House Of Waters - On Becoming (2023) Hi Res

Max Zbirael-Teller was born in Chicago, Moto Fukushima was born in the Japanese city of Kobe, and they met in Brooklyn, New York, where they founded the band House of Waters in 2008. Each of them was already an established musician with a certain background, but their creative union had a special effect. Max ZT (he goes by that nickname) plays the dulcimer, an instrument quite rare in the West, used in the folklore tradition of the Irish in the Appalachian Mountains. In addition, he seriously studied African music, mastered the Senegalese kora, as well as the Indian tradition of playing the santur, a distant relative of the cymbals. In this area, his mentor was the Indian musician Pandit Shivkumar Sharma. Fukushima, a Berklee graduate, plays the six-string bass and is also interested in the African roots of Latin American music.

Their common group House of Waters was first a quintet, then a trio, and gradually turned into a duet of these two musicians, and they invite drummers replacing each other to record albums. The band's discography is quite large, and its hard-to-define style is an unusual mix of fusion, prog-rock, jazz and ethnic. In the new album On Becoming, the guest drummer is the Mexican-American musician Antonio Sanchez, known for his collaboration with Metheny, and the famous guitarist Mike Stern and the wife of Max ZT, Indian vocalist Priya Darshini, who has already managed to become a Grammy nominee, are featured on separate tracks.

The opening track of the album FoldingCranes, the shortest in the program, gives the listener an opportunity to get used to the unusual sound created by cymbals, bass guitar and drums. And the sound is really unique. It seemed to me (this is, of course, a subjective impression) that the sound of the cymbals of Max ZT most of all resembles an Indian sitar, and therefore the whole album turned out to be imbued with a South Asian aura for me. This is especially true for the play Still, which Max ZT dedicated to the memory of his guru Shivkumar Sharma, who ended his earthly journey in 2022. This aura is even more natural for the most voluminous composition of the album TheWall, where Priya Darshini joined the trio, using the Indian sargam vocal technique: singing without words, where the notes sound in unison with the instruments. And you can appreciate the closeness of the cymbal and guitar registers in the Fukushima composition HangintheAir, where Mike Stern participated. The title of this play is also associated with him. When Moto met Mike and asked the usual question “How are you?” Stern usually answered: Hanging in there. Moto turned this stereotypical answer into a consonant title of the composition.

House of Waters is a special team. Max ZT was not in vain awarded the title of "Hendrix dulcimer" by critics. Surprisingly, his name is not yet in the top of the critics' polls in the "Rare Jazz Instruments" category. I think it's still ahead. In the meantime, I recommend enjoying the exotic sound of On Becoming.