Genre-bending & spine-tingling music
Spellbinding Music is an independent blog based in Ireland curating contemporary, modern classical, ambient, roots, electronic, jazz and folk music…and everything in between. Read More
Dave Brubeck: Piano Blues
Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) will of course be remembered as a brilliant musical explorer, a virtuoso improviser, a prolific composer with a fondness for odd time signatures and a great ambassador for jazz music in general. Yet, Dave Brubeck still regarded himself simply as “a composer…
Jon Hopkins: Monsters theme
Monsters is a 2010 British independent science fiction film written and directed by Gareth Edwards with a wonderful soundtrack by Jon Hopkins. The film chronicles the journey of an American journalist and her fellow citizen from alien-infected and quarantined Mexico to the American border. Filmed…
Sam Jackson: The Gramophone
Sam Jackson is a Dublin based pianist, but when I heard “The Gramophone” for the first time on the radio, I mistook it for what could have been a track from an early recording from the Esbjörn Svensson Trio. Sam Jackson’s music is of the same calibre.…
Brad Mehldau: River Man
Any version of Nick Drake’s River man will always stop me in my tracks. The unusual time signature and the eerie contemporary classical arrangements to the original song make it such a rich ground for covers. If Norma Waterson’s version introduced me to the song,…
Ibrahim Maalouf: Will Soon be a Woman
Born in Lebanon and now based in France, Ibrahim Maalouf is a young jazz trumpet player whose sound can truly be described as unique. The musician plays a “hybrid” trumpet fitted with a fourth valve, allowing him to play the quarter tones specific the Arabic melodic…
Gerry Diver: Music for Tape Loop
Multi-instrumentalist Gerry Diver based the Speech Project on several interviews of Irish musicians and singers such as Shane MacGowan, Christy Moore, Damian Dempsey, Martin Hayes and Danny Meehan. It also features archival recordings of Galway accordion player Joe Cooley. The various musical pitches of the musicians’…
John Cage: In a landscape
Referring to classical Indian thought and influenced by Gita Sarabhai, the Indian musician he was tutoring in the mid-1940s, John Cage formulated the idea that the purpose of music was to “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences”. Written…
About Spellbinding Music
Why is it that a particular piece of music, a tune or a song will move us in such a way that it will stop us in our tracks, send shivers up our spine or give us goose bumps? Spiritual or secular musical traditions such…