Label: Blue Heron

Producer: Ron Warren and Brad Baerwald

Release Date: 2004

Do you remember the first time you heard brilliantly performed and produced Native American influences, particularly emenating from those rich and full-on spiritual persuasions in skilled and passionate flute playing? Hmm.. maybe you do remember and maybe you don't. Ron Warren's Dancing the Full Moon however, is testimony to how those influences and musical leanings can be brought together to caress and illuminate the heart and soul!

Ron has produced an album that is, without a doubt, an epitaph in contemporary and traditional North and South American musical influences. Richly and colourfully dominant in some of the most effective and exquisite flute playing that I have ever heard, the album provides us with a vast array of bridges across genres that many of us thought to be the stuff of dreams. These expertly engineered bridges seem to effortlessly cross over the previously self-contained rivers of Contemporary Jazz, Folk, Rock, Americana, and Native American genres, to merge into one hell of an album.

The magical arrangements and musicianship here are so well realized and synchronized, that you could swear there's some kind of spiritually uplifting relay going on between instruments. It's an experience where, for instance, flutes and percussion pass the magic over to incredible vocal and cello performances, and where superb guitar and bass weave tapestries below a myriad of sunsets provided by the keyboard arrangements. Ron Warren and Co have made Dancing the Full Moon an absolute classic and I'm here to loosely describe, track by track, what listening to this album is likely to do to you!

The album opens with the jazzy n classy Flying By - a superb opening for a superb album that you'd want to play over and over to make absolutely certain you don't miss anything. I particularly love the piano and guitar work riding below the exceptional flute arrangements. At somewhere around the three minute mark, there's a lovely acoustic break that is quite unpredictable, and as I have said in many previous reviews, unpredictability is a fine creative gift when it's used to great effect and it's certainly used to great effect here.

Jasmine is one of the most beautiful cedar flute pieces I have heard in a very long time. With traditional native influences gripping your attention in the first few bars, your mental images are of peaceful Sioux settlements, that are suddenly somehow captured and protected by the welcome intrusion of superb acoustic and electric folk, jazz, and rock embraces from a few hundred years into the future. The musicianship here is incredibly skilled and mesmerizing and you yearn to witness these guys performingthis piece live. Following on from Jasmine, is the very fine title track Dancing the Full Moon. Again, the musicianship is truly amazing but the music's efficacy lies in the remarkable arrangements that reach out at you like the most welcoming arms you ever did see. At around the 3.30 mark, you're flying through superb acoustic arrangements guided by the flutes ahead.. the thing is... you just don't want to come back down!

Warrior Song is not only one of my favourite tracks on the album, it's one of the best tracks I have heard all year! With Janice Torres on vocals, the girl takes the entire song and theme to exceptional heights in terms of her passionate vocal expression and immensely clever compassionate personalized renderings to take the listener straight to the heart of the song..now that's pure unadulterated class in any singer! Keep an eye on the drums and percussion.. talk about holding the beat!

The Between Time is delivered with excellence between flute and strings.. the likes of which have become exceedingly rare in recent years but are without doubt, a wonderful gift for the heart and soul as well as for the ears. This very soothing arrangement is laced and enriched with expert playing and when you get to the piccato section, you are well and truly enchanted and quite willingly lost in the composer's world of feeling. Lullabye, with it's haunting acoustic opening features the almost earth-maternal vocal talents of Janice Torres. If you wasn't truly captivated by her vocal work in Warrior Song.. you will be now! A brilliantly inspired and delivered song that goes straight to the heart!

With some really nice reggae influenced decoration, Pretty Girl in Moonlight is vey bit as colourful and dynamic as it's title suggests. What's particularly striking and interesting here is the highly orginal way the walk over bass lines separate the reggae from the blues and jazz meanderings. Alejandro's drum work is again nothing short of outstanding and Leonardo's accompanying bass playing is absolutely amazing.

The final four pieces on this album are delivered by Ron Warren's solitary cedar flutes. Red Dream, White Dream, Black Dream, and finally Blue Dream successively take us back to the first nation settlements we saw earlier in Jasmine, but this time, the addition of the white, black, and blue elements are truly intriguing and abounding in creative wealth. You take on the spirit of the eagle as you soar through the heavens to take in the coloured multi-nation views below. As in all of the tracks reviewed here, mention has to be made of the very cleverly skilled engineering and production as it's a very hard job to get these sounds to provoke such imagery without distraction and I think Ron Warren and co-producer Brad Baerwald have certainly graduated with flying colours on all counts. Well done boys.. 10 out of 10 for innovation and orginality!

Dancing the Full Moon is a brilliantly crafted album that has been performed by multi-talented masters. It's a classic album by anyone's standard and is one of the most engaging releases I have heard in a very long time. You really have to experience this epitaph of musical wonderment not just because of the superb instrumentation and vocal work.. but because sometimes.. life has it's absolute essentials and Dancing the Full Moon is absolutely one of them.

 

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