Jazz Articles

Rodrigo Amado / Chris Corsano: The Healing

by Mark Corroto
August 19, 2025

Imagine the blank canvas that tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado and drummer Chris Corsano set out to fill in this live recording from Lisbon, Portugal's ZDB in September 2016. Between them, they have nearly three hundred recordings and three times as many performances--an arsenal of sounds, textures, and ideas ready for deployment. Their orbits often intersect: Amado leading his Motion Trio, The Attic, The Bridge and collaborating with Luís Lopes, Alexander von Schlippenbach, among others; Corsano sharing stages and studios with ...

Rodrigo Amado / Chris Corsano: The Healing

by Troy Dostert
August 15, 2025

Among recent partnerships in free improvisation, the saxophone/drum tandem of Rodrigo Amado and Chris Corsano has been one of the most dynamic and incendiary. They have joined forces in one form or another since the early 2010s; the recording which first put them on the map was their effort with Joe McPhee and Kent Kessler, the widely-celebrated This Is Our Language (Not Two Records). They continued this fruitful project with equally stirring results on A History of Nothing (Trost, 2018) ...

Rodrigo Amado: Motion Trio

by Clifford Allen
February 26, 2010

Abstraction is too often both separated from and associated with improvised music. Either sounds are divorced from meaning outside themselves, or expected to tell some sort of story. Neither euphemism really works that well. But image is a central fact of Portuguese improviser Rodrigo Amado's work, whether referring to the representational or nonrepresentational--after all, in addition to being a tenor and baritone saxophonist, he's an accomplished photographer whose work takes on the angularity of Stephen Shore (see his Surface (European ...

Rodrigo Amado: Motion Trio

by Glenn Astarita
February 16, 2010

Portuguese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado is one of the busier and more productive European jazz improvisers. He follows up his superfine trio release, The Abstract Truth (European Echoes, 2009), with a new and equally explosive rhythm section. Here, cellist Miguel Mira and drummer Gabriel Ferrandini replace eminent improvisers, bassist Kent Kessler and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love.

Amado--a prolific artist who often records for the increasingly noteworthy Portugal-based Clean Feed Records amid touring jaunts in the USA--is a formidable player who ...

Rodrigo Amado: Motion Trio

by Mark Corroto
February 11, 2010

Listening to saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, while knowing that he is also an accomplished professional photographer, lends insight into his sound and sense of proportion. His trio members, cellist Miguel Mira and drummer Gabriel Ferrandini, share his recognition of arrangement, distribution, and music-making dimensions. Motion Trio is a freely improvised recording possessing balance.

Amado's previous trio recordings with Chicago bassist Kent Kessler and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love--Teatro (European Echoes, 2006) and The Abstract Truth (European Echoes, 2009)--iintroduced both his ...

Rodrigo Amado: The Abstract Truth

by Mark Corroto
September 29, 2009

Saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, bassist Kent Kessler, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is an international trio featuring players from Portugal, United States and Norway, respectively. But on its second recording, The Abstract Truth, the assemblage speaks the same language; its mother tongue being hard-hitting, concise improvisation.

This disc follows the Teatro (European Echoes, 2006), the trio's very first meeting. Where the previous disc was wide-ranging, barbarous, and marked by lengthy pieces, the music here is more concise, with most tracks ...

Rodrigo Amado: Surface

by Mark Corroto
July 7, 2007

Like the preceding disc from Rodrigo Amado entitled The Space Between (Clean Feed), this outing works the same tightrope. The Portuguese saxophonist adds cellist Tomas Ulrich to this trio of Carlos Zingaro (violin) and Ken Filiano (bass) for an uncommon chamber jazz experience.

Amado is probably best known for his recordings with the Lisbon Improvisation Players and recently for the critic's favorite Teatro (Clean Feed 2006) with Paal Nilssen-Love and Kent Kessler.

This quartet's recording, while ...