It’s not often we get to eavesdrop on the entreaties between Mallorcan and Irish music, but Felip Carbonell has wrought something special here with this double CD.
He casts his gaze on a life of Catalan music and a celebration of his colourful musical identities – in his home place of Mallorca and his adopted home in Sligo.
With remarkable ease, he embraces jazz, swing, blues, rock and Irish traditional on the aptly titled Els Colors del Temps. Carbonell's throaty, textured voice tells its own picaresque tales, with delicate accompaniment from Steve Wickham and other Irish musicians, and his Mallorcan compadres from his band Tumbet.
A sharper hand in the final mix might have excluded a small handful of tracks for cohesion, but this is still a warm- hearted, long-lived and living collection.
