Album Notes

Treasury of Jewels is our very first album of exciting and evocative spiritual music.

We have both new and seasoned performers in the band, and we've been experimenting and evolving together to produce this original and magical blend of acoustic world instruments, orchestral tones, modern and traditional drumming, solo vocals, a capella and choral textures.

We've taken inspiration from a very wide range of influences, from modern classical music (Gorecki, Ligeti, Korndorf, Debussy), world music (gamelan, Joji Hirota, Ayub Ogada), traditional (19th century women's working songs in Scots Gaelic and Estonian), acoustic (Jose Gonzalez, Ry Cooder), indie and pop (Jeff Buckley, Mark Hollis, Natalie Merchant, Beck) and even some progressive rock (Pink Floyd).

Soul Ladder met in Manchester, England. We were inspired to share experiences and to learn new musical styles, traditions and languages from all over the world.

Our vision was inclusive. Anyone was welcome and we deliberately used a home setting rather than a studio to allow us to record in a very relaxed atmosphere.

The band is currently: Duncan Thomas (Wales), Jean-Paul 'JP' Dewea (Seychelles), Michael Jay (Carlisle, England), Ferishteh 'Fairy' Mazkoori (India and Iran) and Linda Rootamm (Estonia).

Fairy, JP and Linda wrote and sang. Michael played various guitars and drums. Duncan produced the album, sang and played both normal and obscure instruments... including a 1940s Javenese gong made of about 20kgs of bronze.

Our 26 diverse songs put excerpts from the Baha'i writings to music. All the songs are previously unreleased and are unavailable elsewhere. We sing mainly in English, but also have pieces in Arabic, Estonian and Hindi.

For this release, we've also included the special song 'Light Upon Light'. We first wrote this and performed it live to an audience of about 1,000 people at the UK’s National Baha’i Festival 2005 in Scarborough.

Background about the writings we have used can be found at bahai.org.