This article originally appeared in Acoustic Guitar magazine. © String Letter Publishing, all rights reserved.
United Nations - Two new CDs by fingerstyle adventurer Tim Sparks
When you break the plastic on a new CD from fingerstyle guitarist Tim Sparks, you never know what to expect. Sparks' diverse background includes years of playing Brazilian music on electric and acoustic guitars, stints as the oud player in several Middle Eastern ensembles, and the 1993 fingerpicking championship at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, Kansas. His two previous albums were The Nutcracker, which featured his arrangement of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite for solo guitar as well as a number of Balkan folk tunes, and Guitar Bazaar, an odd-metered extravaganza of music inspired by Bartók.
On his latest release for Acoustic Music, One String Leads to Another, Sparks returns to his North Carolina roots for some musical inspiration. But, as he explains in the liner notes, many of the album's tunes were written while he as vacationing in Mexico, and it doesn't take long before his Travis picking is colored with scales and rhythms that reveal his globe-trotting adventures. "Cornbread and Baklava," as the title suggests, seamlessly blends country-style bends and bluesy licks with Middle Eastern melodies, all in 7/8 time. This multicultural spirit pervades and unifies the album's diverse offerings. Even the familiar Brazilian classic Eu So Quero Em Xodo (written by Anastacia Diminguinhos and featuring Dean Magraw on second guitar) fits into this superb collection of originals with nary a hitch.
Sparks' other new release is Neshamah, a collection of traditional Jewish tunes from around the world. The album was conceived and released by avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn (who recently produced Duck Baker's brilliant Spinning Song), and it is hard to imagine a musician better suited than Sparks to arrange and play this material on solo steel-string guitar. The music ranges from Yiddish classics to Sephardic folk songs originating in Bosnia, Turkey, and Morocco. Sparks' arrangements are true to the songs' often complex melodies, but he is still able to color them with his own unique touch. "Meditation on the Baal Shem Tov's Melody" finds Sparks using complex jazz voicings; "Los Caminos de Sirkeci" is, in Sparks' words, "kind of like an odd-metered bossa nova"; and "Freilich" is arranged using voicings akin to those found in the flamenco taranta form.
Listening to Neshamah and One String Leads to Another side by side, one can't help but be impressed by the maturity of the music. The two albums were recorded in quick succession (One String Leads to Another preceded Neshamah by a couple of months), and similar passages can be heard on both recordings, particularly during the improvised sections. Some of the country-blues elements and string-bending techniques he used in his latest originals found their way into the Jewish tunes, such as "Viva Orduena" and "Rabbi Yohannan the Shoemaker's Melody", only strengthening the impression that Sparks is a player who makes anything he attempts his own. These two new albums are excellent additions to his already impressive and diverse body of work, and they prove beyond a doubt that Tim Sparks is onto something.
-Teja Gerken