Morocco music reviews

This is a colloboration between turkish and flamenco artists and has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with andaluse music or Chiekh Raymond. The artists involved are fine performers, and overall the album is an unusually successful fusion. It is disturbing that the liner notes seem to indicate that the Erguners, who are great masters of turkish music, are utterly ignorant of the fact that there is a living Andaluse-music tradition throughout North-Africa...I repeat, although this is a sometimes-charming fusion, it is not in any way Andaluse Music.

I bought this in Seattle, while attending the Cycle two of Wag-
ner's Ring........and it is a very nice addition to one's "car-
tunes" collection. I like playing it on my computer while doing
research, and it is nicely relaxing. A good intro to Algerian
music. Helps ease the stress of commuter driving.

So if you need a relaxing set of good world-beat tunes, of an
Algerian bent, this is very nice.

The mistake is this record has nothing to do with Cheikh Raymond.
The artists, ALLA (one of the best Oud player) and Youval MICENMACHER (great and sensitive percussionist), deliver a very sharp and efficient example of a rare north african type of music. It can be listen as a "relaxing" music - try it with a good cognac around midnight - or as a sincere "�tude" of one of the origin of arabo-andalous music.

Each track is similar to the next, so naturally it does get boring.

The music here, while traditionally based, has got some very contempoarry production values attached to it. This doesn't have the distance of older, more earthy recordings of similar music; it's very clean, sharp and upfront.

The songs themselves are a great capturing of a tradition, but it wasn't wholly my style. If you're looking for the accessibility of, say, "Kama Sutra" or the earthy tone of "Gift of the Gnawa", you'll find hints of it, but not quite the whole kick-back flavor you know. For peopel heavy into world music - especially Moroccan music - already.

At first glance, this is a pretty good deal; the soundtracks from three Crosby films, with Fred Astaire along for the ride. Unfortunately, this particular deal is not so hot.

An import from Italy, this CD is nothing more than a dub of the sound channel from the films. That is, a copy directly from the audio portion of a VCR tape, complete with sound effects and dialogue. You could of course achieve the same thing yourself if you had the films at home.

If you are not very familiar with the films, then the dialogue and background effects will be totally out of place and just sound weird. There are also long music cues that make sense when watching a film, but do not translate well to an audio CD.

On the plus side, the "Holiday Inn" tracks include "Say It With Firecrackers" and "Hollywood Montage", both of which are not on the official soundtrack release. There is the complete July 4th dance sequence with Fred's fancy firecracker footwork.

If you're like me and really love these wonderful films (especially "Holiday Inn"), you'll find this slapdash disc quite nettlesome.

But if you don't care about the sound quality (which is also suspect), and you can ignore the odd dialogue snippets, poor editing of intros and outros, and such other annoyances, then go for it. The price is right.

Overall, this is great music, so I can't say I got burned. But it would be best to stick with the original soundtracks if you want quality processing.

This CD is rather monotonous. The 1-2-3 rhythmn is pervasive throughout. If you want Moroccan belly dance music, I would recommend Chalf Hassan's other Belly Dance from Morocco Cd which has more variety of speed and melody!

Amazon now lists tracks with this album, so you know what you are getting. There are some songs from Road to Morocco, but most are from different sources. The reigning theme song from the movie "HO HUM" is not on the CD. Neither is another personal favorite "Moonlight Becomes You". When I purchased the CD, tracks were not listed and I am understandably dissappointed.