Free Planet Radio stretches the world-music borders reads the article title in today's The State newspaper and that pretty much describes the music of the Asheville band in a nutshell.    The trio consists of Asheville musicians Chris Rosser, River Guerguerian, and Eliot Wadopian and the band is performing at the Columbia Museum of Art in the South Carolina state capital.

Here's an excerpt from the news article by Otis R Taylor, Jr.

Free Planet Radio has an understandable dilemma: “How do we describe ourselves?” asked the band’s Chris Rosser.

Rosser plays piano, guitar, the Indian dotar and the Turkish cumbus oud. But he says the world-music label is limiting.  “When we say ‘world music,’ we think of it in the broad sense of including anything,” Rosser said. “It’s not the record-label definition of anything not Western.  “We sort of think of jazz and folk music as being world music. (The world-music classification) is something we’ve struggled with.”

Rosser, an Asheville-based singer-songwriter, recruited Guerguerian, a percussionist, and Wadopian, a bassist, to play backup for him.  We would play some instrumentals, and then it evolved into something else,” Rosser said.

Free Planet Radio has been together for six years, releasing one CD, 2004’s “New Bedouin Dance.”

Even with worldly influences — Rosser also plays with Turkish musician Omar Faruk Tekbilek, and Free Planet Radio has studied music from different cultures — the band is jazz-heavy in tone.  “What we do is jazz with different language, scales and rhythms borrowed from around the world,” Rosser said. 

Listening to Free Planet Radio is much easier than describing — or trying to classify — its music. In fact, the band’s name might be Rosser’s answer to how to describe the band.  “In our minds, it was just music without cultural borders,” he said when asked what the name meant to him. “Investigating the similarities between them all.”

 READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

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