Daniel Wing

Panamá 77 – a vibrant and verdant suite of multi-textural, jazz-laced psychedelic instrumental folk-funk – is the debut album by Panamá-born, Chicago-based drummer and DJ Daniel Villarreal.

The mid-'80s proved to be a prolific and exploratory time for the producer/performer team of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, who this time out take guitarist Michael Brook under their ambient wing to create an album of considerable beauty and restraint. Taking a "less is more" approach to the project, Brook adapts quite easily as a group member in co-creating these organic pieces (although composer credits go to him alone), and within a few minutes one forgets that he is a guitar player. Hybrid is not an especially dynamic or exciting album, but its depth is nonetheless rewarding. There is substance within the shadows, and the musicians take the necessary time to properly explore them. Highlights include the title cut, "Hybrid," which takes on the tone of a sleepy journey through underwater Morocco, plus "Pond Life," a barely audible meditation…

The story of the innocent Susanna–whose nude bathing in a stream so excited two elders in her community that they charged her with all sorts of dirty things–is from the Apocrypha. Near the story's close, the young Israelite Daniel, clearly a budding lawyer, disproves the elders' claims by having each explain certain details without the other in the room. (In the Carlisle Floyd version, there's a twist, and the ending is horrifyingly different.) The story, as Handel and his unknown librettist tell it, takes more than two and a half hours. What we get in place of nail-biting drama is a marvelous portrait of the chaste Susanna, her trusting husband, Joacim, and the lascivious elders. There's also a great concentration on the plot's rural setting. Arias are filled with nature–Handel offers us a lovely pastoral setting, with a could-be-tragic story at its core; but neither Nature nor Susanna's good nature wind up sullied.

Susanna comes late in the sequence of Handel’s oratorios but in some ways the composer looks back in it to his experience of Italian opera. It largely comprises a sequence of arias (many in the repeated, da capo form of opera seria) as it relates the story from the Biblical Apocrypha of Susanna who is falsely accused of adultery and eventually vindicated through the clever judicial manoeuvrings of the young prophet Daniel.