It would be hard to imagine any endeavour better serving their individual and collective strengths than Kamancello,
however, so perfectly attuned is it to each player’s talents. Let’s hope the voyage doesn’t end anytime soon.
Kamancello partners Shahriyar Jamshidi and Raphael Weinroth-Browne recorded their sophomore release live at Toronto’s Union Sound Company in April of 2016, the music fully improvised and free of editing. You might find yourself returning to that detail as you listen to this wholly engrossing recording (issued in CD and download formats), which speaks to a degree of telepathy between the two players that verges on uncanny; in fact, the level of communion achieved on the four pieces is so remarkable, one might think they’ve been playing together all their lives. Jamshidi’s kamanche, a four-string spike-fiddle, and Weinroth-Browne’s cello are both string instruments that lend themselves effectively to vocal-like expressions, yet there’s enough timbral contrast between them to allow for easy differentiation.
Though Kamancello’s music does, as the two claim, transcend genres and stylistic boundaries, it does lean in particular directions, with contemporary classical, Middle Eastern, and jazz improv natural reference points. Stylistically, their music is an East-meets-West fusion that typically builds through repetition to ecstatic peaks like those one hears in Qawwali, the Sufi Islamic devotional music popularized by the late Pakistani singers Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Aziz Mian, among others. That the music was improvised doesn’t mean some degree of pre-performance attention wasn’t given to fashioning melodic cells as points of origins, or at least so I’m presuming. In “Emergent,” for example, a yearning theme is voiced by each, sometimes in call-and-response, that’s then subjected to extensive elaborations as the two maximize the range of possibilities the melody affords. Here and in the parts that follow, a supplicating tone permeates the material in a way that makes the performances all the more affecting. Jamshidi and Weinroth-Browne create the impression that they’re reaching for something, the ascendant character of their expressions reflecting that aspiration. While there’s a strong cerebral dimension in play, the music’s more characterized by emotional expression and spiritual yearning…
June 2019