String Rise Azure Traces is, now, the fifth release to come from the Wales, UK based composer and pianist Simon Deeley. As with his earlier albums, all the music, on this current album, is original, all being penned by the composer.
Rather than an over-arching theme the album has a hint of an immediately recognisable style. An infusion of Latin flavour threads through the album; with the Samba groove of “So, Fly Azure Acrobat," and the gentle, easy, slow Latin of “Song to the Condor," to the hint of Spanish music in “On Echoes Andalucia"—both in the solos section and the Bolero like Coda. The other four tracks are examples of two of the composers' other writing styles; blues-infused-jazz-fusion and atmospheric-mood-setting-film style. As he says, “I have always been moved by the expressive, lyrical guitar genre; where the guitarist plays an expressive, powerful melody or line against the backing of the rest of the band (heard a lot in electric blues and earlier rock music) and this is the central element of the opening track 'Theme of the Legends' with its strong, lyrical guitar melody." His more cinematic writing style can be heard in “Midnight Song" and “Aurora's Dream Waltz," the former with its emotionally charged, yet somewhat restrained late-night mood and the latter creating a dreamy atmosphere depicting, perhaps, a wide-screen scene of a dancer tracing shapes across a moonlit landscape or, of course, across the background of the fluid luminescent sky of the Aurora Borealis (The Northern Lights).
Rather than an over-arching theme the album has a hint of an immediately recognisable style. An infusion of Latin flavour threads through the album; with the Samba groove of “So, Fly Azure Acrobat," and the gentle, easy, slow Latin of “Song to the Condor," to the hint of Spanish music in “On Echoes Andalucia"—both in the solos section and the Bolero like Coda. The other four tracks are examples of two of the composers' other writing styles; blues-infused-jazz-fusion and atmospheric-mood-setting-film style. As he says, “I have always been moved by the expressive, lyrical guitar genre; where the guitarist plays an expressive, powerful melody or line against the backing of the rest of the band (heard a lot in electric blues and earlier rock music) and this is the central element of the opening track 'Theme of the Legends' with its strong, lyrical guitar melody." His more cinematic writing style can be heard in “Midnight Song" and “Aurora's Dream Waltz," the former with its emotionally charged, yet somewhat restrained late-night mood and the latter creating a dreamy atmosphere depicting, perhaps, a wide-screen scene of a dancer tracing shapes across a moonlit landscape or, of course, across the background of the fluid luminescent sky of the Aurora Borealis (The Northern Lights).
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