The String Cartel – Dukkah (2016)

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The String Cartel – Dukkah (2016)

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Acoustic swinging string quartet with blazing guitars, soaring violins and pumping double bass.

‘Dukkah’ seemed an appropriate name for a spicy mix of music created and performed live in the studio by four musicians with diverse backgrounds and interests.
Shenzo Gregorio is a master musician. Classically trained, he has written operas, ran masterclasses and performed all over the world. Nigel Date is a professional guitarist. He is always traveling about lending his services to a plethora of acts. The two based in different cities have been friends for a long time and often talked about collaborating. An opportunity presented itself in late 2015. Shenzo rang Nigel and said ‘do you think we can write and record an album in a day? I’ve got tomorrow off…’
Sigel organized Cameron Jones, a guitar player he spends a lot of time playing Django Reinhardt style guitar with in their band Gadjo Guitars and young gun double bass player Tom Wade to join them at Australian music legend Marcus Holden’s state of the art home studio.
Shenzo and Nigel spent the day going over what they had. Tidied up ideas, found the beautiful chords and went over the tricky bits.
This album is a testament to the skill of these four musicians that they were able to walk into a studio fuelled on pizza and perform live these compositions relying on their improvisational skills and their common sense of always attempting to create the ‘epic’..
Shenzo is adept at so many instruments but violin is his main one. There are songs here that reflect their love and respect for the ‘Gypsy Jazz’ tradition that is the music of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli. He also plays cavaquinho, mandolin and some seriously great guitar. It is a steel string small bodied guitar that Nigel owns and will not sell or give to Shenzo…
Nigel plays his trusty ‘Crocker’ Selmer style guitar on most tracks. The Selmer is the guitar Django played on. They are bright loud guitars with a thick clear voice.

Cameron plays his Macaferri style Dhole guitar and some nylon string. Thomas is on double bass.

The last track is a gypsy jazz version of some Tchaikovsky. The first twelve are all original. There’s lots of swing, bits of latin inspired rhythms, a bluegrass epic, a Shakti style tune (minus the percussion). It’s a sonic journey that hopefully evokes the aura and memory of a lot of great authentic music from around the world and across time.

Marcus Holden is the engineer and has so much great equipment and experience to perfectly capture the glorious sounds each of the instruments have and make.

Nigel spent a lot of hours mixing and mastering to make this an album of the highest audio quality.

This music sounds like it may have been around forever but it’s cutting edge music of today. There is a little moment of electric mandolin but otherwise it’s pure acoustic instruments. The playing is fresh and unedited. The ‘mistakes’ are part of the freshness and vitality of making ‘real music’. There’s a sense of fun, beauty, daring do, flights of virtuosity. The listener we hope, should feel like they’re part of the discovery and conversation that the musicians were experiencing.