Javier Ruibal - Sahara

A highly regarded singer-songwriter from Cádiz, Javier Ruibal has created a new type of modern music that blends North African sounds with flamenco and other diverse influences. With the richest rhythms and harmony forming the basis of Sahara, Ruibal draws his inspiration from his love of life and beautiful women, resulting in lyrics dripping with fantastic tales and evocative Spanish poems of love. A well-kept secret beyond Spanish borders for far too long, this album is Javier Ruibal's international debut.

JAVIER RUIBAL – SECRETS AND LIVES

We all have our secrets; little-known places we like to return to, a recipe, book or story we may or may not wish to share with others. Javier Ruibal had been one of mine. During many visits to Spain, I've amassed a large collection of delights and duds of Spanish music, and it was some time in the 1980s that I came across this wonderful singer-songwriter from Cádiz. I can't remember how; maybe a lucky dip, a tip-off or following in some musician's footprints. The sad truth is, ninety-nine per cent of Spanish music is simply not released outside of Spain, and even the best shops abroad tend not to stock the more interesting releases. Like practically all music sung in a non-English language, there is little call for it in the Anglo-American-dominated music business. For some reason, instrumental music suffers the same fate. But, just as the occasional writer writing in a language other than English manages to break through to a fully international readership – García Márquez, Kundera, Calvino, for instance – so is it with music.

There I was, having my one-way relationship with Javier and never thinking to try and promote him. Then, in 2001, a Spanish DJ passed Javier's new record to some movers in the world music scene in the UK, which led to appearances on UK radio and press, and some live shows. But things seldom move far without there being a record available. So here we have it: a digest, a primer, the bluffer's guide to the untold and clandestine delights of the charmer from Cádiz – or more specifically, songs selected from his last two releases together with a new recording especially for this release of ‘La Flor De Estambul'…

The renowned record producer and thinker Brian Eno was one of those who came to hear Javier Ruibal play at Ronnie Scott's during that UK visit in late 2001. He brought along his teenage daughter, who declared afterwards that if any man sang such songs to her she would marry him immediately. Javier has this enviable effect on women. You might say it's a fair return, in that women are his primary source of inspiration. His lyrics are peppered with appreciations of beautiful women longed for, won and lost, or simply (and hotly) admired from a distance – he has something of the flamenco's bemused helplessness in the face, and hands, of the slippery charms of women. Just what chance does an honest man stand?

Beyond this, Javier sings of and to women in a wider metaphorical sense, in order to express his love of life, using imagery sifted from African, Arabic and Caribbean landscapes and picaresque characters both real and imagined, to sing of life's dreams, pleasures, romance, magic and heartbreak. Each song is its own miniature, the music beautifully arranged to evocative and measured Spanish love poetry (and, what is more, beautifully sung and enunciated, for rarely do you hear a Spanish lyric so clearly delivered). Spanish works so well in this way – we might expect it more from Persian poetry or Indian epics of old or, closer to home, Lorca or Albertí. It has a style and sensibility that our more brutal Anglo-Saxon language does not easily encourage, or at least you'd have to be a poet of considerable powers to translate it acceptably. This problem affects so much Spanish writing. They will use three or four adjectives where one might be used in English, set in florid and playful sentence structures. For example, someone wrote of Javier that his songs have ‘echoes and sounds reminiscent of very distant cultures of today, and very close ones in the ancient past'. You know what they mean, and it reads beautifully in Spanish, but sounds clumsily extravagant when put into English!

Javier writes that Contrabando – recorded near Tarifa in April 1997 and from which eight songs are taken – ‘was recorded with the light of the Straits [of Gibraltar] flooding in through the window of the studio, with Halley's Comet passing by every evening to draw a close to the day's sessions. It was all enjoyable and relaxing, as it is in Cádiz.'

He still lives in his home town of Puerto de Santa María, across the Cádiz bay – sea, sun, fantastic food and wine, one of the ancient cities of Europe, a major centre of flamenco, beautiful women galore, the greatest carnival in Europe (another secret, with a satirical poetry tradition all its own, of which Javier is a big fan), with the dreamlands of Africa within hazy view. Javier, his wife Pilar and two children have a great lifestyle (when we visited, there was time for one of those epic four-hour seafood and wine lunches where you emerge blinking into the sun at 5.30 in the afternoon), and he seems relaxed about his prospects for the greater fame and acknowledgement that, particularly, his musical peers in Spain feel he so deserves. If more and more people catch on to his work, then great, but he's not going to lose sleep over it. Maybe, way back, he would have been the court musician to Scheherazade. Who knows? But the secret, if not the genie, is now out of the bottle. We will see where it leads.

David Flower

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