MARA ARANDA i SOLATGE [Eduard Navarro, Josep Mª Ribelles, Jota Martínez & Abel
García] are back with their awaited brand new album “LO TESTAMENT”.
This time the musical spotlight of the repertoire falls back onto Eduard Navarro who is in
charge of compositions, arrangements and adaptations of traditional tunes. Eduard is one
of the most creative and innovator figures of Spanish roots music scene, not only within
Valencia circuit but also out in the wide Mediterranean surroundings.
“LO TESTAMENT” (“The Testament”) is a little gem happened from Mara and Eduard
musical consortium together with the indispensable collaboration from the other band
members. Both musicians define a very personal and expressive music that turns out to be
young and fresh, in contrast to the innocuous and aseptic treatments used by some other
traditional music performers.
Mara’s literary world perfectly fits in the gentle and admonitory atmosphere she got us
used to. This is a far-from-topic beautiful and elegant album. I think this progressive line of
language recovery in the Valencia traditional music should seek other expressive
landscapes beyond the immediate tradition, I mean, the one that reaches the actual
population. On this subject “LO TESTAMENT” displays a resonant world that gets past the
actual landscape of tradition. The sonorous forms just play a deep renovation of
traditional language.
The way paved by this new generation of musicians comes marked by the intention to
increase and recover all those lost musical backgrounds and maintain the reconstruction
of language from more imaginative and solid basis. On of definitive advantages of this new
generation of musicians is the great level of musical language immersion achieved. Each
track on “LO TESTAMENT” is a little wonder and has a special charm that really makes us
jump for joy, we who that started those risky proposal back in the 70’s.
No doubt MARA ARANDA i SOLATGE will progressively add new lost or almost-lost
musical elements in their future work, as they do now with the ‘temperate tuning’,
displayed by Mara’s voice, who demonstrates an impeccable music career and an exquisite
musical sensitivity.
“LO TESTAMENT” becomes a broad-range new step beyond the reconstruction of the
musical background of eastern Spain.