African Suite, released in Europe in November, joins trio with a small string orchestra to realize a position of distinction in Abdullah Ibrahim's body of recordings. Above all, the beautiful melodies center this very fine, very refined date. But this isn't a new strategem for the composer and pianist. His last two trio recordings also reinstituted his familiar compositions in discrete sequences, yet, here, the compositional threads are woven through the graceful and understated arrangements and orchestrations provided by the collaboration with Swiss composer, arranger and conductor Daniel Schnyder.

Certainly the challenge to be met here was the matching of massed strings, not agile by the nature of instrumental technique or customarily fused with African rhythmic structures, with the African trio. Schnyder made ambitious choices in effecting the melding of Ibrahim's melodies and rhythms with the medium sized string ensemble. He opted to work with the strengths at hand: moist vibrato-laden tones layered through the range from cello to violin carried by the customary legato attack. At the same time, he, with considerable daring, chose, in all but two arrangements, not to use the strings as a mere backdrop, and to take the affair in the direction of the concerto and away from the generic and sacharine.

Bolder still are the numerous touches that are slowly brought into the light. Appropriate to the prosaic and communal sources of most of Ibrahim's writing, the arrangements are built out of simple, even austere concepts and then elaborated into greater sophistication by singular tactical impositions such as distinctive counter melodies played against the trio's thematic statements, extensions of harmonic material into striking realms, and, most of all, by the way in which the integration of trio and orchestra is made seamless.

This tight integration is achieved through the combination of balance and simplicity that nonetheless sustains the strings on equal footing with the piano trio. This allows the details of refinement and elaboration to be revealed as a matter of structural pacing. This is the same understated approach Ibrahim uses to arrange his music for improvising ensemble, and, similarly, the accompaniment here is highlighted but rarely calls attention to itself. At several moments, notably on "Ishmael", the strings are highlighted by their very surprising agility as the African rhythms seem take over the fine orchestra.

This integration and balance echoes the African aesthetic. The other side of the coin is the use of the techniques of high music to reinforce the implicit folklyricism inherent in Ibrahim's singing music. Schnyder's settings thus use modern harmonies, (suggestive of Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok) to evoke African atmospheres. Through it all, the trio's own sterling essays unfold and reveal the liberating Africanized hymnody. So it is, musically, that the range of human nature, from the optimistic lullabye to the no less courageous, but much more melancholy and wise ancestral song of praise and remembrance and mourning is unveiled.

Only a few times do Ibrahim's rolling, mellow syncopations fitfully dance with the more geometric rhythmic markings of the strings. These moments do not mitigate the intention of the artists, however. They seem part and parcel of, and appropriate to those kinds of struggles. Only the overly literal shadowing of the trio by the strings on one of Ibrahim's most familiar melodies, "The Wedding", causes the episode to veer into an overripe sentimentality, (as I hear it). Yet, what a time of sentiment is a wedding!

Perfectly ripe is the single piano solo, "Aspen" to my ears the most beautiful offset possible in a record otherwise focused on finely wrought juxtapositions set as gems within the matching of strings with trio.

And here a lesson may be drawn: the tensile strengths evolved out of the reconciliation of Africa and Europe through the universal elementals of harmony, melody and rhythm; importantly, a reconciliation certain of, as Wilfred Mellers, puts it, the "tension between hope and hazard". Or, as Ibrahim himself has spoke of it, the unyielding veracity of the bitter. . .and the sweet.

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