Rounder Rec. 
No Blues : Ya Dunya (NL,2007)***°
No Blues is a project from production house 'Oost-Nederland', who invited various musicians to make something within a pop-cultural frame to make crossovers in different musical genres, trying to find a meeting place between folk-blues and traditional Arabic music, a crossover style which was called ‘Arabicana’. The group made a successful first album in 2005. So this lead to this new album.
On this album No Blues are Ad Van Meurs : guitar, dobro, vocals (played with Deirdre, WAT, as The Watchman), Anne-Maarten van Heuvelen : double bass, vocals (Marbletones, Bluesbrakers, The Jury,..), Haytham Safia : oud, vocals (originally from Israel), with guests Osama Maleegi, percussion (from Sudan), Ankie Keultjes (Very Girls, WAT, Watchman) on vocals, Eric van de Lest: drums (Watchman,..); Tracy Bonham : violin, vocals (from the US).
More than creating a crossover point, the members very much do their own thing, and still succeed in creating multi-crossing cultural elements. In that way they created with incredible ease and convincing lightness a creative meeting point between different cultural origins. The songs are easy and understandable, in recognisable somewhat bluesy genres, mixed often with various standard dance-related rhythms, with perfectly fitting Arab arrangements of oud and some Arab song contributions. The cooperation is absolutely complete without any compromise with an incredible logical ease. If politics between different origins could be solved with the same ease like this, there would not be as many problems growing too large trapped in stubbornness, but trying to change the other. Each song is followed by an instrumental. For Arab crossovers (not mentioning the Turkish / Persian / Middle Eastern examples), this is one of the most convincing Arab crossovers I have heard so far. Highly enjoyable !! This edition has an extra EP called “Black Cadillac” with 5 extra tracks in a similar style. Recommended.
