbing” aspect; it’s music with instruments and arrangements that come out of the working-class dancehall/musette tradition but targeted now to the descendants of, I believe, the palm court classes – and that’s what gives it its aura of sophisticated irony. Well, this seems to me like pretty good off-the-cuff analysis, but I’m just riffing, so contradict me please if I am wrong. But, one way or another, these Quandro Nuevo guys are the ones who, in my ideal world, would furnish the sound track for absolutely ALL movies of melancholic nostalgic bent, and that’s a lot of movies.) Thanks once again, SD people. I believe we’re going to be listening to this one in my household for a long time to come. But, as I say, this CD preys on a very particular vulnerability, so it is absolutely not for everyone. (Oh, yeah, if you start this one and get bored and you don’t feel like finishing, at least, before you quit, skip down and give a listen to the vocal at “Arrivederci.”)
ReplyDeleteI searched around and I discovered that this Quadro Nuevo group, which I started out extravagantly liking, has done 1500 concerts around the world – in places as far-flung, one from the other, as Peking, Tunis, Mexico. So it seems I was in the slow class in not having heard of them until, on a mere hunch, a clicked onto the present “Impala” posting. And then, not only did I fall hard for these guys, I wrote a fairly lengthy appreciation here (see above). In due course, I clicked the SD Quadro Nuevo link (also above), and I discovered that Giullia and Mat had posted several other Quadro Nuevo items over recent weeks – so either I didn’t notice them or nothing immediately grabbed me in a glance at the text and the cover image and I scrolled on by. But now I have downloaded and listen to them all. Given my enthusiasm for tango, both period tango and contemporary variations, I went to the tango album first. I expected to love it. But it seemed, in the event, bloodless to me – and, yes, I’m the guy who likes William Schimmel’s Palm Court recordings (enter “tango project” in the SD search box), even though the Schimmel Nonesuch recordings are also, arguably, bloodless, though in a different way. Could be my problem is one of adjustment. Though the QN tango album is bloodless as Argentine tango, it is probably not even meant as Argentine tango. Could well be it is meant only as an attitude-rich effort to suck some last juice out of old European dancehall tango, i.e., the Euro dancehall tango of the first half of Century XX, which, though the genre inevitably made reference to Argentine tango, was different from Argentine tango. Take it or leave it, I guess. But then “End of the Rainbow” really disappointed me. This the guys did with the NDR Pops Orchestra, whatever that is, and it was therefore absurdly over-orchestrated and insupportably heavy on the velvety strings – the result being, of course, that it started as kitsch, and never thereafter rose out of kitsch, and that is absolutely not the case with “Impala.” (Good thing, then, that I downloaded “Impala” first and not “Tango” – because, if I had downloaded “Tango” first, I would never have found my way to “Impala.”) A couple of bars into “Du gehst durch…,” I quit. As for “Mulo Francel,” man, that’s a swing that is simply not to my taste – so, after a couple of cuts of MF CD #1, I jumped down to the middle of MF CD #2, which, according to credits on the front of the album, was recorded with the Münchner Rundfunkorchester and, wouldn’t you know it, under the direction of the same Enrique Ugarte, who led the NDR Pops Orchestra on “Rainbow” – so there we were, past the trying-too-hard swing of CD #1 and back to the egregious, humorless, irony-free kitschiness of “Rainbow.” At least these guys aren’t just repeating themselves, but, I don’t know, and I speak as a Europhile, maybe there are some things that Europe should leave to the Americas. (Note the plural there. I am not talking even primarily about the U.S. I am talking about the whole land mass all the way down to Ushuaia and not excluding the Caribbean, either.) Last note: I poked around a little on the Internet and I came on a really nice mini-history of bals musette at http://www.des-gens.net/Les-bals-musette-de-Belleville-Menilmontant. For people who like “Impala,” this is definitely worth a look and, if you don’t read French, you can enjoy the old photos. I myself particularly liked the one (#17) of the guy being patted down for weapons at the entrance to La Java. I remember a New Yorker cartoon several years back of an American coffee shop with a sign over the cash register saying, “Gentlemen not admitted without a baseball cap.” That was the style at the time, absurd as it was, back in the 1990s, and all them men already seated in that particular cartoon diner were, in fact, duly wearing baseball caps. Now see the photo numbered 19. Seems La Java had a comparable policy, even if in those days the casquette de rigueur was a different one. Don’t worry, I had fun writing this even if nobody reads it.
ReplyDeleteu r their agent?
ReplyDeleteCan you reupload these posts, PLEASE?
ReplyDeleteTHANKS A LOT!
ReplyDelete