kev rowland

What we have here is the latest release from Brazilian trio Dialeto, whose last album ‘The Last Tribe’ was excellent. I was a little surprised that it has taken four years for them to come back with the follow-up, but that may have something to do with the fact that only guitarist Nelson Coelho was in the band last time around. He has now been joined by drummer Fred Barley and bassist Gabriel Costa, which makes them more how they used to sound, as for the last album the bassist had been replaced by touch guitar. This album is an attempt by Dialeto to take compositions by Béla Bartók and then move them into their own genre, with lots of improvisation. Bartók is considered to be one of the most important Hungarian composers of the last century, and through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology.

With six of the ten songs named Roumanian Folk Dances it isn’t hard to see where the music originally stemmed from, but here it has been taken to new levels as jazz fusion takes this as a base and then moves it into quite new areas. The whole album is fresh, exciting and interesting, taking the listener through many twists and turns, and by the end I found myself thinking that I loved this so much that I really ought to discover the originals and see just what Dialeto had done to them to transform them into this modern style of music. David Cross makes an appearance on the first number, and my only wish was that he had could have stayed for the complete album as he had so much impact, but as it is this really is an album to savour.