Senor Cabrales – Aqui

CD Review by Christine Wheeler

With the release of this wonderfully listenable inaugural recording, I predict the 7-piece band Senor Cabrales has opened the floodgates for sessions around the country featuring the beautiful traditional music of Asturias, Spain.

Senor Cabrales did not rush into their recording, having been around for about 10 years already and graced the stages of folk festivals large and small.

Inspired by friendships formed and music exchanged with the great Asturian band Felpeyu (for whom this author can claim to have once played a support spot), founder members formed Senor Cabrales to keep the music of Felpeyu alive and well here in Australia.

In the years between, several band members have made ‘research’ trips to Spain, lending authenticity to their music as well as keeping their passions alive.

And they’re on track to take the band to Spain next year.

So what you hear on this cd is the assured playing of musicians who’ve been immersed in each other’s musical company long term.

They’ve taken another big leap forward with the discipline of arranging their music for this recording – now you can hear each instrument and each player being featured at different times.

At one point you can actually listen to 2 pipers playing unison, a brave thing to attempt live let alone on a recording!

The band is gifted with several multi-instrumentalists, who between them play 2 sets of gaita (one set of Asturian pipes and one of Galician pipes), 2 whistles, 2 mandolins, 2 bouzoukis, mandola, flute, fiddle, banjo, charango and bodhran.

There are some gorgeous pairings of melody instruments throughout the album, not surprising being so spoilt for choice.

The tunes they’ve chosen to record come variously from Asturias, Galicia, Brittany, Scotland and Ireland, in some cases mixing tunes from different regions into the same set.

It works beautifully, giving a glorious reminder of how much Celtic music from different regions has in common.

Having seen the band launch their cd at this year’s National Folk Festival, which was a joyous affair, I’ve had the album on high rotation ever since.