muzycy:
James Falzone: clarinet
Ronnie Malley: oud and voice
Tim Mulvenna: hand drums and percussion

LINER NOTES
This music is intentional. Intended is what has been at the csore of my Allos Musica project since its inception: an ongoing dialogue (I might even use the word struggle) with my influences. Allos is a Greek word meaning “other” and so the project has always had in mind a reference to the otherly, the mysterious, the ambiguities that rest at the edges of my experience. Also at the core of Allos Musica is a revolving instrumentation. It is not so much a group as it is a concept and, therefore, the ensemble color changes as needed.

The Lamentations project started in 2006 as I prepared music for that year’s Umbrella Music Festival in Chicago. I had in mind to reference my fascination with Arabic forms, modes and aesthetics and to use a trio of oud, clarinet and hand drums. As a guidepost, I funneled my composing and conceptualizing through the lament, a musical/poetic genre that has transcended cultures and time. But could a lament be something other than mournful? Sometimes my own laments are hopeful, feisty, impatient . . . longing for change in a world I often do not understand.

This recording documents 7 lamentations, 9 improvised interludes, and a prelude and postlude. A few thoughts on each:

Raqs al-Janub (Dances of the South), was composed by my friend and teacher Issa Boulos, a remarkable oud player and composer who wrote this in response to two interactions he had with unsavory characters while riding buses, one in his native Palestine and one in a dangerous neighborhood of Chicago. Though on opposite ends of the globe, the two incidents reminded Issa of the “irony of the human condition.” A lament for sure.

Persistent, Time, Attente and Forward are all lamentations on time. Here are mediations on time’s relentlessness (Persistent), its mercuriality (Time), the complexities of stasis (Attente) and the tension of wanting to move time forward, an i.......
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