Rearrange My Heart

Little wonder that the celebrated American roots banjo player Béla Fleck was so taken with this pan-American quartet that he took on the production of their album. It is, as he esteems, intriguing, exciting and inspiring. Singer and fiddler Joe Troop, a multi-linguistic globetrotter from the foothills of the Appalachians, heads a quartet completed by two Argentinians (on guitar and mandolin) and a Mexican banjo player. They reinvent Troop's native bluegrass in a way that melds his genuine feel for the genre with the Latin influence heard on tracks like ‘María’. Troop's travels took him to Japan, and he even sings in Japanese on the extraordinary ‘The Coming of Spring’, with the pizzicato strings sounding like drops of rain on branches. The band members spent years practising and perfecting their harmonies, and they sing as seamlessly as they play.

Whether in Spanish or English, they preach a message of tolerance, letting the music subvert the current political narrative on powerful numbers like ‘The Wall’ and ‘The Dreamer’, a song about Mexican immigration that suggests ‘only when we take a stand/will we change our broken nation.’ So much food for thought, if only...