Kurdish Earth – Veli Toprak & Andy Busuttil

CD Review by Greg Barnett

This is obviously a passion project, as the folded cover slip has three pages of political statements about Kurdish history and their current plight.

The music is all middle eastern rhythms, scales, instruments, song structures and singing styles/ornaments.

The first track blew me away.

While I have no natural empathy, musically, I appreciated and enjoyed the crisp and detailed percussion and the richly toned instruments.

An oddity is that the credits mention ‘tamburas’ but, instead of that Indian drone instrument, the strings on this CD are plucked.

I think the description instead should have been ‘tanburs’, the double-stringed tembûr/tanbour common in Turkey.

All tracks, which seem to be covers, are expertly played and beautifully arranged, recorded, mixed and mastered.

To widen the appeal, Veli and Andy, would greatly benefit by supplying us with English translations.

An enjoyable (if ethnically esoteric) listen, I would have loved to have been more engaged by that extra dimension of understanding what I was listening to.

Reviewer Greg Barnett, born in the UK in 1951, is a guitarist/pianist, singer-songwriter and producer.