Fra Fra Sound
  • artist:Fra Fra Sound
  • release year:2003
  • country:Netherlands
  • formats:CD (Compact Disc)
  • record posted by:Fra Fra Sound
  • label:Pramisi records

On Kultiplex, Fra Fra Sound's members — originally from the Netherlands, Surinam, the Antilles, and Venezuela — draw a wonderfully alluring sound from a fine balance of warm ensemble writing and well-integrated improvisations. All the band members are equally important to the success of their pan-cultural music, creating moment after moment of beauty in a program of all original songs that have surpassing worth and stick with listeners long after the music fades.

Frequent soloist Michael Simon plays a sure-toned hard bop-inclined trumpet, essaying joyous, crisp melodies and digging for greater depth of expression via spontaneous creativity. His lines carry tremendous warmth on the extended composition “Para United,” and he comports himself with complete self-assurance on “Franca Lucia,” joining the other band members in capturing some of the ebullience of the great South African jazz spawned years back with the late great trumpet player Mongezi Feza and the fondly remembered saxophonist Duda Pukwana. Simon also quietly touches the listener’s heart with his measured, cogent work on “Nights in Dzaoudzi,” a tune whose melodic richness suggests classic Blue Note bop flavored with Third World rhythmic spices.

Tenor saxophone player Efraim Trujillo is another pillar of reliability as throughout the recording his solos make outstanding impressions. On “Wakandi,” one of his four compositions, he takes a particularly outstanding flight where his phrases are pushed by a stream of creative musical ideas. Trulillo’s unisons with trumpeter Simon are precise and powerful, as are his exchanges with Simon on “Bidjilo Park View.” This typically uplifting Fra Fra Sound instrumental merges musical cultures and evidences how the band is animated by a shared emotional generosity.

Pianist Robin van Geerke provides lovely colors to the nine album tracks, showing his level of imagination to be sky-high when he goes to the fore on, say, “Para United” and “Family Meetings.” Andro Biswane’s guitar has undeniable verve, whether having a spellbinding African cast on his gorgeous composition “Les yeux des Tamashek” or taking a modernist jazz direction on “Franca Lucia” that would elicit nods of approval from Pat Metheny and Bill Frisell. The guitarist is magnificently effective in both feature and supporting passages on the remaining tracks, as well.

Artistic director and band mainstay Vincent Henar on electric bass shows his mastery of mood by focusing his emotions into a tone that at one moment suggests the bubbly rapids of the Marowijne River back home in Suriname and at another a beacon of R & B-inflected repose. Henar’s compelling playing everywhere encompasses the integrity that accompanies deep understanding of the humanistic value of world music and jazz.

Conga player Carlo Ulrichi Hoop and drummer Guno Kramer supply astounding patterns of beats that connect traditional Surinamese kaseko music with the rhythms of African and the West. Their magical grooves are at once tight and flexible, pyrotechnic and subtle, always felt but never impeding the primary soloists. The conga launching “Para United” merits special notice as a triumph of spirit and virtuosity. To mention just one more highlight: Ulrichi and Kramer interact uncannily on “Les yeux des Tamashek.”

The band name Fra Fra can be understood to mean either “hybrid” or “mysterious” when spoken in Suriname, the independent country formerly known as Dutch Guyana located in northern South America. Much as city life in the tropical land mixes customs from its many ethnic peoples living there (the Amerindians, the Dutch, the Javanese, the Creoles, and the Africans), the band plays an otherworldly music of mixed origins. But the lucid, respectful and exhilarating fashion in which Henar and his six musicians borrow from different cultures distances Fra Fra Sound from the polygot pretenders on the world music circuit that mix-and-match styles in pointless pastiche.