Port (2014)
10 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes
The world of musical fusions is a weird one. There are projects out there that fuse music between almost any styles or cultures that you can name, yet the successfulness of the combinations is always hard to tell just by the elevator pitch. Yes, some cultures share enough in common to make such fusions easier to facilitate from a musical point of view – Mande music and the blues, hip-hop and reggae, Hindustani and Persian classical music – but there are no combinations that are necessarily destined to work even from these. So much comes down to the individual artists taking part, their flexibility, their ability to bend their own music to another’s, and just their overall skills as a musician. And because there are so many variables, it also means that unlikely or unusual musical combinations sometimes have just as good a chance at success as the obvious ones. And so we come to Forabandit…
Forabandit’s music brings together the folk styles of Occitania and Anatolia. The band’s project is based on the idea of a shared Mediterranean culture, emphasising the connections between the people from all across the sea’s coasts who have exchanged goods, language and art through trade for millennia. Those cultures are represented in the band by Ulaş Özdemir from Turkey and Samuel Karpienia from Occitania in the south of France; the trio is shored up by Iranian percussion master Bijan Chemirani.
And – and you already knew this, because this is a blog about Good Albums – the fusion works so well that you could be convinced that the three musicians all came from the same culture, rather than those separated by thousands of kilometres of land and sea. The sounds of the instruments at play go together perfectly. Özdemir plays the Turkish bağlama in the traditional manner of the Alevi-Bektashi aşik, or wandering bards. The instrument is a long-necked lute with double-coursed strings and frets that allow for all sorts of intriguing quartertone scales. Karpienia, on the other hand, plays the mandocello, which is basically a baritone version of the mandolin, about the size of a guitar. When both of these instruments are playing together, the sound is remarkable. They are similar in many ways – steel strings, double courses – but their slight differences in tone mean that when they play together, it sounds like a weaving: a jangling, shimmering mix of high and low tones through which strands of bağlama or mandocello sometimes reach out to create an elegant thread, maybe entwining briefly with the other before settling back into the fabric. The zarb and daf drums of Chemirani hold it together with a mix of rhythms that take in patterns from Occitan, Turkish and his own Persian styles.
The album is all about these connections, in terms of its sound and its lyrics. It’s named Port, which gives you an idea – all around the Mediterranean, it is the ports that served as sites of cultural exchange and linkage. Port cities are some of the most important cultural centres around the sea for that very reason. There’s Marseille and Istanbul, which are crucial here, but it’s the same across the region: Barcelona, Naples, Oran, Beirut, Thessaloniki… That’s one of the great things about musical fusions, and something this album does so well. It highlights connections between people where otherwise they would have been unclear. In that way, ports help to create great music, but music itself can also be a port of a kind, a place where people from many different regions and backgrounds can come together and discover similarities and interesting differences, and work together to create something new in a way that benefits all involved.
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