Album: Ensemble Al Kindi, Le Salon de Musique d'Alep (Chant du Monde)

Forget the Aleppo on your TV screen: this Syrian city is also home to an ancient musical tradition.

With oud, spike fiddle, flute, percussion and zither, this group delivers the music which would have been used to serenade the old Aleppan nobility, with the musicians playing and singing long into the night. Some pieces are improvised, some pre-composed, and all in modes with infinitely finer gradations of pitch than those of the European scale.