João Almeida: Solo Sessions *||||

Listening to Solo Sessions *|||| by Portuguese trumpeter João Almeida, reminds one of a passage in Jack Kerouac's seminal novel On The Road, "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

Almeida's unaccompanied performance, recorded in March 2020, shares its qualities with unfiltered Belgian beers or maybe raw honey. It has that quality of wildness Kerouac described, as if he was in a constant reinvention of sound. Obvious reference points here are to the trumpet explorations of Greg Kelley, Nate Wooley and Peter Evans, with whom he has studied.

March 2020 is notable because for the foreseeable future, all music will be labeled as either a pre or post-pandemic creation. Here we find the solo trumpeter performing to no audience (or so it sounds). He's alone with his patient spontaneous creations. The popping tube sounds that open "Awkward" expand into an extended technique of vocalized growls that keep his instrument unrecognizable. Not so with "Alternate," on which we identify a trumpet as he alters pitch and presses notes under weighted lips. That compression is intensified with "Membrane," just as metamorphic rock is formed under pressure. Just as the trumpeters noted above, Almeida is creating a new language for his instrument. One that, as we hear with "Stuck," can take inspiration from electronic manipulation, although it is performed totally unplugged. He applies an ample amount of locomotion to "Train," which veers from a quasi-chamber performance to an acrobatic display of sound and pulse. That post-pandemic designation might find its best example in "Wobble," a lengthy exercise in the evolution of sound from the primordial awakenings from the darkness into the championed fecundity of an illuminated trumpet.

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