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| Geoffrey Armes's New CD Is Inspired By 'Sufi Princess' Hazrat Inayat Khan was a pacific Sufi musician, and so was his daughter, Noor Inayat Khan (1914-44), an accomplished musician and writer in her own right, prior to Hitler's invasion of their adopted home country of France. Escaping to London in 1940, Noor returned to her beloved Paris, as an Allied Spy. She was to die in Dachau just over a year later. This is the story that has inspired the latest release from New York based world-fusion songwriter and composer Geoffrey Armes. Geoffrey says, "Discovering the life - and death -- of Noor Inayat Khan, especially in the context of her father's writing and work was something of a call to action. Here was a woman in possession of 'spiritual' content or inner reality, who had grown up in a tradition of beautiful words and music, who voluntarily thrust herself into the middle of Europe's coarsest mayhem of the 20th Century. Did she know what she was in for?" and adds "What does a composer/poet/musician do with this response — he puts it into sound and lyrics." Writer Todd Evans notes "Noor reveals itself to be rather like a hybrid Arabic, Indian, West-African world music nod to prog – an avant-garde progressive world music, if you like labels. These are longer length songs (five of the seven songs range from 7-11 minutes) often parsed together using movements, which helps Armes to flesh out these musical vignettes. They are primarily driven by keyboards that shift through jazz inflected electric piano vamps, textured synth washes, and a wide variety of dialed-up sounds such as xylophone and Egyptian oboe with tempered microtones. Modal acoustic guitar riffing skirts the periphery but jumps to the forefront in the right spaces, and is underpinned by a melodically insistent bass joined by what has become by now, Armes' hallmark admixture of strongworld percussion this time featuring talking drums, dumbek, ubang and udu. He spotlights each song's lyrical content with provocative running commentary in an impressive eight page CD booklet, and then brings the poetry to life through his signature vocal style, marked by a yearning emotional intensity and intonation ornaments that evoke early David Sylvian." write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |