Felipe Salles: Camera Obscura

"I've been wanting to do a project like this for decades," Amherst-based Brazilian composer and multi-reedist Felipe Salles writes of Camera Obscura. The album combines jazz and classical quartets in a program of original music inspired by a phenomenon that has intrigued artists and thinkers worldwide since the Stone Age. A camera obscura is created when light passes through a pinhole into a dark chamber, projecting an upside-down-and-backwards image onto an inside wall. In translating this visual circumstance into a sonic one, Salles grapples with ways to create multiple perspectives and manifest light and darkness musically.

"Just like a photographer plays with exposure, colors, sharpness, or even how a picture is cropped," he writes in the liner notes, "I can reshape or reframe a melodic line by changing its underlying harmony, instrumentation, and rhythmic phrasing." On "Perspective," he does just that. Embedding a classical string quartet into the instrumentation provides one clear way to differentiate between vantage points, timbrally and stylistically. Strings predominate in some passages, the full ensemble in others. Elsewhere, soloists seem to narrate, Salles rising above the ensemble with his soprano or pianist Nando Michelin holding forth in a pared-down texture, elucidating an elusive tango feel.

Salles is a strong and sensitive player with a broad palette and an individualized sound, enhanced by his doubles: soprano and tenor saxophones, piccolo, flute, alto flute, bass flute, clarinet and bass clarinet. He applies all of these to his musical canvas, using them in various ways: in contrapuntal commentary, in over-dubbed sections, and in features such as his lovely alto flute solo on the "À Deriva," an exquisite vocal composition that sets Helena Tabatchnik's haunting poem about living on the edge, able to sleep only in the arms of a friend.

Camera Obscura resonates with the work of flutist-pianist-composer Lea Freire and the ensemble Vento em Madeira, pianist-composer Felipe Senna and Câmaranóva, jazz ensemble Trio Corrente, singer Monica Salmaso and other Brazilian artists associated with música instrumental brasileira, an idiom that mixes Brazilian popular music (choro and other genres) with jazz and classical techniques. As its name would suggest, the sound of música instrumental brasileira is identifiably Brazilian, yet it also belongs to the jazz world, while leaning into the Western classical realm compositionally. Interestingly, Salles has lived in the US since 1995, yet this is arguably one of his most recognizably Brazilian albums to date.

The album closer offers The Cushman Quartet, ably led by Laura Arpiainen, a chance to shine as improvisers in "Trem de Prato," conjuring sounds and images of railway cars and tracks reviving after decades of inactivity. The piece connects with jazz's long history of evocative train compositions, functioning as a soundtrack to Salles' fond memories of riding the luxurious Silver Train that ran between his home in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro during his youth.

On "Platus," a highlight among several, Salles recounts, in the abstract, Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" (Republic, 514-520 AD). Drummer Steve Langone pulses out an urgent meter in 7, with Keala Kaumeheiwa's bass serving as his dark foil. Flutes and strings become searching beams of light as Salles' tenor tells the tale in call-and-response with himself, honking and throwing darting shadows across the soundstage, like the dancing figures projected against the cave's walls. The action suspends momentarily as the rhythm section, led by Michelin's piano, seems to contemplate the situation.

Plato shows us how prisoners chained in a dark cave, forced to see only the projected images, would come to perceive them as real, and how difficult it would be for those who understood the natural phenomenon to convince them otherwise. But Socrates holds this hope: "There must be a craft of some kind, which would be a most efficient and effective means of transforming the soul. It would not be an art that gives the soul vision, but a craft at labor under the assumption that the soul has its own innate vision, but does not apply it properly (translated by Shawn Eyer, Plumbstone Books, 2016)." Art or craft, in this extraordinary album, Salles seems to imagine music as such a force.

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