ESTAS TONNE : Romani Song; The Winds Will Bring You Home; All Roads Lead to Rome – Jerusalem; Paris Heart;Snowing; Little Jarochero; Bohemian Skies; Cosmic Fairytale; Happiness Comes Back Again; Walking; Cuban Dance Intro; Cuban Dance; David’s Entry; Place of the Gods; Happiness Comes Back Again (Les Payne Remix – with Les Payne)
Estas Tonne
Available from his website: (CDr self – released)
By all accounts this Ukrainian guitarist/composer is a bit of a phenomenon who has been playing and making albums in the public eye for 20 odd years now, and to all accounts he is a wonderful player who has a very different view on life (which I am not going to go into now) but as a result his music is completely original. It has a ‘spaced – out’ type of feel and consists often of a fast run of notes, a pause while the reverberation, forever present in the music, swims the phrase around, and then he carries on. Yes, there are some up -tempo pieces but much of the music sounds improvised and I would seriously doubt that if he played the pieces again, that they would be the same. There is variety in the actual tracks here, but there is far too much reverb, and far too much attention to his ‘wonderful ‘technique, rather than the music themselves. I would also doubt that he would be able to produce any printed scores of his music that closely resembled his recordings because there is too much here that is almost impossible to write down with any correctness.
I have no doubt that he is a considerable player, as one can tell that his technique here is very advanced, but in the end it comes down to whether his style of music appeals to you, and I am sure that there must be plenty of you who love this sort of music, but unfortunately I found the tracks often very long, very repetitive, and definitely not my cup of tea. But it could be yours so don’t take my word for it, go and hunt some of his music out, and make your own mind up!
Chris Dumigan