Music
Pierre Bensusan
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh
Rob Adams
FOUR STARS
Pierre Bensusan doesn't actually keep a globe in the tidy little office space he creates for himself onstage but he spins one anyway. The Algerian-born guitarist's music is as much about travelling as is his itinerant lifestyle, or perhaps it's just cause and effect. From the Paris he grew up in and where he, first, recites a Victor Hugo poem in English, then sings it in French, and his sometime home of Nice, where he's inspired to describe his feelings in intricate harmonics and beguiling modulations, he ventures to Africa and North and South America, giving apposite flavours and impressions all along the way.
His fingerstyle playing is very spontaneous and there's no sense of an audience being treated to a performance by rote. However, it did seem to take him a piece or two here to settle into the easy pacing that saw him naturally convey the rhythms of Guadeloupe on the short but potent Sentimental Pyromaniacs and get into the sort of mesmerising, pinging, dancing patterns associated with the Brazilian virtuosi Egberto Gismonti and Badi Assad.
The highlight, however, brought him closer to home, a Celtic medley where he showed a deep feeling for Gaelic and bagpipe music and their phrasing, and he prefaced this with one of several charming tales. If the charm began to grow a little thin towards the end of a lengthy second set, there was no denying the impact of his fluent, pan-fretboard invention and his superbly integrated scat vocal and instrumental talent or the sincerity of his tribute to the late guitar tapping pioneer, Michael Hedges, in the lovely, heartfelt So Long Michael.
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