Italian accordion virtuoso Blip Bonaccordia got the world music bug in the late 1980s. He'd been cutting a fi ne groove on the jazz scene for a number of years but a chance backstage meeting with Peter Gabriel “turned his head around”. After wrapping up at the 1990 Montreux Jazz Festival he took a fl ight to the Malay Archipelago and there encountered the remarkable 16-piece Throat Throbbers of Sarawak. Throat throbbing is a vocal tradition akin to Mongolian throat singing but requires remarkable control of the uvula to produce a thrumming that can be varied in pitch. Bonaccordia was so taken with the sound that he wasted no time in getting the group into studios in Penang. Unfortunately for Bonaccordia the Throat Throbbers brought with them their “mascot”, an uncontrollable Bornean gibbon called Yang. There are many moments on this release when we are subjected to the on-mic hoots, shrieks and howls of this lesser ape, believed by the Throat Throbbers to bring good fortune to the occasion. Track one – ‘Noi siamo i throbbers di gola’ (‘We are the throat throbbers’) – contains some wonderful vocalising by the Sarawak troupe, genuinely impressive and strangely affecting, Bonaccordia too is delightfully self-effacing, adding rippling effects like a cascading Malayan waterfall (I would imagine). However, at around the 15-minute mark Yang starts to chip in with some deeply disconcerting yelps and hootings. Bonaccordia relates that the gibbon started swinging around the studio and at one point attempted to dismantle a light fi tting (distantly heard on this track). Things don't improve with track two, ‘Dì ciao al jazz’ (‘Say hello to jazz’), despite Bonaccordia showing his bop chops with some impressive fl eet-fi ngeredness and the Throbbers digging in behind him with astounding aplomb. What nobody needed here was a gibbon making sounds like a toy ambulance whose batteries are dying. Close but no cheroot.