Album Notes

REVIEWS:
"Tom Rossi's auspicious debut, "Salma Har," is a global mosaic, a border-dissolving symphony of tones and beats and harmonies from Africa and the Middle East to South America and the Brooklyn basement where it was recorded. Lavish textures of rhythmic, earth-rumbling traditional and popular African styles dive, swirl and somersault through classical and folk tones, encompassing rich piano, lulling mbira, light bass and a penetrating thread of kora. From songs that soothe with haunting calls to invigorating, celebratory pieces, this soft, supple African pop fusion finds a heart and a home in a sanctuary of hope, joy, promise and beauty. This elaborate mix of styles finds itself drawing from the music of Togo and Ghana, as well as tapping into Caribbean, Middle Eastern & South American colors. This is music that feeds the senses, where sound comes at you in walls, in gigantic waves that wash over and fill emptiness. With occasional hints of Peter Gabriel, Rossi brings a personal approach, with distinctive music imagery, to a style that speaks to so many traditions.
-Lloyd Barde, Backroads Music

"This New York City-based guitarist never dreamed he'd be composing psychotropic music that has African, Brazilian and a variety of other cultural influences. Born in Texas, but raised in Massachusetts, Rossi found his creative space during his trips to Ghana where he studied with Mustapha Tetty Addy and then was inspired by voodoo ceremonies in Togo.

All that being so, Rossi brings a tapestry of cultural influences to the plate with this release on the Ajna label. The compositions feel almost like familiar singer/songwriter-based tunes but without lyrics. The seven pieces here are instrumental with vocals that have African inflections, especially when blended with Kalimba tracks he plays himself.

With Salma Har, Rossi sounds like a crossbreed between Samite and sometimes even throws hints of American songwriters like Joseph Arthur and Paul Simon into the mix making the album very interesting and accessible.

Overall, this record could be used for yoga practices but that might call for an instructor. The music is light, sweet and sensitive but isn't obvious about its intentions at all. For the most part, Salma Har is the sort of album one can light a candle, sit back, stretch and reach for without any specificity. It fits into a world music/new age category nicely, but falls a little short of being either one. Rossi's performance is very sharp and the production is quiet and simple. All the instruments are performed live and the organic nature of the production is the best thing about it." -Michael R. Mollura LA YOGA Jan/Feb 2005

BIOGRAPHY:
It was a poet from Brooklyn who wrote "I am large, I contain multitudes," so it's only fitting that Tom Rossi's basement in that same New York borough manages to encompass the entire world. Salma Har, recorded in his cellar on Seventh Street is indeed a global mosaic, a border-dissolving symphony of tones and beats and harmonies from Africa and Asia and the Middle East, South America and the Caribbean and points unnamed.

Rossi himself was born in Texas, raised in Massachusetts, and went to college in the Pacific Northwest, but a moment of transformation came in a village of unpaved roads and mud huts in Togo, West Africa, where Rossi grasped the raw psychotropic power of music in voodoo ceremonies: "That's when rock & roll was never the same for me. A rock concert could never hold a candle to a voodoo ceremony. It feels like the earth has opened up and you're sitting next to the heart of the earth and it's just pounding."

Already an accomplished guitarist, Rossi kicked his polyglot education into a high gear. He went to Ghana to enroll in a drum and dance school run by the master percussionist Mustapha Tetty Addy, and eventually found his way to Cuba and Brazil. He marinated in African, Haitian, Cuban, and Brazilian rhythms while working at a dance studio in Manhattan. He taught himself the kalimba, a South African thumb piano, during six months of recuperation from surgery. Then he spent six years studying the healing arts in NYC, giving his globe-trotting sonic database a purpose: moving both body and spirit.

And in the end, the instrument that Tom Rossi might understand the best is the one that thumps squarely in the middle of your chest. This is music for, as that Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman once put it, "respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart." Listen closely; Salma Har contains multitudes.

Jeff Gordinier (Details, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly)