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Jazz Articles about Luis Vicente
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 ...
Continue ReadingLuis Vicente Trio: Chanting In The Name Of
by Glenn Astarita
All-world jazz man, world music maker and fierce improvisational drummer Hamid Drake penned venerating liners for this album led by the always in demand Portuguese trumpeter Luis Vicente and his trio. And Drake's correlations with estimable Sufi mystic and teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan's view that music is life, and a means of discovery that parallels the harmony of the entire universe among relationships with nature and other pleasurable perceptions is spot on. Hence, the trio attains a symbiosis, rooted in ...
Continue ReadingFail 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 ...
Continue ReadingIn Layers: Pliable
by John Sharpe
Working on-the-fly, improv outfit In Layers collectively orders timbral maneuvers into captivating momentum on Pliable, its second outing following the eponymous debut (FMR, 2016). The cast remains unchanged, the Portuguese pair of guitarist Marcelo Dos Reis and trumpeter Luis Vicente, being supplemented by Dutch drummer Onno Govaert and Amsterdam-based Icelandic pianist Kristjan Martinsson. Dos Reis and Vicente's liking for unhurried group congress has surfaced in multiple guises, prominent among them being Points (Multikulti Project, 2019), Chamber 4 (FMR, ...
Continue ReadingLuís 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 ...
Continue ReadingLuís Vicente: Maré
by Mark Corroto
We have no idea whether Portuguese trumpeter Luís Vicente is Catholic. Nor if he knew before performing at the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova that he would be in harmony with the building's monastic religious order, the Poor Clares. His music performed at the Anozero-Bienal de Arte Contemporânea de Coimbra, however, is as stark and austere as the Franciscan, Clare of Assisi's vocation. This three-part solo trumpet performance from 2017 utilizes the architecture of the monastery as a sounding ...
Continue ReadingVicente / Brice / Sanders: Unnavigable Tributaries
by John Sharpe
One of the UK's premier rhythm sections meeting with the adventurous Portuguese trumpeter Luis Vicente results in some classy unfettered mischief on Unnavigable Tributaries. Bassist Olie Brice and drummer Mark Sanders indulge in the masterful interplay that has buoyed up the likes of the Riverloam Trio with Polish saxophonist Mikolaj Trzaska and their trinity with ICP stalwart saxophonist Tobias Delius. Vicente exhibits the same canny command he has shown in dates such as Points (Multikulti Project, 2019),Chamber 4 (FMR, 2015) ...
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