Alec Goldfarb - Fire Lapping at the Creek (2024)

The blues is full of the mystical and the hidden. Bluesmen hid magical objects like rattlesnake rattlers in their guitars, which would augment the supernatural sounds of their strings with the sympathetic resonance of the snake. The devil appeared as a snake to Eve, and to Robert Johnson. In Fire Lapping at the Creek we hear these resonances from a distant time and place, from this deepest wellspring of American music making.

The music presents a puzzle. There are echoes from places one would not often associate with the Blues: the Shire Highlands of Malawi, Lutheran Convents in Saxony, and the coasts of the Arabian Sea. These strands intertwine with the blues, hymns blending into shouts and microtonal melismas that hang over broken ragtime. As each piece unfolds, an epiphany crystallizes from within the music: an “aha” moment that the Blues is connected to these settings, these echoes. Across the 10 tracks, the sextet breaks apart these strands at the heart of the blues and alchemizes them into something mystical.

The Blues itself possesses many secret things, and in these compositions Alec Goldfarb brings out this transcendent quality by making secretive the known- ghostly tunings spiderweb out from blue notes, irrational rhythms overtake loping shuffles. The improvisers in this all-star sextet contribute equally to this resynthesis of the Blues from its basic components, completing the magic trick that we have been transported somewhere alien, some distant shore, but somewhere familiar.

Fire Lapping at the Creek creates a dialogue with our history that shatters the conception of the Blues as simple music without historicity. As we listen, we are reunited with the font of American music making- a revolutionary, ecstatic, syncretic, folkloric tradition that synthesizes Arabic, African, European, and American ways of music making known as the Blues.

David Leon - Alto Saxophone
Xavier Del Castillo - Tenor Saxophone
Zekkereya El-Magharbel - Trombone
Alec Goldfarb - Guitar and Composition
Chris Tordini - Contrabass
Steven Crammer - Drumset

Tracklist
01 - High Water All Round
02 - And the Red Light was my Mind
03 - Crow Jane
04 - I Know my Name is Written in the Kingdom
05 - Sound the Visage
06 - Fire Lapping at the Creek
07 - Al’ud
08 - Seven Thunders Utter their Voices
09 - You Gotta Take Sick and Die Some of These Days
10 - Warm Hearts on the Lake of Fire