Now that marketing doesn’t work to suit the majors any more, the choices you have are as good as infinite. So why would you want to go looking for David Feder?
Well. This is a good quality jazz/blues guitar-with-small-group album. The press pitch is "Hillbilly Flamenco" but given the Florida location, a blend of Latin, blues and jazz music is no real surprise. The quality of the playing is pretty special though, and the audience that likes this stuff will love it quite a lot.
Opener "Vuno Mayal", like most of the tracks is Feder composition. The melody has half snatches of Jimmy Webb's "Up Up and Away". It’s a cheerful upbeat kind of thing that has a richly intonated gut string guitar doing some Manitas da Plata meets John Etheridge kind of stuff while Red Seldman does some Hot Club of France violin, and the band do flamenco hand percussion. Not so unmixed as it sounds, by the way.
Other tracks have comparable combinations of style and instrumentation. The constant theme is David Feder's accomplished and luscious-sounding guitar. It’s very well-behaved music. It could move into lots of singleton flats and young-couple bar/diner places and make everyone feel sociable, relaxed and generally optimistic.
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For English ears, there's a holiday mood in the Spanish sounds (Ken Fradley plays some classy and evocative trumpet and Flugel Horn). Flute, more guitars and a variety of percussion also feature.
For hard line consumers of roots and crossover world music the album might be making too many concessions to an easy-listening or mood music audience. My intuition tells me that David Feder is someone you need to hear in person before you can get the full deal out of the music. He's obviously an entertainer by instinct, and I'm sure that an evening listening to his band in good company would really make you want to have the album. Without that personal introduction, I think I would have to work pretty hard to get you away from the other stuff in the racks. This is very fine music, in a world full of brilliance and sensation. But if you’re over in the Florida Keys this holiday time, you should definitely look out for one of his shows
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