Alex de Grassi - The Water Garden
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CD Details
Artist: Alex de GrassiEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1998-08-18
Music Label: Tropo Records
Soundtracks:
- Prelude
- Zipper
- Water Garden
- Lost in the Woods
- Another Shore
- Cumulus Rising
- Ripple
- Vanishing Point
- Down Below
- Endless Rain
Music reviews of The Water Garden
Music Review: Crystalline Beauty
Rating: 5 Stars
Alex de Grassi is one of the best contemporary acoustic guitarists, and this is one of his best albums. Nominated for a grammy award, the compositions, guitar technique, and production quality on this album are all superb. This album creates an aura of meditative peacefulness and ordered perfection. Every note is exactly in place, and yet at times they cascade over the ear in rich profusion like a waterfall of sound. But this is a peaceful waterfall, not the niagra of a rock band, but the gentle trickling one would hear in a garden.
Many of de Grassi's albums are good, and it is hard for me to describe exactly why this one stands out as one of his best. There is something about the clarity and subtlety of the compositions that catches one's heart. Many of the songs on this album are beautiful, yet none of them are cloying. Some of the pieces are quite abstract, yet they never lack a clear structure and a few subtle themes to tie the composition together.
I recommend this album whole heartedly to anyone who enjoys acoustic guitar music with a peaceful and meditative side to it. Don't mistake this for background music. The meditative aspect comes from the rewards one gets from listening very closely and careful to a superb craftsman and artist at the height of his powers.
Description of The Water Garden
"Meditation and water are wedded forever," says New Acoustic progenitor Alex de Grassi, quoting Herman Melville in the liner notes to this 10-song cycle of solo steel-string guitar pieces "on the theme of water." There's a stillness at the heart of this Garden, but don't expect placid performances; de Grassi's stunning finger style exploits rapidslike torrents of open-tuned chords ("Prelude"), babbling brooks of uplifting hammer-on melodies ("The Zipper"), and buoyant themes floating over liquid counterpoint ("Another Shore"). Sure, the former Windham Hill mainstay, whose Turning: Turning Back and Slow Circle helped define that label's identity, is capable of brooding, contemplative work--the lovely title track is a good example--but he rarely gets stuck in meditative mud, preferring, as in "Cumulus Rising," to wring great emotion from even his quietest moments. The Water Garden suggests that de Grassi's vision has only gotten deeper and clearer over time; he's a jazz composer with a folkie's fingers and the Northern California coastline in his soul. --James RotondiGeneral CDs
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