9/10
Tasha Smith Godinez, harp. Ennanga Records, 2022.
Tasha Smith Godinez’s lavish new album Out of the Desert is a product of a time of aridity, the pandemic, when we all lived without, feeling parched in our need for creative outlet and reprieve. Like many of us, Smith Godinez made the most of the confusion of those days allowing her creative spirit to burst out in a super bloom of wonder and joy in a set of original compositions.
Right at the outset, Smith Godinez goes deep and looks at her identity. Mulatta describes herself, the child of two worlds. Violist Domenico Hueso begins with a tender melody in the universal language of love, his tone rich and savory. Gently rocked by Christopher Garcia’s imaginative percussion, Smith Godinez makes her entrance with a generous spirit of a musician carrying on voices of the past. It’s mesmerizing, haunting, but ultimately impossible to hear without swaying to the beat.
Quiet Memories is an altogether different feel. It commemorates the life of her grandfather who died at the height of the pandemic. In a more highly romantic, almost worshipful feel, Smith Godinez lingers on opulent phrases conjuring the sounds of a celestial choir. Her technical prowess is bested only by her emotional depth, and it’s sweet to know her grandfather heard the music before he died.
Smith Godinez takes us on a virtual journey to the brilliant contrasting hues of sand and sea in Baja California in El Amenecer or dawn. The three instruments are so connected, it’s hard to hear where one leaves off and the other begins, much like the azure waters fading into the horizon.
Curiously, in an album inspired by the desert, Smith Godinez ends with a five-part work about water, My Soul Floats on the Sea. Each vignette is a tone poem to what many of us share—the feeling of floating in something vast as if in a cradle, but one that holds mysterious, dangerous, and impossible-to-comprehend depths. Both Garcia and Hueso add their voices to the music as if whales deep below the surface.
I hesitate to describe the specifics of the mood lest it’s interpreted too literally. There’s much art in making music that serves not just the purpose of background as if music for film but something more powerful in its own right. Smith Godinez reaches this level utterly, holding interest as well as curiosity and hunger for what comes next.
One of the more complicated works on the album is Come Back to Me. It’s improvisatory in nature and takes us deeply into Smith Godinez’s spiritual grounding, both reflective, and searching. We can practically hear the violist sing the words of Isaiah, “He who has compassion on them will guide and lead them beside springs of water.”
Out of the Desert is some of Smith Godinez’s best, a superb album that you will listen to over and over.
