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Chamber 4: Dawn To Dusk
by John Sharpe
The third album from the French-Portuguese collective Chamber 4 might be the aural equivalent of comfort food. A nourishing feast of spontaneous communal navigation which slips down easily, but leaves you wanting more. Not that there's any attempt to replicate past glories from their eponymous debut (FMR, 2015) or City Of Light (Clean Feed, 2017). Instead the unchanged cast of trumpeter Luis Vicente, guitarist Marcelo dos Reis and the brothers violinist Theo Ceccaldi and cellist Valentin Ceccaldi once ...
read moreFail Better!: The Fall
by John Sharpe
For its third album following Zero Sum (JACC, 2014) and Owt (NoBusiness, 2016), adventurous Portuguese improvising outfit Fail Better! presents selections from a 2017 concert in the city of Coimbra. Although the instrumentation remains the same, this time out drummer Marco Franco and Lisbon-based Catalan saxophonist Albert Cirera join core members trumpeter Luis Vicente, guitarist Marcelo dos Reis and bassist Jose Miguel Pereira. Of the newbies, Franco is the more regular collaborator with Vicente, as can be heard on the ...
read moreLuís Vicente / John Dikeman / William Parker / Hamid Drake: Goes Without Saying, But It's Got To Be Said
by Mark Corroto
It has been more than half a century since the oracles Albert Ayler and John Coltrane proclaimed their message of freedom to the people of earth. Please excuse the grandiosity of the above statement, but after those two giants passed, a shift in consciousness began to take hold. In the biography of William Parker Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021), Cisco Bradley relates how the passing of Ayler and Coltrane affected the young ...
read morePedra Contida: Xisto
by Eyal Hareuveni
Pedra Contida (contained stone in Portuguese) is a Portuguese quintet assembled by guitarist Marcelo dos Reis to work together for a week in the remote mountain village Cerdeira in Serra da Lousã, in the Coimbra district of Portugal. The five musicians-- dos Reis also on prepared guitar, voice and singing bowls are Angélica V. Salvi on harp, Nuno Torres on alto sax, Miguel Carvalhais computer, and João Pais Filipe who also collaborates with dos Reis in the Fail Better! quintet ...
read moreFail Better!: Zero Sum
by Eyal Hareuveni
The name of the Portuguese quintet Fail Better! is inspired by Samuel Beckett who advised: “ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again, fail better." This saying, together with the one of Miles Davis who claimed that there are no mistakes in music, capture the very essence of the process of free improvisation. And, obviously its real-time sense of experiment and discovery, a walk on a thin line between magic and the sonic equivalent of psychodrama. ...
read moreRodrigo Amado: Burning Live At Jazz AO Centro
by Mark Corroto
Rodrigo Amado's improvising Motion Trio might be better described as The Confluence Trio or Conflux, because its sound is a meeting of rivers. Like the three rivers of Pittsburgh, where the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to create the Ohio River, or Sangam, India where the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati meet, the music of the Motion Trio flows together to create a seamless whole, as was quite evident on its self-titled debut, Motion Trio (European Echoes, 2010).The trio ...
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