We Kinda Music - A Review
by Dalton Narine
On US National Public Radio (NPR), Andy Narell describes how pan has taken him from the traditional steel band sound to jazz and back again.
Narell has a sincere and deep conviction about the music he makes. In spite of his fame, he remains thoroughly unpretentious, pooh-poohing the idea that his score of albums bursts out to a paean of his pan and jazz music of his life stories.
Life stories?
Narell claims that he’s simply doing his work, writing complicated forms and creating larger ones, each album, each piece of music that way and experimenting with different others.
Narell insists that there’s nothing about his life in the whole kit and caboodle here.
Yet Narell tells stories. We glean that much from his stellar collection of CD titles and Web videos. In a sense, Narell is no different from any other artist. His work has become his lifestyle.
His latest, We Kinda Music, is a tour de force of a performance that is as eminently enjoyable as it is wildly experimental.
I’m mindful of the fact that, as a fan of classical music, I deeply embrace a work like Symphony fantastique, a self-portrait of French composer Hector Berlioz, who fashioned the music as a drama of his life. He was only 26.
Which is not to compare Narell’s music of his ‘life stories’ to Berlioz’s opus, despite the fact that the plot points of his career as a musician and panist shape him into who he is, how he became himself and, with We kinda Music, who he is on the way to becoming.
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Congratulations to Andy on his induction.
Cecil: Yuh see the part about sampling Ellie Pans and perfecting the notes in the computer. You and me talk about that on this forum years ago already. I always knew that is where THE MUSIC was headed next. If YOUR PEOPLE doh PLAY CATCH UP and jump in the brew ... is MORE TEARS from the sidelines!!!
WHAT A STORY!!! TOOK MY BREATH AWAY!!!