A HAWK AND A HACKSAW - Délivrance

Every work by Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost's band charts an itinerary, a full immersion in a musical heritage of a thousand facets, whose complexity is examined in depth right down to its most peripheral details, driven at once by a thirst for knowledge and an awareness of an unbridgeable cultural distance.

Traditional contaminations of a broadly "Balkan" nature have in recent years been common in independent productions of the most disparate origins, yet few have achieved the level of artistic and cultural immersion reached by A Hawk And A Hacksaw. Barnes's gaze has never settled for the blurred, all-encompassing view of a tourist jaunt through Eastern Europe (Beirut-style, so to speak), but has instead pushed to probe specific places, peoples and traditions: to do so, Barnes relocated permanently to Budapest for his collaboration with the Hun Hungár Ensemble, later moving on from there to explore further lands and folklores otherwise forgotten.

The Hungarian capital was the chosen setting for the making of "Délivrance", an album that picks up the wild gypsy-flavored ballads for which the band had made a name for itself with the previous "Darkness At Noon" and "The Way The Wind Blows", enriching them with even wider-ranging paths, aimed at highlighting a syncretism that is not confined to the musical sphere but crosses geographical, historical and political borders.

Not just the Balkans, then, but also the Carpathians, the Danube, and then further East and South: Greece, Turkey and beyond, all the way to Israel, in search of the Mediterranean ties between Asia and Europe, retracing in reverse the routes of Orthodox Jews and Ottoman conquerors.

The musical content of this itinerary is represented by ten tracks, nearly all marked by a dusty uptempo drive and a remarkable instrumental richness, which does not limit itself to a mere calligraphic flourish of rhythms and brass, but instead delights in pursuing compositional distinctiveness (it's no coincidence that four tracks are traditional pieces or reworkings thereof) and instrumental peculiarities, as in the case of the cymbalum, an instrument similar to the dulcimer played with a mallet. In just a few turns of frenzied dance one moves from the Greek, bouzouki-driven ballad "Foni Tu Argile" to the oblique arabesques of "Kertész" and "Hummingbirds", from the surge of the accordion to the screech of the violins, all the way to harsh, sinuous melodies that mark the further shift eastward, piecing together the fragments of historical and cultural ties that have never fully dissolved.

The imprint of the tracks remains mostly warm and joyful, without ever tipping into glib superficiality, indeed offering a few glimpses of solemn nostalgia ("Raggle Taggle") and reflective melodic layering, which however only rarely take on the fully realized shape of a ballad. This is clearly a deliberate stylistic choice, but also a limit on the development of an independent artistic identity capable of being inspired by tradition while also breaking free from it; despite the underlying consistency of their ethno-musicological research, A Hawk And A Hacksaw only occasionally give the impression of offering a personal contribution of their own, rather than what comes across as a careful anthropological survey.

Perhaps that's why the real limit of such projects still lies in the difficulty of transcending mere sonic research through original solutions, such as those briefly sketched out here in Gypsy-tinged or Arabian-flavored miniatures, and in the accordion-and-violin ballad “I Am Not A Gambling Man,” the only track truly capable of recasting in the present an album that nonetheless succeeds very well in conveying the exotic, enchanted sense of places and atmospheres from another space and time.

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16/05/2009