Andy Narell’s new album, Oui ma Chérie!, is just the thing to gift the soul of music. Bright and splashy, it delivers a mosaic of ideas and sounds the Italians may well categorize as coloratura.
From the very first cut, Forward Home, arranged by Narell and Raf Robertson, to the sentimental coda, One More Touch, Oui ma Chérie! plays unquestionably as a handsome CD that works on several levels. What’s more, generally unrestrained performances on the pans at least dignify Narell as a savant of not necessarily steel band and jazz, but music self.
Though, one of the CD’s strengths may come as a surprise.
Mercurial beauty. Which emanates from Narell’s ensemble, featuring trumpeter Etienne Charles, guitarist Mike Stern, Guadeloupean drummer Gregory Louis and Cuban conga player and percussionist Inor Sotolongo. Which, too, jumps out in Forward Home, an eclectic composition by André Tanker, who explored and embellished the roots of afro- and indo-Caribbean music in the 1960s and 1970s.
With Thomas Dyani on djembe (a West African drum), Narell’s tribute sheds light on Tanker’s experimental science, pulling strands of African rhythm and story out of the guts of the earth. Small wonder, at one point, Narell seems to flick his sticks this way and that during an eloquent passage as if to say, “Hey, brother, this one’s for you.”
Could be the reverb is kicking back to the player himself. True, within reason, Narell may be wrapping the rubber around his own self-discovery.
The American expatriate who resides in France, and, some say, lists Trinidad as his third home, turns all this virtuosity into an extraordinary work about vision, destiny, identity, and light. All of which is channelled through the rich tone of the pans. Indeed, some twenty-five pan parts, authored by the maestro himself, inform the basic sound of the album.
Clearly the singular component of the music, the instruments are imbued without artifacts by pan-meister Ellie Mannette, whose work on the Moby Dick of Caribbean orchestration is legendary. You can tell. It shines through the perfect notes, deepening a sense of pan’s mystery. Mannette is among those tuners who ensured that pan’s acceptance wouldn’t and couldn’t be denied. The drum has survived, and it mattered not how many harpoons had been speared in its back. At 87, Mannette hails from that era. And now his sound continues to pay off in spades on Narell’s bomb of an album.
You imagine the player behind the pans, waxing poetic on ‘Visibly Absent,’ a cut that runs almost 21 minutes, and visibly present is the crystalline structure of bass line riffs, the groundwork of harmony that creates a clear rhythmic pulse - on and on and on. What a magical complement to this wicked opus!
Relator and Andy Narell -- photo by Djamilla Cochran
Make no mistake, another true-true surprise springs up when Relator, using comedy as a spice but not the main ingredient, lays down an intermezzo, characterized by a double entendre about Lenore, a Kitchener jamette. Such is Relator’s charisma and voice, as imposing as an opera singer working over an aria in an Italian cathedral, you find yourself longing for an encore from a mauvaise langue (scandal-monger) with a mauvais tongue.
Hilarious, indeed! And the ‘never-dirty’ ditty plays on those inimitable sonorous pipes, the clear voice of calypso, grander than the Grandmaster's and just as witty. The new Blue Kitch.
Hear! Hear!
To those of you who admire birdsong, when Narell swings into the penultimate number, The Last Word, his sparse but efficient 2014 Panorama composition, this song without words may be still ringing in the ear - as with Coffee Street, San Fernando’s cheerful hail from Narell in a bygone era that touted Clive Bradley as still the man to catch.
Perhaps, The Last Word might have been better received had the audience been acquainted with the title’s positive connotation: The story of a guy who says, “with my wife I always have the last word, which is ‘oui ma chérie’ (yes darling).”
Be that as it may, all great music has a certain cachet. The Nashville Sound, the Beatles Sound, the Desperadoes Sound come readily to mind. And Narell’s album certainly finds a niche within that purview.
Notwithstanding the classic Mannette touch (the old Invader is still on his game, having tuned a dozen pans for the album), in phrasing his music, Narell strikes the tempered steel stylishly soft, producing an otherworldly timbre that strays beyond horizons and soars well past the threshold of, say, the Silicon Valley of auditory expressions. By infusing delicate tones with the muscularity of steel, a fresh reality in his music comes bursting to the fore.
Bringing both his art and artfulness, Narell no doubt keeps pace with a world that is racing at breakneck speed. Thus has the memory of his stellar work on, for example, The Songlines (Little Secrets,1989) and Tatoom (2007), become sublimated by this latest, surreal oeuvre in which he never appears to justify himself. No indication of old wounds to lick - no, you don’t get that vibe here, not when he’s flavoring the work with exotic salts, making occasional forays into our private universe and probing beneath emotions that range from admiration to delight.
One could find a deeper meaning to Narell’s true colors, not as panist or even musician, but as revealed in the very nature, or Nativity, of pan, the instrument of a new age. After all, though we live in a divided world ramped up ever more so by Internet chatter, it’d be a sin to homogenize pan’s musical heritage into something disturbingly uniform. Not when artists like Narell paint tones with a refreshingly broad and creative brush. Thus enabling treats like those on Oui ma Chérie to reach us as solid as pieces of Swiss chocolate that match mood and elicit emotion.
Not at all.
So, yep, coloratura! That is darling’s signature, all right.
Note: Oui ma Chérie! will be available within days at andynarell.net as well as Sanch Electronix, Cleve’s, Crosby’s, Kam’s, Paper Based Book Store at the Normandie and airport outlets M and Total Local in Trinidad and Tobago.
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