Pick of the Week: “Santa Fe Skies” by Dave Hoover & Gentry Bronson,
September 22, 2006
Something magical happened in Albuquerque in June of 2006. Two disparate musicians met each other more or less by accident. Pianist Gentry Bronson was a pop singer from the Bay Area – while harpist Dave Hoover from Albuquerque was a musical magician with a penchant for playing any instrument he could get his hands on. The two of them jammed in someone’s backyard, and Bronson, an accomplished producer with just a little bit of time on his hands, saw possibilities for the two of them to lay down a few tracks in Hoover’s livingroom studio – just to see what would happen.
The result is a record called “Santa Fe Sky,” an instrumental record that features Bronson on keys and Hoover on a great pile of instruments, including the celtic harp, the chinese Gu Zheng, the Lakota flute, the appalachian mountain dulcimer, the kalimba, and ambient background loops that he collected from nature on an MP3 recorder. While it might be easy to dismiss a record like this as another “New Age” record, the speed with which it was recorded (a weekend) the serendipity of the meeting of these players, and the soulfulness of the performances point to a music that is just as easily informed by punk rock, jazz, and Americana musics that suggest no simple comparison – this is a soundtrack to a story that we who live in this place know too well.
That soundtrack is almost inherent in the desert of the great American southwest. You can almost feel the wind blowing through your hair on a dusty forgotten road as you hear the opening strains, and a sense of heightening drama as harp and keys first tease one another, then intersect and really play, singing to each other in their own unique voice, but coming together as one as the track hits its stride. This is the harp of dreams followed by the restrained pianos of a thousand saloons, aching to play a music that does more than call us to dance, but stirs the body to breathe deeply, stirs the soul to dream and feel a sense of wonder at the enormity of the sky above.
We’ve yet to hear the entire record at New Mexico Bands, but we’re fairly certain that there’s something greater going on here than just a few tracks carelessly thrown together. We do know that the whole record is available on It’s About Music – and you can find that track we love so much on our profile, or at either of the musician’s profiles involved.
namaste
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