Revel & Ritual: Holiday Music for the World – Greg Herriges (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

When you hear the term “holiday music” what springs to mind depends on which part of the world you are from and what your cultural heritage sounds like. With this in mind Greg Herriges has collected together music which goes beyond the Holly and The Ivy of the western Christmas traditions and recorded, reworked and in some cases composed his own music which reflects the sounds of festivals, revels and holiday celebration across the globe.

The skill of such an enterprise is to come across with authenticity, that you are revelling in the music with the spirit and joy for which it was intended rather than being merely a dusty academic, collecting and cataloguing for anthropological reasons rather than musical. And as he flits from Basque to Balinese traditions, from Catalan to Chinese song and from Hebrew to Ukrainian heritages he never once sounds anything other than at one with the music. A glorious celebration of world music and a reminder that however much we talk about the global village, the world is indeed still a large, fascinating and beguiling place full of rich rewards and musical marvellousness.