ELDA

My first encounter with the Brazilian percussionist Adriano Adewale came earlier this year when I saw him presenting Catapluf's Musical Journey, which was a tremendously inventive world music show for children that had my grandson captivated. In the ELDA Trio, he has teamed up with Swedish jazz-folk vocalist Emilia Mårtensson and Slovenian accordionist Janez Dovč to record ELDA, an album that merges their three distinctive cultures into something strikingly original.

As the singer and composer or lyricist on eight of the dozen songs, it's Emilia Mårtensson's haunting voice – pitched somewhere between Márta Sebestyén, jazz chanteuse Madeleine Peyroux and Mari Boine – which commands attention on first hearing. Here, her a capella showpiece ‘To the Sun, to the Moon’, on which her voice is multi-tracked to striking effect, is outstanding. But repeated plays reveal hidden depths to Janez Dovč's contributions, particularly ‘The Tree’, on which he ventures into Kimmo Pohjonen-style atmospherics, while Adriano Adewale's percussion is full of constant surprise and imagination. His brief solo piece ‘I am Dreaming With You’ is a tour de force of dazzling beatbox innovation.