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February 2010
gig reviews

Martin Carthy
Claudia Quintet
Antonio Forcione & Adriano Adewale

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Vortex gig reviews by Chris Parker

Antonio Forcione & Adriano Adewale

Tuesday 16 March

For sheer virtuosity, passion and intensity, a performance by acoustic guitarist Antonio Forcione is hard to beat, and in the consistently resourceful and sensitive percussionist Adriano Adewale he has the perfect foil, so it was no surprise to find the club packed to bursting point before the duo's gig.

The quality of this SRO crowd's attentiveness, too, was something special: as soon as Forcione and Adewale took their first (intentionally) tentative steps into their opening number, 'Spanish Breeze', there descended a rapt hush, undisturbed thereafter (applause excepted) throughout a typically wide-ranging tour through the pair's musical landscape.

For, applied to Forcione and Adewale, the much-abused (and lazily relativist) term 'world music' actually makes sense: although the guitarist has discernible roots in, say, flamenco, and Adewale's playing readily brings such fellow Brazilians as Nana Vasconcelos and Airto Moreira to mind, their music, with its unaffected and entirely natural-sounding utilisation of an extraordinary plethora of rhythms and textures from all over the world, is clearly a product of an age where all forms of music are instantly available, all equally valid, none seen as 'exotic', or even unusual.

And if the duo have thoroughly assimilated styles and approaches, they have also assimilated technique with similar readiness: much of the joy to be found in their music comes from the contrast between the breezily informal (apparent) ease of its delivery and its (actual) complexity.

Blistering runs, showers of harmonics, alternately rollicking and restrained rhythms from Forcione; driving beats, the subtlest of whispering/chiming percussion effects, sounds resembling natural forces from Adewale – the pair's sets seem to pass in a glorious flash, but always leave an audience glowing.

 

 

Chris Parker

Chris Parker was commissioning editor for Quartet Books jazz list and publisher of Wire magazine and has written on jazz forJazz Review and Jazzwise, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph and The Times).

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